Alison Duke MA - 22 July 1915 - 6 November 2005
Introduction
Alison Duke, Life Fellow of the College, died on 6 November 2005, aged 90. Her funeral service was held in the College Chapel on 21 November. The tribute from the College was given by the Mistress, Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. The tribute from the Girl Guide Movement was given by Mrs Ann Mitchell, County Commissioner, Girlguiding Cambridgeshire East.
Miss Duke’s long association with College began when she came up to read Classics 1934–39. She returned in 1946 to act as Assistant Tutor and stayed, holding office as Tutor, Senior Tutor, Fellow and Lecturer in Classics, Director of Studies in Classics, Praelector, and Registrar of the Roll until she retired in 1982. On retirement she was elected Life Fellow and Registrar Emerita of the Roll. Miss Duke was a major donor to the new extension to the College Library which is named the Duke Building in her honour.
The obituary was written by Dr Dorothy Thompson. It appeared in abridged form in The Times.
Tribute from the Girl Guide Movement
The name Alison Duke, Chick as she was known in guiding circles, first stuck in my mind when I was working at Our Chalet, the Swiss home that belongs to World guiding, in the early 1960’s. She was extremely well known and well-respected for all she had done to help in Greece and Germany. By coincidence I then came to live in Cambridge and met Alison, and in due course took over her international job and got to know her better, but let us go back to the beginning.
Aged 11, Alison was enrolled into the 1st Cambridge Company by Miss Gaskell, who had founded that great unit in January 1911, thus linking Alison to the beginning of guiding in this county. Shortly before the second World War she in her turn became ‘Captain’ and ran the Company until 1969. In spite of her demanding academic life Alison always had time for guiding. In the tense summer of 1939, as the only fluent German speaker she had been entrusted with the escort of a large UK contingent of girls and young women by train right across Europe to Pax-Ting, a large international camp and World Conference in Hungary. With the Nazis already in control of part of the territory, border crossings were far from easy. They arrived back safely barely a week before war was declared.
During the War, every spare weekend and vacation was spent as a member of a Guides’ mobile catering and accommodation team, travelling anywhere it was needed. Conditions were often hard as they supported workers coping with the blitz, those drafted to work on the land and the troops building up to D-day. During this time,, in spite of working in Reading, Alison remained the Captain of the 1st Cambridge, returning to Cambridge whenever she could, a journey that had to be broken overnight in London, to help and encourage her Company being led by its Patrol Leaders, taking them to camp and getting them involved in war service, including hop picking in the west country. Finally, as a measure of her indomitable spirit, she opted for work in Greece as the interpreter for the first team sent out by the Guide International Service from 1944–1946. During the rigorous and demanding preparation time before the departure of the GIS team, led by an old Girtonian Margaret Pilkington, Alison set up a series of lessons to try to teach everyone Greek by correspondence – no mean task. The team sailed in June 1944, only to be stuck in Egypt for 7 months because of the outbreak of the Greek civil war. During this enforced break they helped in the Greek refugee camps, eventually arriving in Athens just 24 hours after the tide of civil war had released that city. This was a remarkable period of her life, which left her with an indelible love of Greece and its people. The official role of the team was the distribution of relief; supplies were divided with impeccable fairness amongst deprived mountain villagers, often in extremely remote locations, which were hard of access. Those who knew Alison in later years found it hard to imagine the young Englishwoman, dressed in khaki, who in January 1945 against great odds negotiated a bread supply for a women’s prison in Athens or who later that winter, snowed up in Amphissa before the British troops got through, with two female colleagues, was called upon to accept the arms surrendered by ELAS guerrillas coming down from the hills.
Whilst still in Greece, Alison and her colleagues helped the Greek Guide Association to rise again from the ashes, and after the war she was a major participant in the re-establishment of guiding in Germany which included participation in a training event at Our Chalet and taking the first group of guides from this country to Germany to camp. She made life-long friendships with both German and Greek guiders. In 1961 and 1963 she was the obvious leader of two UK parties who went to Greece on service camps to help rebuild that country in which so much was destroyed by civil war.
In 1948 Alison gave part of the New year greeting address on the BBC World Service to Greece; as a part of this she said:
‘I remember the day we went up on mules to a little village, high in the mountains taking with us all too scanty supplies of clothing for distribution. The village was entirely destroyed. The men and women were in rags, the children looked old and wizened and more than half starved but nevertheless this village gave us a friendly and enthusiastic welcome. Later when we were drinking health in retsina, they told us about the day their village was burnt. How the soldiers of occupation had been searching for a British Major who had befriended and helped this and many villages. No one was found to betray him, so the village had been burnt. That night out of the dark came the Major, and they told him he was a good man and their friend and they could not have betrayed him. This is the story of countless villages in Greece and to us it was a privilege and joy to work among them.’
At home, Alison became Guide International Adviser for this county in the 1940’s a post she held until 1976. In 1951 she became a member of the Education Panel at Guide headquarters, becoming its chairman in 1958. She had become a camp trainer in 1942, and continued to use this for 30 years. She gained the Beaver Award for services to guiding in 1963, and a Good Service Award in 1978 for all she had done for this county. Her final role was as our archivist, and it is thanks to her capacity to keep everything that we have such excellent archives.
It is impossible to calculate her contribution to the lives of young people in this country and overseas; all the many guides whose lives she touched and influenced, opening their eyes to the natural world by camping; learning to give service at home and abroad; inculcating skills and qualities of behaviour; and demonstrating the sharing of cultures and differences to promote greater understanding between nations. That is her memorial – she used the term ‘good Girtonian’ as the highest accolade, to that I would wish to add she was a good guide.
Obituary
The recent death of Alison Duke has deprived Girton College of its remembrancer. For her life covered more than half that of the first Cambridge women’s college, and a remarkable memory for students (and colleagues) allowed later generations a glimpse of oral history at work. Born in Cambridge in 1915, the younger daughter of an academic father, William Holden Duke (a classics don at Jesus), and a German mother, Emilie Johanna von Lippe, Alison Duke spent most of her life in the city of her birth. Her secondary education was at the Perse Girls’ School in the city, from where she went on to Girton as a Scholar to read Classics from 1934–1939. Following graduation, she started work on the manuscripts of Livy.
When war broke out, unable to concentrate on research – a self-indulgent activity, she thought, at such a time – in 1940 she accepted a lecturing post in the Classics Department at Reading University, where she covered for a male lecturer who had left to fight. Every spare weekend and vacation was spent as a member of a Girl Guides’ mobile catering and accommodation team, travelling anywhere it was needed. Conditions were often hard as they supported workers coping with the blitz, those drafted to work on the land and the troops building up to D-day. Finally, a measure of her indomitable spirit, she opted for work in Greece as part of the first team sent out by the Guide International Service 1944–1946. This was a remarkable period of her life, which left her with an indelible love of that country and its people. The official role of these women was the distribution of relief; supplies were divided with impeccable fairness amongst deprived mountain villagers, often in extremely remote locations which were hard of access. Those who knew Miss Duke in later years found it hard to imagine the young Englishwoman, dressed in khaki, who in January 1945 against great odds negotiated a bread supply for a women’s prison in Athens or who later that winter, snowed up in Amphissa before the British troops got through, with two female colleagues was called upon to accept the arms surrendered by ELAS guerrillas coming down from the hills.
In 1946 Miss Duke returned to Girton College to an unestablished post as Acting Assistant Tutor. And there she was to stay, as Tutor, Director of Studies in Classics from 1951 until she retired in 1982, Senior Tutor until 1974, Her work, again as part of a successful team, on the second volume of the Girton College Register was published in 1991. Without her initiative, perseverance and support this publication would not have happened.
In December 1947 Alison Duke was present when the University of Cambridge finally voted to admit women as full members; she lived to see and applaud the appointment of two women Vice-Chancellors. From 1952 she held the post of Assistant Lecturer and from 1957 that of Lecturer in Classics in the University, where palaeography teaching was her special responsibility. Serving on numerous University and College committees, she directed her energies above all to the pastoral care of her students. As teacher and tutor, she embodied the old-style College Fellow for whom the well-being of her charges was more important than her personal career. Her honorary appointment as Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog (First Class) was earned when she acted as tutor to Princess Margrethe, the future queen of Denmark.
All this time she remained an active member of the Guide Association, focussing on its international links and ethos of world friendship. In the tense summer of 1939, as the only fluent German speaker, she had been entrusted with the escort of a large UK contingent of girls and young women by train right across Europe to an international camp in Hungary; with the Nazis already in control of part of the territory, border crossings were far from easy. After the war, she took part in several training sessions where women from the newly liberated countries of Europe – Belgium, France and the Netherlands – were helped alongside women from their recent oppressor Germany to re-establish guiding in their respective countries. For many years she served on international and education committees at the UK national headquarters, and she continued to run her 1st Cambridge Company, into which she had been enrolled herself aged eleven. The values she brought to her other work she brought also to her Guiding, inculcating into countless young women qualities and skills that would serve them well as they went on to adult life.
Alison Duke never married. She cared for her mother at home until her death in her nineties. Her appointment on retirement as Life Fellow of Girton College and Registrar Emerita of the Roll was a fitting culmination to a selfless career, in which to a large degree the College had become her life. The Duke Archive at Girton, completed and opened before her death, is a fitting memorial to her.
Tribute from the College
Girton very much appreciates holding this service in the chapel of the College to which Miss Duke was attached for all but the first years of her life—we thank her family, and her friends from outside, for allowing us to exercise the privilege. There will be many things to say later, but I want to share with the County Commissioner for the Girl Guides a few words on this immediate occasion, and to do so on behalf of College.
Miss Duke was my Tutor. I say that not just because it was true, but because it was true for generations of Girtonians. The phrase almost works as a collective noun, it links so many people. But she linked them in a very special way. For her quite formidable memory meant that she embodied the comings and goings of countless students to whom she was devoted, and whose lives took her beyond Girton and Cambridge.
Alison Duke grew up in Cambridge, attending the Perse School where she was later Governor, and—following in the footsteps of her sister—read Classics at Girton. After a brief spell at Reading University, she returned to Girton in 1946 as Acting Assistant Tutor, and then over the next 35 years became Tutor and subsequently the first holder of the newly created role of Senior Tutor. She was Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in Classics over this same period, and held a University Lectureship for most of it. She retired in 1982.
But if you thought that ended the tale, it has only just begun.
It does not say anything for example about that remarkable interlude in her life before she became a Tutor, when she was posted as a relief worker in Egypt and Greece, with the Guide International Service—I shall let the Commissioner talk about that. But the indomitable qualities she displayed then were evident back in College. An eminent pupil and fellow Classicist of hers has observed—
[She had a] strong sense of what was right, combined with a determination to pursue this even against all odds… On many occasions throughout her life, those in her care were to experience these qualities first hand. A fierce loyalty, strong conscience and a sense of how to get things done generally kept her charges on the straight and narrow, yet even when they strayed they never lost her support. She expected from others the same straight dealings and punctiliousness that she would deliver. To be a ‘good Girtonian’ was the highest accolade. To meet her standards and expectations was not always easy.
Indeed the early men fellows—in the later 1970s and early 80s—recall to this day breakfasts in her company, though with as much affection as with awe.
Nor did that brief account convey quite how passionate her love of Classics was. Growing up in a household of books, the daughter of a Classics don, she would recount years later her acute disappintment as an undergraduate for not being auditioned for the Greek Play. It was the Frogs, and she longed for the compelling chorus. The reason? As a woman she was not then a full member of the University. That was of course rectified after the war. And for both the women’s colleges—her ties with her Newnham colleagues were close.
Nor did it convey the extent to which Miss Duke was the supreme keeper of the College’s memories. Her vivid and intimate recollections combined with institutional ones, as she became Praelector, presenting generations of undergraduates for their degrees, and Registrar of the Roll, becoming contact person for past members of the College. And after she had retired, she turned to a quite monumental work, spending almost a decade compiling—with great finesse and textual care—the second Girton Register (1944–69). It was experience working in the old archives that led to her most magnificent endowment of what is now named the Duke Building, of which pride of place must go to the new Archive. It could not be a more fitting memorial for this living archivist and oral historian. For what we might want to keep in mind is that for hundreds of those entries, probably for more of the people there than not, she could conjure personal recollections, and to each of these persons Miss Duke was a very special figure. And even before then, as one of her pupils at Reading University has written to remind me.
The bare details of her time of Girton do not talk either of how much her family meant. I refer, if I may, to her dear sister and nephews, about whom I was often told, and to her own mother for whom she cared for many years at home. Her mother’s furniture was a frequent talking point when I visited. It was through her mother that German remained a precious language, and her ties with her German relatives of so much value.
And of course they say nothing about her own circle, and the devotion she inspired. She had constant companionship in her later years—from close friends within and outside College—and in the last few months she enjoyed support from those closest to her that I can only look back and point to as the most emphatic measure of the extent to which—all her life—she had supported others. Hers was a self-less career, her obituarist notes.
On the inside cover of her address book she wrote down a couple of lines from T. S. Eliot: ‘The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is humility, and humility is endless’.