This article written by Jackie Rickenberg was published in the Parish Magazine in August 2022
This is the final story of the Fisher family. Herbert and Lettice have been featured over the last couple of months and now it’s the turn of their daughter Mary. Mary Letitia Somerville Fisher (1913-2005) was an only child, born in London to Herbert and Lettice, but brought up in Oxford where her father was Warden of New College. She was best known as an academic, historian and for her tenure as Principle of St Hilda’s College between 1965 and 1980.
Mary had lived (part-time) in our village ever since she was a small child and moved here permanently when she retired. She lived in her parents’ house, Rock Cottage at the top of Highfield Lane. And we were so very fortuitous to have had her, as being an historian, not only did Mary research her own family history, but she documented so much of life as it was in Thursley throughout her time here. The History Society’s archives would be a lot less interesting and poorer, were it not for Mary’s records of the times, the occupants and village life throughout her lifetime. It is amazing that those recollections will be with us for generations to come and will inform and enhance the lives of many families and villagers alike.
After Mary obtained her degree from Somerville College, Oxford, she was living at home, researching Roman history and picking up a little undergraduate teaching from friends in other colleges. When war broke out, she felt that she should be doing something more immediately useful to the war effort and so, with the help of one of her mother’s friends, Hilda Matheson, who had been a spy in the First World War, she landed a position in an organisation run by Hilda, (known to the Intelligent Services!) that sent broadcasting material to various countries, with the ostensible purpose of replacing it with covert recordings which were to be smuggled into or dropped over Germany. Very mysterious and curious! In Mary’s own words, the story continues:
“I was living in London, on Chelsea Embankment, after Hilda’s premature death. Her company was taken over by the BBC and we moved first to Bedford College in Regent’s Park and then to an ex-convent in Maida Vale. We worked very hard and did a lot of recording, including a good deal of actuality recording, for special recorded programmes. We corresponded with overseas radio stations but, I think rightly, very few people took us very seriously and I doubt we did anything very useful.
By this point, my mother had retired from Oxford to Thursley, and I would return at weekends, taking the train to Milford station, where she would sometimes collect me in her small car with her even smaller petrol ration! But I think more often, I took the bus from Guildford and walked up from the Red Lion. To return, I would walk across Upper Highfield Farm to the A3 and take the bus to Godalming station.
I was based in London, commissioning and supervising the recording of programmes. The French, were the main point of contact, and we had a liaison officer called Mademoiselle Moulun, whose home was in the Argentine but who had worked as a finishing school teacher in Paris. We would mainly send out pressed 78rpm recordings in brown paper parcels and because they would go by sea mail to consuls to pass on to the local radio stations, they were not very prompt. We would send out light programmes of dance music. The purpose of these recordings was to show the rest of the world that we were still in the field, that things were still happening, that life was going on and above all that the French were still in the field. We were showing that the French had not been forgotten and that was the one undoubtedly useful thing we did because we did convince the Free French that we were batting on their side. By Christmas of 1944 it was clear that the war was coming to an end and so my job became far less interesting and there was really very little point in going on with it. So, I let it be known that I was in the market as I didn’t want to stay with the BBC, but rather do something different.
Then there was one of those accidents that happen and change your life. My mother had yet another friend, who had a farm in Hampshire and she used to throw great parties, one of which I was invited to. At the party I found myself talking to a man from the Colonial Office (the Foreign, India, Home and Colonial Offices have now become the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) and during our conversation I said that I was at the BBC but was trying to get out of it. The next day he telephoned to say that he thought there was a vacancy coming up in the Colonial Office and would I be interested? I thought it would be worth trying anything and I got the job! Originally, he thought the vacancy was on the Palestine desk but the job I was posted to was in the Mediterranean department, which was responsible for Malta, Gibraltar and Cyprus. As the war ended our job was to try to cope with the political ferment that it had produced in the colonies, both by economic and social development and by devising new constitutional arrangements, most of which proved shorter lived than we expected”.
In 1955, Mary Fisher married senior civil servant John Bennett and from 1965 until 1980, she was Principal of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. They commissioned Jean Cooke to paint this portrait of her:
Mary retired from Oxford, as her mother had done before her, to Rock Cottage and from there she filled her days, until her death in 2005, writing her memoirs and her recollections of a bygone Thursley. We shall be regularly featuring Mary’s amusing and incisive musings in months to come.