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DR HELEN MURIEL HUDSON

by
11 January 2007

Students’ friend: Dr Hudson

Students’ friend: Dr Hudson

A correspondent writes:
DR HELEN HUDSON, who died on 27 January, aged 87, was the youngest child and only daughter of the Revd Charles and Helen Maud Hudson. She attended Berwick-on-Tweed and later Morpeth High Schools for Girls from 1929 to 1937, and then studied English language and literature at St Mary’s College, Durham, where she obtained a BA, a teaching diploma, and later an MA.

She taught English at Urmston-Flixton in Lancashire, and in Brentford and Hexham during the Second World War. In 1948, she started an influential period of her life, teaching at the Collège Moderne de Jeunes Filles in Clermont Ferrand, France.

From 1949 to 1953, she was Lectrice d’Anglais at Dijon University, France, and Teacher of English at the Franco-British-American Institute there. In 1953, she was awarded a doctorate in Comparative Literature by that university. She then returned to the UK, where she took up the posts of Tutor, then Senior Tutor and Lecturer in English, at St Mary’s College, Durham. It was here that she began to develop the pastoral side of her work with students.

This interest continued when she was appointed Tutor to Women Students at King’s College, London, in 1959. There she championed the cause of equal treatment of women students, and she became Dean of Students (both women and men) in 1973, until her retirement in 1982.

During this period, she exchanged jobs with her counterpart at the University of Oregon, in the United States, for a semester. Her commitment to this pastoral work did not stop with her retirement, and she worked for four years, until 1986, as Director of Studies at St Catherine’s Foundation at Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. A history of the Lodge by Dr Hudson was published in 1989, and republished in 1997.

Helen was not prepared to stop working, and undertook a research fellowship at the Ecumenical Studies Centre at Tantur, near Jerusalem, in 1987. After her return to this country, she became Patron of the King’s College London Association, a post from which she retired only in 2005. She was succeeded in it by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Helen outlived her three brothers, lived in Putney, and attended Fulham Parish Church regularly.

Michael Morpurgo adds: The essentially good and kind people are very rare. Helen Hudson was one. As a child, I knew her only as an aunt I did not see very often, just at occasional family gatherings, usually funerals; and, when I did see her, I found her rather forbidding. I think this was because she always seemed to have her eye on me. It wasn’t a threatening look: simply a knowing one. I felt she knew my game. She unnerved me; so I kept my distance.

It was at the end of my childhood, my first childhood anyway, that we got to know one another a lot better. My early steps in adult life had taken me down some false trails. It was an act of great kindness and faith on Helen’s part that she set me right, helped me on my way when I needed it most, when plenty of others had given me up as a helpless case.

Hearing of my floundering attempts to get into university, when she was Dean of Students at King’s College, London, she invited me to King’s, and suggested that a general degree (my A levels were distinctly below par) might be a good option. “See Dr Landers,” she said. “Expect no favours.” I had my interview with Dr Landers, and was accepted on to the course. There were no favours, but there had been a guiding hand.

I saw Dr Hudson off and on in the corridors over my years at King’s. She was always kind, always concerned. We would have cups of tea in her office and chat. She knew that I was not the most academic of students, that it was a struggle. When it came close to finals, and because I lived out of London at the time, she offered me a room in her flat on Putney Hill for several weeks, so I could concentrate on revision, away from my young family. She looked after me like a mother, fed me, and woke me up on exam morning with a cup of tea.

In spite of all her support, I got a poor degree. I feared her disapproval and displeasure. There was none.

In the years that followed, we saw one another only intermittently, but we kept in touch. She was there at the ceremony 35 years later when King’s, London, made me a Fellow of the college. We lunched together. She still had that knowing look, but I was no longer nervous of it; for I now knew the devotion and concern behind it.

She wanted only the best for other people, for the college she served so well for so many years, for her students, and also for her extended family. Helen was a kind friend who made a huge difference to many lives.

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