In 2019-2020 Worcester College celebrates the admission of women as undergraduates to the College 40 years ago in 1979.  It seems a good time, therefore, finally to answer a question occasioned by a gift label found in c.200 history books in the College’s modern library collections: “the gift of Rosalind Clay, who taught history to Worcester men for many years”.  Who was Rosalind Clay, a woman who taught at Worcester long before women were themselves admitted?

The books she gave to the College provide a little information.  Not only do they show an interest in Tudor and Stuart history in particular, but some, such as a copy of Tanner’s Tudor constitutional documents, AD 1485-1603 boast her signature and her address: 121A Woodstock Road, Oxford.  It is searches in the College Record, the Archives, and then further afield, however, that have allowed us to add some detail to this intriguing gift inscription.

Rosalind Clay’s signature and address

An account by a former student, Alan MacFarlane, who himself became a historian, provided the first steps to discovering more.  In his online memoir he recalls:  ‘Lady Rosalind Clay, a doughty north Oxford historian, also became a friend after teaching me Tudor and Stuart history and through her I gained an entry into the world of Oxford gossip as her father had been Master of Balliol, one daughter was the historian Rosalind Mitchison, and her son-in-law the politician Peter Shore’ (MacFarlane, ‘1941-1963’).

Born Rosalind Smith, she was the daughter of the historian A L Smith (1850-1924), Master of Balliol College from 1916 until his death in 1924.  He must have been an early influence on her historical interests: Rosalind helped her father annotate and publish his 1906 Ford Lectures on ‘Church and State in the Middle Ages’ (Smith, Arthur Lionel Smith, page 171).  In 1915, she married Edward Murray Wrong (1889-1928), a Canadian-born historian who had been a pupil of her father (Arthur Lionel Smith, page 220) and with him she had six children, before his death in 1928.  In 1951, Rosalind married the economist (and second Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford) Sir Henry Clay (1883-1954) – he died in a car accident in 1954: Rosalind was widowed for a second time.

The above provides a biographical skeleton, but tells us nothing about her career at Worcester, ‘[teaching] history to Worcester men’; for that the records of the College Archives prove more useful.  Even there, though, the file only begins in 1963, with a letter from the Provost electing her to a Lectureship in Modern History – but her association extended back long before that.  The election, the Provost writes, is ‘in recognition of the great services which you have rendered to us for so many years’.  And it was a major step for the College, ‘[breaking] through old traditions’, as the Provost recognized: Lady Clay was the College’s first female lecturer.

Letter from Provost Franks to Rosalind Clay, 1st June 1963

Letters from College are archived with the replies of Rosalind Clay: and through her own words, which record her gratitude to the College, one gets a sense of her character.  Charming, modest, cultured, she once, comparing herself to her sisters, ‘half-identified [herself]’ with the dimmer of the Pleiades  –a self-deprecating remark, notable for its recondite reference!

Rosalind Clay Letter to F V Price, 14th November 1965

In particular, she shows great magnanimity in her reply concerning her long-withheld SCR dining rights (finally offered in 1965), relishing the opportunity to see more of her colleagues: ‘In the past my dealings with them have for weeks at a time been mainly by telephone or hasty notes’.  A letter of 29^th April 1972 thanks the Provost for ‘Thursday last… one of the great days of my life’, a tea party in the year of her 80^th birthday, perhaps celebrating the award of her Oxford MA (a fact I am currently unable to check).  Certainly, it was a celebration of her:  both of Rosalind Clay’s colleges, Worcester and Balliol (her adoptive and birth colleges), flew their flags.  And it is in this letter, looking back on her association with Worcester, that she recalls conversations with Mr Paul Roberts 25 years ago: ‘a series of careful vivas to see whether I was fitted to do some work’.  So it was in the late 1940s, when still Rosalind Wrong, that she started working for the College, ‘teaching history to Worcester men’.

Rosalind Clay retired in 1974, which was reported in the Record for 1977.  I can do no better than reproduce that notice here:

“In 1974, Lady Clay retired as a lecturer at the College.  She had taught Worcester historians Tudor and Stuart history from 1949.  No tutor could have been more admirably informed and conscientious.  More important still, after a longer experience of history and of undergraduates than any historian teaching in the University, she was and is very fond of both and tired of neither. To be attached on one subject for its own sake and to one’s pupils for theirs is to be a very good tutor, for it enables one to inspire enthusiasm and attract attention.  Lady Clay has done both; and many generations of Worcester historians owe her much.  It was a matter of great satisfaction to her friends when the University honoured her with an MA honoris causa.  Having read history in another place before the eligibility of women for degrees, she was, until then, innocent of any degree whatsoever.”

Rosalind, Lady Clay, who was born on 20^th September 1892, died on 16^th February 1984.  It was in that year when her books came to the Library.  Worcester College has no photos of Rosalind Clay, but one has kindly been provided by her niece Elizabeth Nussbaum, through the kind services of the Balliol College Archivist.  Quite why it should be, I don’t know, but it was good finally to put a face to a name previously only known from a gift label.

Rosalind Clay (by permission of Elizabeth Nussbaum)

Mark Bainbridge, Librarian

Bibliography

• MacFarlane, A., ‘1941-1963.  Childhood, adolescence and undergraduate life: learning what the questions are’, available online at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/1941_1963.pdf
• Smith, M., Arthur Lionel Smith, Master of Balliol (1916-1924): a biography and some reminiscences (London, 1928)