Alice Carthew, Hannah Floretta Cohen, Winifred Dakyns & Blanche Athena Clough
The Spencelayh painting hanging in 2 Audley Square tells a story.
In 1936, UWC member Hannah Floretta Cohen commissioned a portrait to mark the Club’s 50th anniversary. She wanted to record the four longest-serving Committee members of the time — women who had not merely attended the Club, but built it, funded it, and in three cases, purchased the very building it occupies today.
The painter was Charles Spencelayh (1865–1958), a distinguished British portrait and genre painter. He captured the Library at 2 Audley Square with such fidelity that members say it remains recognisable in detail today. Standing quietly in the background, by the Library door, is the then Club Secretary, Miss Allison.
The four women depicted are, left to right:
Alice Grace Elizabeth Carthew (1867–1940)
Alice Grace Elizabeth Carthew joined the Committee in 1904 and served in almost every capacity the Club offered — Honorary Secretary, Librarian, Trustee. She was one of the three Trustees in whose names the purchase of 2 Audley Square was ratified in 1921. The Library she is depicted sitting in is, in every sense, a room she helped to create and secure.
Hannah Floretta Cohen (1875–1946)
Hannah Floretta Cohen served as Honorary Secretary and then Joint Honorary Treasurer for 36 years, providing loans to the Club in difficult times and acting as one of the three Trustees who purchased Audley Square in 1921. The painting itself was her gift — a rare and rather lovely act of record-keeping in which the donor chose to share the frame with the women who had built something alongside her.
Winifred Dakyns CBE (1875–1960)
Winifred Dakyns CBE joined the Club in 1913 and served as Honorary Secretary before resigning to take on her war work — as Assistant Director of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, designer of the WRNS uniform (now preserved in the Imperial War Museum), and recipient of the CBE in 1919. She returned to the Club after the war and continued in post for many years.
Blanche Athena Clough (1861–1960)
Blanche Athena Clough was a member from the Club’s very inception, Joint Honorary Treasurer for over two decades, and one of the three Trustees who ratified the purchase of Audley Square in 1921. She was the niece of Anne Jemima Clough, founding Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge — and went on to become Principal of Newnham herself, from 1920 to 1923. She lived to the age of 99.
Three of the four women in this painting are among the Trustees who purchased 2 Audley Square. They are painted sitting in the building they bought, in the Library they helped to create, by an artist commissioned by one of their own number. It is, in its quiet way, one of the most significant objects in the Club’s history.
This piece is part of the University Women’s Club’s 140th anniversary series. Members can read the full archival account of these women in the Members’ Portal.