College Record 2013

Optimistically, the collection’s preface states that ‘The dialogues are humorous,
short and easily learnt by heart.’ A pupil from these days, when she was at Southall
Grammar School, recalls her on Friends Reunited: ‘Her striped stockings and long
finger nails will live with us forever!’ Later she taught at Battersea County School,
and was head of modern languages there by 1963, when she produced an edition of
Heinrich Böll, Dr Murkes Gesammeltes Schweigen.
She also moved beyond language and literature into studies of the methodology
of teaching and testing as well as the provision of German-language teaching
materials. Recognition came in the award of the Goethe Medal (1968) by the
Goethe Institute, and then in a tutorship in Modern Languages at the Institute of
Educational Studies, Oxford. After three years there, she moved to Southampton
University, where she was appointed to the newly-founded Language Centre as one
of its first lecturers (1972). Being hardworking and punctual herself, she expected
her students to share her attitude: latecomers to her 9 a.m. lectures could expect to
be directed to come and sit at the front. But academic conventions never troubled
her unduly: she once cancelled her own lecture so that she could go and hear an
archaeologist visiting from Oxford give a lecture in another department. This was
how she met her future friend and collaborator, Martin Henig (SF 1998–2009), who
many years later wrote her obituary for The Times.
It could be said that her second career commenced when she took early retirement in
1979 and started living permanently in Oxford, where the libraries and institutions
such as the Ashmolean Museum and the Institute of Archaeology became her
constant resource. But really she had begun her exploration of the history of the
decorative arts, and especially of the history of jewellery, in her London days,
when she was a regular weekend visitor to the Portobello Road dealers. She had
an extremely eclectic range of interests, but in her disciplined way gradually came
to focus on what she realised was an overlooked area, where someone with a good
memory and an eye could make the most wonderful discoveries. This was the world
of gemstones, especially sards (cut in sardonyx), carved in the Neoclassical style and
often echoing great statues of the Ancient World, in the later eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Previously such carvings had tended either to be mistaken
as Antique or dismissed as mere fakes or copies. She thus had the field almost to
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