Bertha Phillpotts - Biography

Biography

Bertha Phillpotts was born in Bedford on 25th October 1877. Her father, James Surtees Phillpotts (1839-1930), was headmaster of Bedford School and instrumental in turning it from a relatively obscure grammar school to a top-ranking public school. Her mother, Marian Hadfield Phillpotts née Cordery (1843-1925), was a competent linguist. Bertha was educated at home before going to the University of Cambridge. She studied medieval and modern languages, Old Norse and Celtic at Girton College between 1898 and 1902, and then travelled to Iceland and Copenhagen as a research student. She worked as a librarian at Girton College from 1906 to 1909, and in 1913 she became the first Lady Carlisle Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.

She became the Mistress of Girton College in 1922, succeeding Katharine Jex-Blake (1860-1951) who happened to be her first cousin (the daughter of her mother's sister Henrietta Cordery and Thomas Jex-Blake, sometime Headmaster of Rugby School). She held this post until 1925 when she resigned in order to look after her father, who by then had retired to Tunbridge Wells, after the death of her mother. However she was elected to a research fellowship and continued to be an active Fellow of the college, commuting between Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge in her own car.

From 1926 until her death in 1932 she was director of Scandinavian studies and university lecturer at Girton college. Her research included translations of old Icelandic sagas and studies on the influence of Old Norse and Icelandic on the English language.