Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw

Name: Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw (1912 – 2014)

Role: Chairman of the Joint Committee and Court

About: Dame Kathleen is recognised as one of the great driving forces behind the creation of the RNCM. In fact, as the late Michael Kennedy recalled in his book Music Enriches All – The Royal Northern College of Music: the First Twenty-One Years, she prevented the College building site from being disrupted by travellers just hours before work was due to commence: ‘The bulldozers were due to move on to the site on a Monday morning. The Chairman of the Joint Committee, Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, drove there in her white Rover from her home in Didsbury several times during the day on the Sunday. Convinced that there was a real risk of occupation, she drove round and round the site through the night. At 8.30am the work began.’

Did you know? In 1921, aged eight, Dame Kathleen was diagnosed almost completely deaf. Twelve years later, despite this profound disability, she graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, on path to becoming one of Britain’s leading mathematicians, lecturing at the University of Manchester after the Second World War and writing in excess of 25 papers on the subject.