Talk: A Cambridge Photographer – Lettice Ramsey 1898-1985

This talk is about the remarkable life and work of Lettice Ramsey, who as a young widow in the early 1930s set up a photographic studio with her professional partner Helen Muspratt in Petty Cury, Cambridge. Ramsey & Muspratt became one of the most celebrated 20^th century photographers, and their portraits of the Bloomsbury group and 1930s Cambridge spies are still widely reproduced today. In 1938 Muspratt moved to Oxford and the studio continued in both university towns. In the 1950s and 1960s Lettice Ramsey took Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s wedding photographs (which they hated and kept hidden away) and travelled widely, including to Cambodia. She worked as a professional photographer almost until her death in 1985 and was described as ‘Cambridge’s First Lady’. Many Cambridge people will still have memories of her, and perhaps even some of her photographs.

Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and independent researcher based in Cambridge. Her reviews and essays are published in the Times Literary Supplement, History Today and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and she was awarded a Women’s History Network Independent Researcher fellowship for 2021-22.

A special request: If you have any images taken by Ramsey & Muspratt, or memories of Lettice Ramsey you would like to share, Ann would love to hear from you. Please contact admin@millroadhistory.org.uk or go to Ann’s ‘Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society’ blog here: https://akennedysmith.com/