British Council scholars

This newspaper photograph from October 1949 is among papers relating to Marjorie Bean, the first Black female Supervisor of Schools and appointee to the Bermuda Legislative Council.

As an undergraduate she attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, America’s oldest historically Black university. She followed this with post-graduate studies at Columbia, NY, and then took up various teaching positions in Bermuda.

In 1945 Marjorie was awarded a British Council scholarship to study for her Teacher’s Diploma at the University of London Institute of Education. She followed this with two years’ post-graduate study.

In October 1948 Marjorie returned to her former teaching post in the Berkeley Institute in Pembroke, Bermuda, and the following year she was appointed Supervisor of Schools. Marjorie was awarded an MBE in 1968, an OBE in 1981, and then a Damehood in 1995 for services to education.

This photograph of Gibraltarian singer Louis Gomila was attached to his application for a British Council scholarship in 1946. He spelled his name ‘Louis’ on the form but was also known as ‘Luis’, particularly in Gibraltar.

Louis and his mother were evacuated from Gibraltar to the UK in 1940 when he was just 16. By 1942 he was studying singing in London where his teachers included Alfred Piccaver, the British-American tenor, and Jean Lloyd Webber, musician and teacher, and later the mother of Andrew and Julian.

After the war Louis’ mother returned to Gibraltar and Jean Lloyd Webber took on the role of his unofficial guardian as well as teacher. She was a very enthusiastic supporter and his file includes a number of letters from her in support of his scholarship application.

Louis’ British Council scholarship ran for two years from 1946 to 1948.

This newspaper cutting shows Isabel Do Prado, a British Council scholar from Brazil who studied English Language and Literature at Bedford College for women from 1939.

Bedford was one of seven London colleges evacuated to Cambridge during the war, giving Isabel the opportunity to learn from Cambridge academics specialising in the medieval literature that interested her.

Isabel was the first woman to be hired by the BBC’s Brazilian Service where she made broadcasts in Portuguese. In 1942 she was invited to meet with the MP Mavis Constance Tate who was planning to visit South America to lecture on the part played by women in the war effort.

A memo in Isabel’s file describes her as ‘a leading feminist and educationalist’ who was keen to establish women’s organisations similar to the WAAF and WRNS in Brazil, so that they could be prepared in the event of war being declared with Germany.

This letter from the Ministry of Information to the British Council is about Professor Yeh Chuen-Chien (also known as Yeh Chun-Chan and Ye Junjian).

Chuen-Chien was taught at Wuhan University by Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell, who he described as 'my English teacher and great friend'.

In 1944 Chuen-Chien was invited by the Ministry of Information and the BBC to speak about the Chinese efforts against the Japanese invasion. He then studied English Literature at King’s College and became friendly with members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Chuen-Chien wrote a trilogy, Quiet are the Mountains, which he mentions in an essay we hold as being in progress. The first book The Mountain Village was written in English while he was at Cambridge and published in 1947. The next two books, The Open Fields and A Distant Journey, were written in Chinese and published much later in 1984 and 1986.

This photograph of 18-year-old Maryann Kissaun was attached to her British Council scholarship application in 1946. The same year, Maryann arrived in London to begin studying at the Royal College of Music.

Accommodation was arranged for her in a convent, but correspondence in her file says 'the food is so poor and unappetizing that she takes most of her meals at a Lyon’s Help Yourself with the result that she has lost a considerable amount of weight'.

One of Maryann’s tutors, Thomas Percival Fielden, wrote that she 'is a most promising musician' and that she had improved 'due not only to her talent, but to real industry and application'.

Maryann’s scholarship was extended for an additional two years, and she later went on to have a successful career as a concert pianist and teacher. In 2010 she was awarded the Tribute of the Maltese Republic for her contribution to Maltese culture.

This letter is from the British Council Scottish office to a London colleague, confirming that Kenneth Onwuka Dike (pronounced Diké) has been recommended for a further scholarship.

As the attached newspaper cutting says, Kenneth was the first Nigerian student to graduate at Aberdeen University, obtaining a first-class honours degree in history.

One of his Aberdeen tutors wrote ‘he is not only well educated and highly intelligent, but also universally popular – witness the fact that in his first year at University he became President of two student Societies!’

Kenneth returned to Nigeria to teach at University College Ibadan, where he eventually became Vice Chancellor. He transformed the study of African history, advocating a more Africanist perspective, and is considered to be ‘the father of modern African historiography’.

In 1954 Kenneth founded the Nigerian National Archives.

This letter to the British Council explains that Mario Mormile, an Italian student at Bristol University has been interned. Mario and another Italian student, Luigi Del Duca, had arrived in the UK to study English language and literature in 1939.

On 10 June 1940 Italy declared war on the UK and this letter, written on 11 June, shows that there was swift action to detain those that were now considered enemy aliens.

A note on the file from Luigi’s college in Newcastle upon Tyne says 'I saw Del Duca the evening that Italy declared war. He had tried to get away on a coal boat, but there was a hitch about clearance. He was arrested by the police in the small hours of the next morning.'

Mario was released after only two days on the condition that he left for Italy.

Internees index cards in HO 396/287 show Luigi was held in Henderson Hall, Newcastle, but don’t show how long he was there.

This letter by Lady Isobel Cripps is among papers relating to British Council scholar Dr Elizabeth Tang.

Elizabeth began medical studies in the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London in 1944. Despite also caring for her young daughter, Elizabeth progressed rapidly, taking a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene in 1948.

A report from her tutor said ‘Mrs Tang’s work is outstandingly good. She is an exceptionally intelligent woman, who has much to give to her own people as a qualified medical woman.’

Widowed in 1947, Elizabeth moved to Hong Kong in 1949 where she practised at Queen Mary Hospital. She met and fell in love with an Australian journalist who was killed the following year in Korea.

Elizabeth wrote about this relationship in a best-selling novel, ‘A Many Splendoured Thing’ published in 1952 under her pen name Han Suyin. The book was made into a film in 1955.

This photograph shows Alvin Marriott, a Jamaican sculptor who studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts under a British Council scholarship from 1947 to 1949.

On the application form in his file, Alvin states that he had exhibited his work in Jamaica, and in 1944 had presented a bust of Franklin D Roosevelt to the American president himself.

Alvin later taught in the Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts, and following Jamaican Independence he was commissioned to create busts of leading figures such as Marcus Garvey, Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante.

In 1969 the Contemporary Jamaican Artists’ Association chose Alvin as their first Artist of the Year, and in 1970 the Institute of Jamaica awarded Alvin a gold Musgrave Medal.

In 1984, at the age of 81, and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Alvin sculpted a statue of Bob Marley, which stands in Celebrity Park in Kingston.

This image shows the application form for a British Council scholarship completed by Demitrios Kapetanakis in 1939.

Demitrios spent two years at Cambridge where one of his tutors was George ‘Dadie’ Rylands, a renowned theatre director and Shakespeare scholar. A letter from Rylands in the file describes Demitrios as ‘certainly gifted, sensitive, original and acute’.

By the time the scholarship ended, Greece was occupied by Nazi Germany. A letter in the file shows Demitrios was making arrangements to work for the Greek Ministry of Information in London in October 1941 while he finished his thesis.

Sadly, Demitrios was diagnosed with leukemia in 1942 and died in March 1944. He is buried in West Norwood cemetery.

In 1947 a collection of his poems and essays was published by John Lehmann under the title ‘Demitrios Capetanakis, a Greek Poet in England’ along with a tribute from Edith Sitwell.