SIBILLE FORD

Sybille Ormston Ford (born 1874) was a first class student of Newnham College, somewhat unusually, taking ‘Botany & Zoology’ in Part II of the Tripos (1899). Although her post-graduate studies were botanical, she was in 1901-02 a teaching assistant in Animal Morphology at the Balfour Laboratory. Like her classmate, Gertrude Crewdson, she was a Quaker.

Her family’s roots were in Leeds, although she grew up in Bentham, about 15 miles northeast of Lancaster, where her father managed the Ford Ayrton silk mill. In spite of being relatively wealthy, the family’s Quaker faith led them to be exceptionally caring employers. Ford’s aunt was Isabella Ormston Ford (1855-1924) a social reformer and suffragist; among her distinctions, Isabella was the first woman to speak at a conference of the Labour Representation Committee (which became the British Labour Party).

After ‘graduating’, Sybille Ford was the recipient of a Bathurst Studentship (1900-02), her research focusing on the morphology of ancient and modern ferns and leading to two papers in the Annals of Botany, and one in the Transactions of the Linnean Society. She was then the co-author of a major review of the Araucariaceae, an ancient family of conifers that includes the well-known Monkey Puzzle Tree. The review was published in the prestigious Transactions of the Royal Society (1906), the first author and mentor for most of her studies in Cambridge being Albert Charles Seward FRS.  It is quite possible that there was a connection between the Ford and the Seward families that pre-dated Cambridge for Seward was born and educated in Lancaster. His family too were in business, and famous throughout the area for the stained-glass windows they manufactured for churches and municipal buildings. If nothing else, Sybille Ford must have felt comfortable being guided by a fellow north-westerner.

AC Seward, who would succeed Harry Marshall Ward as Professor of Botany in Cambridge when the former died in 1906, attributed his interest in extinct plants to his having attended at an early age a series of extension lectures given by William Crawford Williamson, Professor of Botany at Owens College, Manchester. From 1883 to 1886, Marshall Ward had been, first, a Bishop Berkeley Fellow, then a Demonstrator and Assistant Lecturer in Crawford’s Department at Owens. The second of Ford’s two papers in the Annals (1904) reveals that the work was started in Cambridge but completed at Owens College, where she was a Robert Platt Research Scholar. Williamson was by then dead, but could Marshall Ward have used other of his connections at Owens to help Ford secure the Scholarship? Quite possibly.

It appears that a promising career lay ahead for Sibille Ford but, apart from her having gained a BA degree from Trinity College, Dublin in 1906, her trail goes cold until 1918-20 when she is recorded as been part of the Friends Relief Mission in the Bar-le-Duc, Sermaize, Verdun area. She may also have worked for her local Relief Committee assisting Belgian refugees arriving in Britain.

Sibille Ford does not appear to have married, or to have had children. The last we know of her is that she died in Grange-Over-Sands, Cumbria, in 1932, and that she rests in the Friends Burial Ground in Bentham.