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Bernice Martin, former Chair of the Elizabeth Nuffield Educational Fund

I was an early beneficiary of Lady Nuffield’s bounty. Without that scholarship I should never have had an academic career. I was the first of my extended family of Lancashire mill workers to go to university. I went up to Bedford College, London, in 1956, a year after my father had died leaving my mother at forty one with six younger children to bring up on a widow’s pension and what little she could earn as an unofficial childminder. I still marvel that she never hesitated over letting me go to university. When I graduated with a first class degree in sociology in 1969 it was obvious that I should either teach (what else could a working class girl do?) or, more urgently, go straight home and get a job to help my mother. When the exam results were published one of my teachers wrote to tell me he had proposed me for an ENEF award as I had just been pipped at the post for the University scholarship by a self-taught, external mature student (whom I married in 1963: we have had a forty-four year conversation about sociology, music, religion and many other things ever since, in the intervals of bringing up four children). The same teacher rejected out of hand my own desire to study religion (a dead subject, he believed!) and set me to research the early administration of the Factory Acts.

After my (almost) full time year of research, (during which I solved my accommodation problem by living and teaching part-time in Hillcroft College), I got a research post at the University of Sheffield. Here I wrote a monograph on the real-politik used by Education Officers to establish flagship comprehensive schools in reluctant Labour-controlled local authorities in the North. At the end of that year I was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Sociology in my old department at Bedford where I spent my teaching career, apart from a few years in America in the 1980’s. I never completed the PhD though I published a number of articles from the material I gathered in that first year. Even as late as the early 1960s there was an old guard that regarded the PhD as a ‘vulgar American fetish’ (how times have changed!) and it was seen as more important to publish, so I happily reverted to my real interests and spent my research time on education, religion and cultural issues.

My most notable publication was a book on the cultural legacy of the 1960s that came out in 1981. It annoyed both left and right. I think it may have been a conversation about this book at one of those marvellous ENEF parties for award holders that prompted the invitation to join the Committee under Isobel Galbraith’s Chairmanship. I remained a fascinated member of the Committee for 18 years (another thing that is quite properly unthinkable today) spending the last eighteen months as Chair. Before leaving the Committee I joined my colleague and fellow Committee Member, Professor Hilary Land, in a small piece of research on the Committee’s archive. My contribution was a brief history of the Committee and how it had targeted its limited funds on different groups of women over time, sometimes in ways which might have scandalised Lady Nuffield. The ENEF is one of the most rewarding and worthwhile things I look back on, and the only Committee in a long life of academic Committees that I am unequivocally proud to have spent, and not wasted, my time on.

Last Updated Tue, 18 July 2006