Student of Engineering

23

Single

Vann Bridge Cottage, Fernhurst, West Sussex

NUWSS

Complies

Rachel Costelloe was the daughter of a barrister, Frank Costelloe, and his American wife, Mary Pearsall Smith. Always known as Ray, she was brought up largely by her grandmother, after her mother left for Italy, and her father died when she was 12 years old. Ray’s education was disrupted by frequent school moves, and her own lack of application, but she nonetheless studied Mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, gaining an Honours Pass. At school and university, Ray was close friends with Ellie Rendel, one of the granddaughters of Lady Jane Strachey, a leading suffragist. Suffrage became the cause that Ray was looking for in her life and she and Ellie devoted much of their time at Newnham to meetings and campaigns. Both marched on the NUWSS ‘Mud March’ in February 1907 and gained speaking and organizing practice holding small meetings during their summer holidays. In July 1908, the two women organized a Newnham Caravan under the aegis of the NUWSS, taking the suffrage message to rural areas in the North. When Ray’s mother took her on a ‘finishing’ trip to the US, she was disconcerted to find that Ellie Rendel joined them, and that Ray and Ellie were soon travelling around the Northern States with Anna Shaw, the President of the North American Women’s Suffrage Society. Ray took much of 1909 “off” to concentrate on her writing, but she was back in the thick of the suffrage campaign during the 1910 election, promoting suffrage petitions and supporting suffragist candidates in the East End of London. She travelled to the US in the spring of 1910, combining research with campaigning, before returning to study electrical engineering at Oxford. Through Easter 1911 and for a time, she lived with her aunt, Alys Russell (married to Bertrand Russell), at Vann Bridge Cottage (now Vann Bridge Close) in Fernhurst, and it is there that Ray appears in the 1911 census – listed as an engineering student. Alys was a suffragist herself and one hopes she took great satisfaction in the singularity of Ray’s occupation! Later in 1911, Ray married Oliver Strachey, with whom she had two children, as well as a step- daughter. Despite her domestic burdens – which included managing much of Oliver’s life and their precarious joint finances - Ray carried out a huge amount of campaigning work for women’s rights – from suffrage, to employment opportunities, to equal pay. She wrote, spoke, and broadcast prodigiously; worked for Nancy Astor MP, and headed up the Women’s Employment Federation from 1933 through to her early death in 1940. Ray Strachey is best known for her history of the women’s movement (‘The Cause’, 1928), but her ‘immense activity’ (according to Virginia Woolf) ranged much more broadly than that, encompassing three Parliamentary campaigns and the physical construction of two small ‘rammed earth’ cottages in the hills around Fernhurst, where she found peace from the incessant demands of children and committee work. Her contribution to the Women’s movement fully justifies Jennifer Holmes comment that “women of today owe her a great debt” - if only for Ray’s insistence that women could find ‘a source of happiness of great value’ in their work outside the home. Sources: Jennifer Holmes, A Working Woman: the remarkable life of Ray Strachey (2019); Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (1987). Contributed by Evelyn Cook (Independent researcher).