Last month I was invited to talk to the Mill Road History Society about the life and work of Lettice Ramsey. From 1932-1978 she was one half of the celebrated photographic team, Ramsey & Muspratt, and their portraits of the Bloomsbury group and Cambridge spies are still widely reproduced today. While her professional partner Helen Muspratt expanded their business in Oxford, Ramsey worked in Cambridge until the late 1970s and was described as ‘Cambridge’s First Lady’.

One of the nice things about giving this talk in Cambridge was hearing others’ personal memories of Lettice Ramsey, and seeing delightful family photographs taken by her that had been carefully preserved. I am very grateful to everyone who got in touch with me to share their stories and images. There are links to my previous posts about Lettice Ramsey here, and below is a video of my talk on 11 October 2022.

My thanks to the Mill Road History Society and to the Cambridgeshire Collection for its archives; to Peter Lofts whose archival website of Ramsey & Muspratt’s photographs is here, and to Jessica Sutcliffe for her excellent book Face: Shape and Angle, Helen Muspratt Photographer (MUP, 2016).