Marjory Stephenson, 1885 - 1948

Abstract

Marjory Stephenson was born on 24 January 1885 at Burwell, a village ten miles out of Cambridge on the Newmarket Road. Her father was Robert Stephenson, her mother was Elizabeth Rogers of Newmarket. The Stephenson family had farmed in the fenland for many years. Marjory Stephenson’s great grandfather had been a trainer of race-horses in the eighteenth century when the training grounds were outside the town in the direction of West Wratten. His training records were preserved in the hands of a distant relative and they show that he was a man of education. Not much is known of her grandfather except that he was a successful farmer and a man of some substance. Marjory Stephenson’s father, Robert Stephenson, inherited land from his father and bought more. The progress and stir of'the nineteenth century, however, led him farther afield and he took a great interest in the affairs of the county. Indeed, he appears to have been a public-spirited man of an excellent type. Public business interested him and he was for a time chairman of the Newmarket Gas Company; he also became chairman of the Cambridge County Council and held this position when the Education Act of 1902 came into operation. His active concern in education showed itself in his successful efforts to get local support towards starting the Cambridge University School of Agriculture and he took part in the founding of the Cambridge County Secondary School for boys. It was for these services to education that Cambridge University gave him an honorary M.A. degree in 1903. It was an honour he greatly prized, chiefly perhaps because it gave him access to the University Library. He made full use of this opportunity to the end of his life. He lived to be eighty and died in 1929.