Relative Interviews: My Grandmother

We were asked to interview one of our older female relations to find out what their experience was of growing up in their generation.

My granny was born in Rhodesia (Africa) in the 1920's. She describes her mother as being one who ran the house, but because of all the servants at her disposal, worked more as a supervisor than actually hands on.

My granny lived in a very rural part of Rhodesia; she lived and worked on a coffee plantation that her family owned. From the age of 5 to 14 she attended an all girls boarding school in Rhodesia. She has fond memories and describes how she loved being able to do lots of different things in her free time. However the one thing that she really wanted to do but couldn't was see boys.

Because of her rural upbringing she was able to have a lot more freedom than if she had lived in somewhere like London. She had even more freedom because her father often worked away from home and her mother was too busy to always keep tabs on her. The only thing was that as an upper class lady she wasn't really meant to interact with the 'natives' or get a job. Such things were frowned upon.

However she still had a lot of freedom. She left school at 16 and took typing and bookkeeping courses while also studying domestic science. But by the time she was 17 she was dreaming of joining the British army. In the end she had to compromise with her parents, joining the South African army instead of the British army because her parents thought it was safer.

She left the army when she was 20 and moved to England in the hopes of becoming a doctor. She rejected offers from Oxford and other universities, choosing study biology and botany at Reading university because it was closer to Cambridge which was where her boyfriend was studying.

She got engaged for the first time in 1933 but in the end she chose another man, getting engaged for the second time in 1950.

She worked as a bacteriologist. It would have been difficult for her to have gotten the job because of her gender had it not been for her accumen and the vacuum of male workers after the war.

It was apparently very unusual to be married and working like she was.


One of the things that resonated for me was that even though my grandmother seemed to have relative freedom to do what she wanted she is adamant that the girls of today have much more freedom than she ever had.

I was also struck by how successful my mother's academic and working career had been. The first question that I really want to ask is how common it was for a woman to be accepted to Oxford at that time. Secondly I would love to know and how great an extent did the war aid her in securing good jobs.