Students came to consult him on every sort of matter - personal troubles and problems, as well as difficulties in their work. I used sometimes to be curled up, unobserved, on the deep window seat in the study, half-hidden by the heavy curtains, when they came to talk to him. He made them talk; 'sort out' their problems. He said once: 'You can't give anybody advice as to what he should do. That is his freedom, and his responsibility. But you can help him to set out the pieces, so that he can see what his choice is.'

Eleanor Sidgwick and Henry Sidgwick had, throughout their life together, chosen to give their time to college. She had renounced mathematical research of a very high order in order to come and assist Miss Clough in the early days. Early in their married life, which was a perfect partnership, they gave up their own home to come and live in Newnham… They enjoyed the triumph of 1881 in the passing of the Senate of the Graces admitting women to the right of sitting for Tripos examinations and being placed on the lists, the struggle for full recognition - the granting of degrees, and admission to membership of the University was entering on a long, slow phase, with no end in sight. (It was in fact to take forty years and a world war to persuade the authorities to grant degrees to women.)

Eleanor Sidgwick was principal of Newnham College in my time at Cambridge (Henry Sidgwick died in 1900). A tall, slightly bent, emaciated figure; tenuous, yet not fragile.

A white face, with snowy hair covered by a delicate fragment of lace. Then, as she passed, she smiled; the eyes went blue and the face was, suddenly, changed to a poignant beauty. How could anyone take Newnham and the fact of being there for granted, while she was there, who had helped to wring its being out of such resistance.

Newnham College was still on trial, and the authorities were uneasily conscious of the fact. Hence total separation from the masculine undergraduate population, which most of us did not feel or resent at the time, but any contemporary student must find odd, even inexplicable. Hence the timid restrictions that irked and offended students.

Margery's mother, Marie Corbett, was an ardent Feminist, one small external sign being the fact that she regularly wore the breeches she had taken to when bicycling came in, at least a decade before war-time made them permissible. She was a woman of great drive, active in local affairs and local government and all good causes. The house was apt to swarm with people. The Corbett's hospitality was in the best English tradition. Friends of Margery, of her younger sister Cicely - extravagantly pretty, and at the time we were at Cambridge, preparing to go Oxford and of her elder brother Adrian, then at Oxford, assembled for dances and week-end parties…. At college Margery was intensely keen on civil liberties, free trade, international good will, democracy… She spends time and energy without stint or personal ambition… She has an immense sense of duty, and must have spent a very large part of her entire life on committees and at meetings. Not to like her is and always has been impossible; she has charm and complete sincerity, and has made a success of life, in its essential relationships. She was a good daughter: she is a good wife and mother. The one boy, born during the 1914 war, when his father was in France with the B.E.F., was, as a baby, so delicate that it did not seem possible he should live; Margery insisted that he should; he has grown up a superb physical specimen.

Within weeks, horror was fully upon us. That war means the massive, selective slaughter, the killing, maiming, blinding, shell-shocking of men was a fact no one could refuse to see. Daily vast convoys of wounded arrived; the hospitals were crowded; the casualty lists filled columns of small print, as the flower of our young manhood was annihilated.