Hester Adrian, Baroness Adrian

Did You Know?

• Her mother, Dame Ellen Pinsent, was a social reformer and novelist.
• Both of her brothers died in World War I when she was a teenager.
• She graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, with second-class honours in modern history.

Career

Adrian lived in Cambridge as the wife of a professor and Master of Trinity College, and was a social hostess welcoming distinguished guests. She volunteered in the Cambridge community, becoming a justice of the peace in 1936. During World War II, she worked for the Women's Voluntary Service as a billeting officer. After the war, she chaired the juvenile panel of Cambridge magistrates' courts from 1949 to 1958. She joined the management committee of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and became president of the Howard League for Penal Reform in 1959. She was honorary secretary of the Cambridgeshire Mental Welfare Association from 1924 to 1934 and vice-chair of the National Association of Mental Health. The Hester Adrian Research Centre at the University of Manchester was established in 1968 to research psychological and educational factors affecting mentally handicapped children and adults.

Personal life

Hester Pinsent married Edgar Douglas Adrian on 14 June 1923. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1932 and was President of the Royal Society from 1950 to 1955. They had three children: Anne Pinsent Adrian, Richard Hume Adrian, and Jennet Adrian. In 1942, she injured her leg badly when a rock crushed it; the leg was amputated above the knee, and she used a prosthetic leg thereafter. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1965. She died at her Cambridge home in 1966.