ABSTRACT
Beryl Smalley, pioneer of the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, was born on 3 June 1905 at Cheadle in Derbyshire, her parents’ first child. There were to be three more children, a break during World War I, and then another two, but it was Beryl, the firstborn, who remained all her life a source of astonishment to her parents. Her father, Edgar, a successful Manchester businessman, dealt in cotton, but his chief passion was horses. (Smalley’s youngest brother, Richard, would later become the Grand National’s starter.) Her mother, Lilian (née Bowman), to whom she remained devoted until her death at the age of ninety-one, Beryl could sometimes shock—she turned up in Derbyshire in the 1930s in a most outrageous hat from Paris, a pillbox creation no less—but more often Beryl simply perplexed her. There really was, she would say, no need for Beryl to work so hard; it was quite unnecessary (and not what was expected) to go to Oxford. Dances, parties, and marriage were the plan. Smalley, never for an instant stuffy, took to both the dances and the parties, but marriage was not part of her horizon. Her family, their marriages, children, and grandchildren, were close to her all her life. As the oldest child she had her own share of parenting early on. She would take the younger ones for walks, write poetry for them, read to them, even, when scarlet fever made school impossible, teach them. The young Smalleys had a nurse but no governess; Beryl had everything in hand. Years later she would attribute her powers of concentration to those nursery years. She grew accustomed to doing her own homework surrounded by clamorous siblings, keeping them satisfied and in order by regular helpings of “yes” and “no.” As an established scholar in Oxford, she would punctuate her reading in the Bodleian by these habitual negative and affirmative utterances, much to the astonishment of others in the library.
