Alys Blakeway is a Trustee of the Sybil Campbell Collection Trust and a member of WWG. 

A unique collection of books whose donors include Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Beatrice Webb, is held at Winchester University Library on long-term loan from the British Federation of Women Graduates.

The collection consists of some 8000 books whose subject matter varies enormously from biography to astrology, from geography to medicine, not to mention fiction. But what is remarkable about the collection is that each book was given as a personal choice from a distinguished figure as a gesture of support to the young women students resident at Crosby Hall in Chelsea.

A keen supporter of the collection was the eponymous Sybil Campbell (1899-1977), an alumna of Girton College, Cambridge, who made legal history as one of ten women admitted at Middle Temple in November 1922 – when women were first called to the English Bar – and went on to become the first woman to serve as a Stipendiary Magistrate in London, at Tower Bridge Magistrate’s Court in 1945.

Sybil Campbell was also the Honorary Secretary of the British Federation of University Women (now the BFWG) from 1921-33, and supported its fundraising campaign to establish Crosby Hall as an international hall of residence for women students.

With others she then worked enthusiastically to build up the Hall’s Library, as a research and leisure resource for students living there, by asking distinguished people for donations.  “Many of the foreign women were spending just the one year in England, and, as a result, felt this year to be one of the greatest experiences of their lives,” said Viennese physicist Berta Karlik.  “For this reason the majority of the Crosby Hall residents lived at an enormous pitch of intensity, lifted out of their everyday habits, and this, above all, was what shaped the intellectual life of Crosby Hall”.

After the closure of Crosby Hall as a student residence in in the late 1980s, the Collection was cared for by the BFWG until 2006, when it was deposited at Winchester University, and it has been cherished here in Winchester ever since.

It is the books’ provenance which gives the collection its highly personal character.  I can imagine Virginia Woolf choosing to donate her own work, “A Room of One’s Own”, to be read by women for whom Crosby Hall might be their first taste of independent living.

Similarly, her husband Leonard was a loyal donor, giving books at intervals between 1920 and 1933.  One, “The Religious Foundations of Internationalism” by Norman Bentwich, was clearly chosen for the international residents of Crosby Hall.

Lytton Strachey gave his own two iconoclastic works, “Eminent Victorians” and “Queen Victoria”, which must have made interesting reading for Crosby Hall’s residents from the British Empire.

Beatrice Webb, the socialist with a “priggish puritan” reputation, had clearly gone to a lot of trouble and some expense to select her 130 books, many of which she had chosen to give the residents an idea of British culture and to help them settle in.  They range from collections of English poetry to illustrated works on the history of Chelsea, Kensington and Fulham.  These include a fine art publication, “Bits of Old Chelsea”, with 41 etchings by William Walter Burgess, a distinguished etcher of his day, as well as descriptions by equally distinguished authors, Lionel Johnson and Richard le Gallienne.

Beatrice Webb certainly didn’t expect readers to settle down to sociological treatises after a busy day in the lecture theatre or the laboratory – although they could if they wanted to, as she had included William Booth’s “London Labour and the London Poor” among her donations.

Personal experience of the Sybil Campbell Collection.

What I have most enjoyed about the Collection is that it provides the context for the Sybil Campbell Reading Group which is open to all WWG members.

Contact me alys_blakeway@yahoo.co.uk  if you are interested and I will pass your names on. The group has introduced me to pioneering women who challenged, ignored or learnt to live with the conventions of their day, in order to achieve their aims.

Although it is not possible to borrow the actual books themselves – the Collection is for reference only – it is normally easy enough to buy copies second hand or borrow them from other libraries.  Recently, for example, we have read, and discussed remotely, “Victorian Lady Travellers” ­by Dorothy Middleton, and “Nancy Astor and Friends” by Astor’s niece, Elizabeth Langhorne.

Undaunted by discomfort and combining a respect for convention with the conviction that, even they ignored Victorian norms of ladylike behaviour, they would be respected, the lady travellers explored places where white ladies were a rarity, from Siberia to Africa, from Tibet to North America.

Some were missionaries (Annie Taylor and Kate Marsden), one (Marianne North) was a botanical illustrator and some (May Sheldon and Fanny Workman) were explorers.  They all needed to get away from the constraints of Victorian middle-class life and mores.

As Britain’s first woman MP, Nancy Astor, another pioneer, was undaunted by convention.  Most of her friends were men and she could strike up friendly relations with people of all classes, as she showed during the bombing of Plymouth in World War II.

Despite the fact that she never served alcohol, invitations to her country house, Cliveden, were sought after.  Although a Conservative, she worked closely with the second woman MP, Margaret Wintringham, a Liberal, and campaigned for free nursery schools and widows’ pensions.  Naturally fair-minded, it was her belief that the Germans had been treated unfairly by the post-World War I Versailles treaty which caused her to be regarded, unjustly, as an appeaser. 

So, long after their deaths, the donors to the then Crosby Hall Library are still enriching today’s women’s learning and leisure by informing us about women of the past.

Access to the Sybil Campbell Collection:  In normal times Winchester Women Graduate, can see books from the collection by appointment with the university library.  At present, however, access is suspended due to the pandemic. See the library website for updated information