Funeral Address by Haruko Fukuda
St. Peter's Church, Limpsfield, Thursday 13th January 2011

It is a very great privilege that I have been asked to talk about Robin.

Robin, Auntie Robin, Miss Hammond: she was all of those to me for 46 years, just short of half a century. I first met her in the autumn of 1964 when I went up for interview to New Hall. Her first words surprised me: ‘Why don't you read English?' I had applied to read History. Knowing that she was the English don, I quickly thought of a diplomatic answer: ‘I only came to England two years ago and my English vocabulary might not be adequate to cope with English Literature.' She didn't change her expression and just said ‘Ye-es... you had some good instances in your essays... you can always change subjects once you are here...' As I had never expected to get in, I came away thinking what a nice person she was. I went up to read History anyway, so Miss Hammond was my Tutor, not my Director of Studies.

She was Auntie Robin because she was my friends Caro and Liz Barker Bennett's aunt. At another unnerving moment early in that interview she came straight out and said ‘I am on the Board of Governors of Channing, and Lizzie Barker Bennett is my niece.' I said I would be seeing Caro later on. She smiled and said ‘Ye-es. That will be nice.' I am sure she thought that connection would put me at ease, but sitting timidly and nervous I wondered whether she knew more about me than I had assumed for a first encounter. She had been a pupil of Miss Gwyneth Lloyd Thomas, a Life Fellow of Girton and another scholar of seventeenth century English literature, and my headmistress at Channing.

Caro was already up at New Hall and gave me coffee after lunch with other old girls from Channing in her room under the Library in the new building in Buckingham Road. A year later, Liz came up to read History, but in the Hammond tradition she immediately changed her subject to English. And she became my closest friend. These connections, though unknown to me at that first meeting, undoubtedly came to enhance my own friendship with Miss Hammond. So whenever I was talking to Liz, Miss Hammond was Auntie Robin. I remember Liz planning meals- what else?- when her parents were coming to stay with Auntie Robin. Smoked eel from Adams's in Trinity Lane used to make a frequent appearance at these, being brought uphill strung around the handlebars of Lizzie's bicycle, as did scrambled eggs with smoked salmon.

Miss Hammond's room, always with a large dried flower arrangement of very faded colours, almost white, had the warmth of her personality pervading each and every chosen object, creating a wonderfully infectious atmosphere. She sat in her low-slung Victorian armchair, often with Smokey, her cat, in attendance, surrounded by numerous paintings. Some of the watercolours were by her aunt, Aunt Edith. The general tone of the room was soft-coloured but well textured, with of course many well-thumbed books ancient and modern. The well-chosen mixture of antique and modern furniture gave an attractive patina to the room. It was what I might generally classify as Modern British aesthetic, with paintings by Edward Lear, Edward Bawden and the like, gentle and homely and very English.

She was born in Oxted, Surrey, the younger daughter of Robert and Madeleine Hammond. Her father was a consulting electrical engineer. Having already been awarded the DSO, he was killed in 1917 as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Fusiliers when Robin was only three years old. On hearing the news she sat on the staircase and said ‘The Germans have kill't my father!' Her mother was the daughter of one George Kent who was born in 1806, and who had a very large family, with two wives and twenty-two children. He also had an international engineering company; Robin was his last grandchild.

Her mother had Multiple Sclerosis and it was for the survival of the mother and child that the newly-born Robin was named Hope. This was 1914, when Britain went to war with Germany, and Hope was a name that expressed the preoccupations of that generation. She was obviously a clever, even precocious girl from her early childhood. She remembered asking her teacher on her first day at primary school, in Detillens Lane just round the corner from this church, ‘Are you being ironical?' One day when she hadn't done her geography prep she wondered momentarily, walking to school from Broadham Green past the watermill, whether to throw herself into the millrace - but decided she could finesse it. (So she well understood how her students at Cambridge felt when they hadn't done their essays!) She went on to school at Bedales but hated it and stayed there only one term. She quickly discovered that if she hid in the rhododendron bushes she could avoid all intimidating school activity, only emerging for gym lessons. She was happy when they were all sent home during an outbreak of typhoid. Her next school, the Crobam Hurst School, where she was a weekly boarder, was a much happier experience. Her whole life centred on Cambridge and her home at Oxted, with short spells in Paris and in London, where she owned a flat near Earls Court until she retired, when she went back to live near her old home and her sister in Oxted.

She first went up to Girton in 1934. She remembered being handed the telegram saying ‘MINOR AWARD OFFERED STOP GIRTON' as one of the best moments in her life. She got a First in English in 1937. That was long before Firsts were dumbed down and a First then was a life-enhancing achievement. She spent the next two years at the Sorbonne, then returned to Girton in 1940 to start on her doctorate. During the war between 1941 and 43 she worked at the Board of Trade in charge of the allocation of Wood Wool, a vital packing material, the polystyrene of yesteryear. She in fact had wanted to join SOE, the Special Operations Executive, but wasn't accepted. Her French would have come in useful and she thought it might have been rather more exciting. She envied her friend Rosemary Syfret who was in M15.

Her doctoral thesis was entitled ‘The Sermon as Persuasion in Late Seventeenth Century France and England': Lancelot Andrewes and his contemporaries were her subjects. She was teaching at Queen Mary College, London from 1949 to 1954. In that year New Hall was founded and she applied for the position of Tutor. She was appointed, with Rosemary Murray, Tutor in Charge. Life at the Hermitage in Silver Street is not something I know first-hand, but I have heard many special recollections of her initiative and enormous personal resources meeting the challenges of making it a happy life in the fledgling college. Miss Murray and Robin were a great partnership of complementary personalities and they became lifelong friends. I am sure it was there that her values and ethos became those of New Hall, which were carried over to the new building that was to be the college on its present site.

She had lectured on the seventeenth century in the English Faculty, but her principal thrust in her academic vocation was in teaching. She devoted her entire professional life to this, with evident consummate success. She was Tutor and Senior Tutor for twenty years and on retirement elected Emeritus Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge. It must have been a tremendous satisfaction to her that she and Miss Murray saw through the progress and development of the college from its inception to its gaining full college status and the Royal Charter as New Hall in the University of Cambridge in 1974. That was surely the greatest achievement of her professional career and a most remarkable contribution to Cambridge and the academic life of this country.

In the new building, she had a flat on the first floor in the middle of what is now called Orchard Court. Visitors often wondered why a long branch reached right to her window: but she had a very original idea that Smokey should have its own front door in and out of her room. She also had a dashing open Alfa Romeo car. She would be seen speeding down Castle Hill with the top down; but in the Long Vac she went in it with her lifelong friend from Girton, Rosemary Syfret, to the Dolomites for walking holidays. Her cars were very special. Charlie Barker Bennett has told me that she first bought in 1948 a four-and-a-half-litre vintage Bentley, and this was followed by an Allard. About the time she started at New Hall she graduated to a Jaguar XK14O, but after this she had more modest but still sporty Alfas. Clearly, from the days of favouring gym lessons at Bedales on, she was never meant to be a blue-stocking, but became a uniquely stylish don.

In those days she was definitely Miss Hammond to me. She was my Tutor, to whom I went to get my Absits and Exeats, and for occasional chats. But I did once try to get back to her about changing my subject. I thought it might be nice to change from History to Fine Art. After all she had said to me at the interview that I could change once I was up. But she wasn't very cooperative. She said History was a serious, proper subject but History of Art was somewhat less rigorous. When I protested, she asked me, knowing well what my answer would be, if I could read nineteenth-century German. I had to confess I couldn't. So that was that and I carried on with History which of course I have never regretted. That decision made for me by Miss Hammond gave me a lifelong interest in history.

Later, as we both got older, it felt slightly odd to be calling her Miss Hammond, or indeed Auntie Robin except with Liz and Caro, so I did start to call her Robin. Soon after she retired, she was asked in an interview in The Dolphin, the New Hall magazine, what she was doing in her retirement. She characteristically replied that she was ‘getting on with living'. Whenever I felt uncertain of direction I always remembered those words. She was to me an inspiration in how to live. Her wide-ranging interests, literature, people, dogs, gardening, art, the world around her, all provided for her what make our lives so fascinating. She wrote to her professor at the Sorbonne that her doctoral thesis was on the ‘Imagerie' of seventeenth century sermons in France and England. That word ‘Imagery' gives many clues to her personality. She favoured originality of thought and expression. Her speech was full of imagery, words leading to imagination and ideas- it was quite unique, and her letters always contained- with a number of dashes- that essential joy in linking ideas that somehow unexpectedly came together. In that sense she was a true intellectual. Never censorious but with a naturally affectionate nature, always finding better and kinder thoughts, she was always sure of her values. Honest, courageous, forthright, true to herself and her convictions, she was all of those things. She taught us above all the correct scale of values. And that was so until the very end: she was clear-minded to the day she died.

All her students loved her as she had that gift of being able to find the right wavelengths with people- in the modem parlance, ‘to connect'- so that they felt she was on their side. She was a good judge of character and very perceptive. Behind her calm and cheerful exterior was a deeply caring and thoughtful personality- all creatures blameless were instantly forgiven. (I dare say most of those in the animal kingdom came into this category-as well as children.) Open-minded, she was never a reactionary. She kept up with the changing social mores and modem thinking, embracing the unconventional. Thus she said to me that she thought New Hall should go co-ed in order to protect its academic standing and attract the highest calibre of students. She cared deeply about scholarship, academic integrity, and logical thinking. For myself, she influenced me profoundly in the way I learnt to look at and think about things- a kind of three dimensional thinking with wider perspectives. How much that added to my enjoyment of life.

She loved and cared about New Hall very much. It gave her a particular delight to unveil a plaque in 2004 on the site of the old Hermitage in Silver Street, marking the birthplace of New Hall in the presence of her students from those years; it was poignant that her fellow soldier at the Hermitage, Dame Rosemary Murray, died the very next day. Some years earlier she was much pleased for New Hall when I was asked to chair its newly formed Development Board. Recently, she was saddened when she heard that the college's name was to be changed, and wrote to the Privy Council to correct any misunderstandings that might have arisen.

When she retired in 1974, aged sixty, Robin looked for a house with, I remember her saying, at least an acre of garden, near Oxted. She bought an Arts & Crafts house, a mediaeval revival- more like Girton than New Hall perhaps- Essington Priors, down a narrow and wooded lane near Limpsfield, with the garden leading into a long and sloping meadow, surrounded by woods. She shared it with her best friend, Rosemary Syfret, daughter of an Admiral who also retired the same year from Somerville at Oxford. Rosemary was almost a member of the family. I saw them together many times at Neb House, the Barker Bennett home in Oxted when they were staying.

When Ruth, her elder sister, died I wrote to Robin about Ruth and her kindnesses to me and about life at Neb House. Robin wrote me a long letter back in which she described what Neb House had meant to her. It was obvious that the death of her elder sister, nine years older, who had been the most central relationship of her life and provided that essential anchor, was the saddest moment of her life. Neb House was built by their aunt, Aunt Linda, in the 1920s in the Queen Anne style and when she died during the war it became the home of Ruth's family. If Robin's rooms at New Hall or Essington had their special character and atmosphere, they were the subsidiaries of the headquarters at Neb House: harmony of gentle colours, plants, flowers and paintings by similar, if not the same artists, and the dried flowers. The wonderfully productive kitchen garden beautifully tended by Robin's brother-in-law provided the material for the successive delicious meals created for the yellow dining room. The flowers in the well-landscaped garden and the lovely light interior of the house combined to provide the overwhelmingly joyful atmosphere of the home.

Robin looked after Rosemary tirelessly in her last illness. Essington Priors, like her room at New Hall, was hallmarked with her taste. We went to visit her to talk and to lunch together. Her conversations were always engaging with amusing illustrative metaphors. She always had dogs in the house- at least one but until recently two- to which she was passionately devoted. Woody, her last little dog, survived her and Robin would be relieved to know that in its sorrow it has been given a new home with Liz and her dogs Jura and Stalky at Chute. Robin told me they decided not to have a cat because they wanted to feed the birds. She gardened with great skill and that was not least an inspiration for my garden in Suffolk. On the way back in my car from the party when Lizzie married Douglas, we were discussing the design of my new rose border: it was she who suggested under-planting with irises with variegated leaves. Those irises are still there gracing my rose garden.

It wouldn't be right to end without mentioning some endearing traits of her personality. She was a lady scholar of period style- we associate her with champagne cocktails, gin and French, delicious meals with well chosen wines, and brandy afterwards. Only a few years ago when we went out to lunch at her favourite nearby restaurant, she told me of her regular visits to her butcher to buy some meat for the foxes which came to visit each evening. She ignored some odd looks from the other customers at her butcher's; she said her butcher was on her side. More than this she had a weekly standing order with the baker for steak and kidney pies for the foxes until she became too frail to go out at night to feed them. Liz told me recently when Robin looked frail and failing, on being asked if she could manage just a little plain boiled chicken for lunch she replied how much more delicious it would be with mayonnaise. In her ninety-seventh year she was still on a diet of large gin and tonics before lunch and two double whiskies before dinner.

It was wonderful for her that latterly she found in Kay Russell a true and loving friend. Kay looked after her devotedly as she became increasingly frail and made it possible for her to stay at home until she died. As with many others Robin found a wavelength with Kay that made them devoted friends. Kay told Liz how much she enjoyed doing the crossword puzzles with Robin, when she learnt so much. That is totally believable to all those who knew Robin but how much more fun it was for Robin to do it with her young and dear friend. How wonderful it was for Robin that Kay was with her when she died that evening just before last Christmas. Together with Sally, Charlie, Caro and Liz all of us who loved Robin will be forever grateful to Kay for making her happy in her last days.

Robin would have been so pleased that so many of us came to celebrate her life in this lovely ancient church just round the corner from where she first went to school.

Miss Haruko Fukuda OBE FRSA HonDSc (1965)