DR ANN SILVER
From The Daily Telegraph 23rd March 2023.
Dr Ann Silver. Born 1929. Physiologist and Editor. Passed away peacefully on 10th March. Funeral Service at St Mark's, Newnham, Cambridge on 3rd April at 11 a.m. Family flowers only. Donations to Action Medical Research.
Dear Old Felicians,
Some of you will remember reunions of the Old Felicians being held in Cambridge at King’s and Pembroke Colleges, being arranged by Dr. Ann Silver, a fellow old girl from the 1940s.
From today's Daily Telegraph the sad notice of the death of our Ann Silver, Saint Felix, Clough House 1940 to 1949. I recall her telling me over an OF lunch that she, being such a diminutive ten-year old little girl, was passed through the carriage door window over the tops of the soldiers returning from Dunkirk until they found her a seat in a compartment.
A very entertaining lady and a true scholar.
Yours faithfully,
Caroline Hayward MacMillan
Fawcett 1954-
An extract from an interview of Ann Silver by members of The Physiological Society. The full version can be read via this link.
Microsoft Word - OH_Ann Silver_final version_JAG (physoc.org)
This interview with Ann Silver was conducted at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church (‘because The Physiological Society office could not provide adequate facilities for us on this occasion because of broken ventilation’) on 15 May 2008. Those present were Dafydd Walters (DW), Martin Rosenberg (MR) and Ann Silver (AS).
DW: Ann, first of all, welcome and thank you for very much for coming. And I think we should start off, if we can, by you telling us a little bit about your family, what part of the country they were in, and any interesting stories you have about your family if you’re willing to do that?
AS: Well my family came from Scotland on both sides. My father’s father was Minister in Westruther and my maternal grandparents came from Ayrshire, from Mauchline. And going further back, that part of the family was very much involved with the Burns Monument in Alloway because my Great, Great Grandfather was a friend of Alexander Boswell (son of James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer). As a result of this connection I am a member of the Auchinleck Boswell Society – a rather esoteric thing to belong to. Now going further on, my father had joined the Indian Army after the First World War, and I was born in India, at Meerut where the Indian Mutiny had started. My brother had been born two years earlier in Poona but I was only three months old when we came home so I don’t remember anything about India, though we still retain some Hindustani words in the family.
DW: So that’s interesting. So you have an Indian Birth Certificate, Ann, do you? AS: I have no Birth Certificate. Being born in the Army I was registered in the British hospital, but there was no Birth Certificate. Luckily I have a Baptismal Certificate that says, ‘Said to be born’. Having no Birth Certificate has been a problem because when I tried to renew my passport in 1977 things had got tricky. Although I’d had passports before I was asked where my father was 2 born. Well he’d been born in Grenada in the British West Indies where his father was Minister in the Church of Scotland. I was told that Granada, which had allowed my British Citizenship, was now independent. So since 1974 I had been a citizen of Granada but I ‘appeared to have some claim to British citizenship through the reputed birth of my grandfather in Scotland.’ So I had to get his Birth and Marriage Certificates before I could become British again.
DW: That’s fascinating. You see, I was born in India as well and I have that same problem in that every time I apply for a passport now, I have to put down, record, give evidence of, my father’s place of birth, which luckily was in Britain. So that’s interesting, actually, that it’s still quite a problem.
MR: So do you know the exact date of your birth?
AS: Well my baptism certificate says I was ‘said to be born on 23 November 1929’. I think my mother agreed I was born then.
DW: And when you said that your grandfather was a Minister, that was in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition? AS: Yes.
DW: Right. So your father was what in the army, Ann? AS: He joined the Army at the beginning of the Great War though he was actually a little bit too young. And then after the War he went on to join the Indian Army. He was in the Second Lancers. In 1930 Indian Regiments were becoming more Indian with fewer British officers. And so in 1930, with a lot of others, he decided to retire and came home. Having been in a Cavalry Regiment, he was very keen on riding so we moved to near Woodbridge in Suffolk where he and a couple of other ex‐Cavalry men set up a Riding School. And so I was riding from when I was about three years old.
DW: Really? Gosh. Well we’ll come back to your affinity to physiology later but do you think that experience was important, that contact with animals?
AS: Oh very, very much so. I feel very grateful for a completely country upbringing with horses, animals, nature, etc.; I think that’s partly why I went into physiology.
DW: Oh, interesting. So when you say near Woodbridge, were you in a village or a… AS: We were not ‘in’ anything; we were between the villages of Melton and Bredfield. We lived in a farmhouse. We didn’t farm the land but we had stables.
DW: And your schooling was local as well, wasn’t it?
AS: Well, I went first of all to a little school in Woodbridge called St Anne’s and then I was meant to be going to St Felix School at Southwold but in 1939, my mother didn’t think sending someone on to the East coast was quite the right thing to do. So I went for a year to a ghastly sort of Dame School in Ipswich, which I hated. Then in May 1940 my mother came and collected me, and I went to Dorset where some of the girls from St Felix, who lived in danger areas, had gone to stay with one of the House Mistresses’ brothers in his Rectory at Stoke Abbott. As an aside – a day or two earlier my mother had been told that Miss Williamson, the Head Mistress, would be going through Woodbridge station en route to find somewhere to evacuate the School to. So my mother went to the station and more‐or‐less said, ‘Will you take Ann?’ And Miss Williamson agreed. That’s how I got enrolled in the School. To return to our time in Dorset, we were only there for about a fortnight, by which time Miss Williamson had found King Arthur’s Castle Hotel in Tintagel to evacuate the school to. We left Stoke Abbott and took various cross‐country trains. I can’t remember exactly but think we joined the London train carrying the rest of the school at Okehampton. This was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation and the train was absolutely chock‐a‐block with soldiers. They couldn’t open the doors because people would fall out so because I was only little I was actually pushed into the train through the window and in the other side.
MR: Dear me. What year was this?
AS: This was 1940.
DW: And this was right at the Dunkirk evacuation?
MR: And you have a clear memory of that?
AS: I have a very clear memory. One thing I have a clear memory of is that somebody had decided the thing to feed girls with on a hot train journey was big blocks of Cadbury’s milk chocolate. And if you can think of anything more thirst‐making, sick‐making, this is what we were fed on anyhow.
DW: So how big was this group of girls?
AS: Well, the School before the war was probably getting on for about 300 but quite a lot of people didn’t go to Tintagel, so I think maybe about 200 or less went down to King Arthur’s Castle Hotel.
DW: Good gracious.
AS: Where we stayed for the summer term of 1940.
DW: Right. And did you stay on there then?
AS: Well, after that we went to Lord Poulett’s house at Hinton St George. It had originally been occupied by girls from Malvern School because their building had been taken over by the Ministry of Defence, or some other London ministry. They had adapted the basement of Hinton House with awful – can’t think of the word – well almost cardboard partitions to make loos and bathrooms. These awful places were known as the ‘Malverns’. After one term they had been allowed to go back to their buildings at Malvern and so we took over Hinton House. And that’s where we spent the rest of the time until 1945.
DW: I’m always, I don’t know, I don’t have any first‐hand experience of the war at all really, but people’s education was often disturbed like this, by relocation; but what was your experience? Do you think the education was upset in any way?
AS: Well, yes, from the point of view of science there really was very little because there were no labs or anything. Of course, I was only 10‐ish when I went but I did School Certificate there. The only science that I did was biology but older girls who were further on in their education, went into Crewkerne to have physics lessons, I think, in the Boys’ school. But we had virtually no science other than biology. This always surprises me, thinking back, because after returning to Southwold (in 1945) I took physics, chemistry, and biology Higher School Certificate two years later. So, we must have had to catch up quite fast.