I set off for the University in 1923, my pigtails coiled over my ears like headphones (as was the fashion of the day). The significance of what I was doing completely escaped me. It simply never occurred to me to ask questions about how the University came to exist in what was, at that time, the improbable setting of a commercial city. Nor how I as a young woman came to be there, all set to acquire a degree with a view to embarking on an independent career of my own. It is only now I realise that I was the unsuspecting beneficiary of a most remarkable coming-together of the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Without the solid base of the moral commitment of Liverpool's philanthropic tradition, the University would never have come into being. Without the University, that commitment would never have blossomed into the magical vision of the urban city as the finest flower of the Industrial Revolution. Without the stimulus and the opportunity offered by these two together, the passionate hunger of women to play their part in the society in which they found themselves might well have run into the sands of frustration.