she met without prejudice or preconception. In the last five the Bath, an award exclusive to high-ranking civil servants) years of her life she succumbed to Alzheimer’s and moved to a in 1989. care home in early 2021. Until the end, however, she enjoyed It was at the Parliamentary Council that she met her partner, flowers, gardens, good food, and her two grandchildren. Terence Skemp. Theirs was a long and enduring partnership, and Jonathan Seglow they lived happily in their home on the Finchley Road in London. Sandra retired early to care for him and they continued to live Jane Sik (née Woodland, 1965) here until Terence's death in 1996. Sandra was very generous with her nieces and nephew, great After graduating in Physics from nieces and nephews, and her great great niece. She also loved Somerville, Jane moved to PhD study to travel, taking herself off to Guatemala, Mexico and the Inca at Darwin College, Cambridge. There Trail, Syria, to name a few. She took a lot of photographs and she met her husband, Michael. They then turned them into paintings when she got home. moved from Cambridge to take up As her fierce intellectual capacity faded in the grip of dementia, research fellowships in Edinburgh. she softened, leaning into tenderness and love. Along with They had three children after their excellence, success and loyalty, that became an important part move to Scotland (Emma, Becky and of her legacy. David), and later three grandsons. Jane took up teaching after rearing JANE SIK Susan Stokes (née Bretherton, 1952) her family and became principal teacher of Physics in a number of schools in the West of Scotland. Jane had many interests but Susan was born in Oxford to a her main hobby was beekeeping which she continued right up Somervillian mother (Jocelyn to her death. Bretherton, née Mathews, who read History in 1924). After boarding at Sandra Skemp (née Burns, 1957) Godolphin in Salisbury, she came up to Somerville to study Modern Languages, and after graduation Sandra Burns was born in became a teacher of French. Early in Manchester. Her mother, a her teaching career, she was part of seamstress, struggled to support her the fight for equal pay for women SUSAN STOKES husband, Sandra, and her two sisters. in that profession. She remembered After her father's death when she wondering why the man teaching in the next classroom was was 11, Sandra contracted pleurisy, paid almost double what she earned, deciding that wasn't and was sent to Wales to recover, fair and to do something about it. That turned out to be a building resilience in face of the recurring pattern. loneliness and boredom of this time. Returning to school, with her health SANDRA SKEMP Teaching in Bristol, she met her husband, Joe Stokes, and improved, she was determined to they had two children, Neil and Tom, moving to Eridge in East excel, and was top of her class by Christmas. Sussex. After Joe’s death in 1980, Susan brought up the two boys alone, working as a teacher as well as doing cooking With a scholarship to read Law at Somerville, Sandra continued and cleaning jobs until they were through school and off to to excel and was awarded a Congratulatory First. After university themselves. graduation, she won a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States and on her return, she became a Research Fellow At that point, Susan retired from teaching, and moved into local at Somerville for three years. She then saw a job for the politics, becoming a County Councillor in 1996. Four years later, Parliamentary Council advertised. At the bottom of the advert, she moved to Steyning and spent a happy twenty years there. in small print, it said ‘male applicants only’. Shelagh, Sandra’s Thinking about, and helping, others around her, especially those longstanding friend from Somerville, recalls that far from being less fortunate or experiencing hardship, always felt natural to put off by this, an incensed Sandra wrote to the Prime Minister her. A selection of the organisations she was engaged with, who arranged for her to have an interview. She duly got the job. often in a leading role, illustrates this: the Eridge Evening Guild, The Parliamentary Council is the body that drafts and produces Eridge PTA, Rotherfield Parish Council, Rotherfield School PTA, laws following them being agreed by both houses of parliament. East Sussex County Council, the Liberal Democrats, Steyning A streamlined method of doing this had been developed using Museum, Meals on Wheels, Ashdown Forest conservators, the an early computer programme in Scotland, but Sandra knew WI, the University of the 3rd Age. she could better this, and she did. The programme she wrote, As her son, Tom, comments, being community minded came to having taught herself computer programming, ran to 400 his mother like breathing. She always saw the good in people. pages, and did indeed make the Parliamentary Council’s work She believed in fairness and in helping people less fortunate and considerably more efficient and cheaper. She was – again, she used the combination of her formidable intelligence, energy perhaps unsurprisingly - awarded a CB (Commander of and empathy to do that. 56