Building a community

Philanthropy makes it possible for our exceptional students to access a world-leading education and ensure that their experience at Cambridge is unsurpassed.

During LucyGives, we will be exploring the College’s history of giving and celebrating our donor’s contributions to the College.

The £3000 Foundation gift

George Parker Bidder (George Bidder III) was Dr Anna Bidder’s (Lucy co-founder and first President) father. He was a British marine biologist who primarily studied sponges, and the President of the Marine Biological Association from 1939 to 1945. He was the first donor to the College on its Foundation, with a generous gift (anonymous at first) in support of The Dining Club’s (Bidder, Braithwaite and Wood-Legh) radical vision of a new College ‘led by women, for women’. To commemorate her father’s generosity, Anna Bidder commissioned an oil painting portrait of George Bidder III, which she donated to the College (Artist: Eves, R G.).

You can read more about the College’s history here.

Since then Lucy has grown in so many ways, and its expanding facilities could not have been made possible without the support of the College community.

Buildings providing student accommodation…

Strathaird was built in 1897 on land owned by St. John’s College, it was the home of a succession of senior academic staff. For a time during the Second World War it was used to house Bedford College students evacuated from London. In 1973, with wonderful generosity, Professor Oliver and Mrs Margo Bulman who lived there at the time, gifted the remaining lease on this Victorian villa to our College, which now provides student accommodation and conference facilities. It was the second college building on the site. Professor Bulman was a British palaeontologist and Woodwardian Professor of Geology at the University of Cambridge, and Mrs Bulman a former Girton College student (Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College 1991-2003). Mrs Bulman was a sculptor and made the bust of Dr Kate Bertram (2nd College President) which is now in the Bulman Room, another testimony of their generosity to the College.

de Brye and Bertram houses (named after our second President, Dr. Kate Bertram, 1970-1979 and her husband who was Senior Tutor at St John’s to acknowledge the contribution of them both) were funded by a legacy gift from Honorary Fellow and generous benefactor Countess Barbara de Brye. She provided the College with a vital gift at a key moment in its development and also provided support for the post of College Lecturer in Archaeology, held by Dr Jane Renfrew.

…and other places where College members can socialise, study, or simply relax

The Music and Meditation Pavilion (1994). The creation of our unique Music and Meditation Pavilion was made possible by the generosity of two women living in New York, Irene Sharaff, a costume designer who won five Oscars and whose credits include West Side Story, Cleopatra and The King and I – and Mai-mai Sze a talented writer, artist and lecturer. They had a strong commitment to the education and advancement of women and, inspired by the work of our College outlined in a New York Times article in 1985, they began to correspond with the then College President Dame Anne Warburton. This correspondence eventually led to a generous legacy, which funded the building of the Pavilion, completed in 1995. It also led to the establishment of two named Research Fellowships - the Alice Tong Sze Fellowship for the Humanities and the Lu Gwei-Djen Fellowship for the Sciences. Sadly, Irene Sharaff and Mai-mai Sze never visited Lucy Cavendish College during their lifetime. However, their memorial stones, created by the David Kindersley Workshop, and formed from one single stone split into two, stand beside the Pavilion.

The Paul Paget Room in Oldham Hall at Lucy Cavendish is named after the architect Paul Edward Paget, RIBA FSA CRVO, in recognition of the generous donation of £40,000 by his widow, the writer Verily Anderson (1915-2010). Paul Paget (1901-1985) was the son of Henry Luke Paget, Bishop of Chester, and Elmer Katie Hoare, a keen supporter of women’s education. Two of Verily’s daughters are connected to Lucy Cavendish College: Janie Hampton, women's health activist and biographer of Joyce Grenfell,  Lucy Cavendish's first Honorary Fellow, is an Associate of the College; and Alexandra Walker (Allerhand), a retired lecturer, studied History at Lucy from 1983-86.

During the summer of 2016, we undertook two main refurbishment projects: one included the Paul Paget room, bar, conservatory and gym, and the other one was in the Library. We were able to complete all these projects thanks to a very kind donation from Keith Maddocks, founder of KMG Systems Limited, a family run business, which is the global leader in the design and manufacture of conveying and seasoning systems for the food industry. The company has over 40 years of experience, combining innovation and specialist knowledge to ensure that they provide the cleanest, safest, most reliable systems delivering high accuracy, gentle product handling with flexibility and control. He also generously contributed towards the development of the Histon Road development, one of our newest student accommodation sites.

Philanthropy ensures Lucy Cavendish can continue to be the vanguard of change at Cambridge and the College is deeply grateful to its benefactors through the years.

What is LucyGives?

LucyGives Giving Week (25 April – 1 May 2022) is a 7-day campaign for a better, fairer future. Driven by the College community’s support in LucyGives 2020, Lucy Cavendish is forging ahead with its pioneering vision, welcoming the most socio-economically diverse year group admitted by any Cambridge college this academic year. But this is just the start.

Your support during LucyGives 2022 will help realise our ambitions to achieve a UK student population which is broadly representative of society by 2025, and to increase numbers of talented students from under-served communities across the globe. LucyGives will support the brightest minds from all backgrounds, enabling them to access a world-class university education and to graduate with the skills and confidence to make a positive impact in society. Through LucyGives, we will together ensure our College and its global mission remain at the vanguard of change at the University of Cambridge.

To get involved and to show your support please visit the LucyGives website