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(Joan) Pernel Strachey

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(Joan) Pernel Strachey

by Ray Strachey
oil on board, late 1920s or early 1930s
19 in. x 14 in. (483 mm x 356 mm)
Given by Barbara Strachey (Hultin, later Halpern), 1999
Reference Collection
NPG D239

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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, acknowledging the full independence of the Irish Free State, led at the time by W.T. Cosgrave, the the first President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State.

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The BBC gains its Royal Charter making it a public corporation and a public service broadcaster accountable to its audience. John Reith became the first Director General with the directive to 'inform, educate and entertain.'

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Stalin expels Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Communist Party, giving himself greater control of the party and country by ousting opposition elements.

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Roger Bamkin

16 March 2018, 15:27

Strachey was born in Clapham Common in London in 1876. She came from a large family led by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey and the suffragist Jane Maria Strachey. Her mother was a friend of Millicent Garrett Fawcett who had co-founded Newnham College in Cambridge.[1]


The sons and daughters of Sir Richard Strachey and Lady Strachey. Pernel is fourth from the left
Strachey went to Allenswood School.[2] She was then a scholar of French after initially studying history at Newnham College in 1895. Her course was modern and medieval languages, but she was talented in French. By 1900 she was lecturing at Royal Holloway College in London after briefly studying in Paris. She returned to her alma mater in 1905 and by 1917 she was leading the modern and medieval languages department. In 1921 she used her suffragist background to help lead a campaign to get real degrees for women at Girton College and Newnham. The campaign failed.[1]

She became principal of the college in 1927.[2] She used her friendship with the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf to get Woolf to deliver a talk in 1928. Woolf stayed at Newnham[1] and her talk to the Newnham Arts Society was the basis for her essay A Room of One's Own.[3] Strachey retired in 1941.[2]

Strachey died in Gordon Square in London on 19 December 1951, aged 75.[1]

References
Rita McWilliams Tullberg, ‘Strachey, (Joan) Pernel (1876–1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 6 March 2017
Pernel Strachey, National Archives, Retrieved 6 March 2017
Newnham Essay Prize, Newnham College, Retrieved 6 March 2017