Buller, Amy Ernestine, 1891-1974

Amy Ernestine Buller was born in London on 9 November 1891. She was brought up in South Africa as a Baptist, returning to England in 1911. Soon after, she went to Germany to learn the language, and to complete matriculation for Birkbeck College, London, where she took her degree in 1917 and became an Anglo-Catholic. She joined the Student Christian Movement (SCM) after the First World War and was appointed organising secretary in 1921. Moving from Manchester to become a London secretary in 1922, Buller organised a great many conferences and retreats bringing people of different doctrines and nations together. In 1929, she was appointed with 3 others to lead the SCM. In 1931, however, she left the movement to become warden of a women's residential hall at the University of Liverpool. During the 1930s she organised a number of delegations of prominent British churchmen to Germany in a bid for peace and to understand Nazism: what she saw as a new religion but ultimately condemned. She compiled a series of her conversations with people she had met in Germany and her views on the importance of some kind of religion to young people which were published under the title: Darkness over Germany (Longman Green, 1943). Buller resigned from the University of Liverpool in 1942 and moved to London. Her time was taken up with plans to set up a new religious college. Initially, this was to be at the vacated precinct of the hospital of St. Katharine's, Regents Park. Her plans for a college at St Katharine's ran into difficulty both in terms of ethos and geographical issues and she had to abandon the location and search for another. After several other failures to a secure a site for her college, Buller was granted the use of Cumberland Lodge at Windsor Park after the death of its previous inhabitant, Lord Fitzalan. Buller wanted to retain the connection with St Katharine's, but the college had to remain separate from the original foundation. She decided to retain the same name, albeit with a different spelling, associated with St. Catharine, the Patron Saint of Philosophers. The name of the college changed in 1966 to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Foundation of St. Catharine's, Cumberland Lodge. The college was designed as a place where students could discuss important matters of life and society in a pleasant environment, being given intellectual stimulus in areas outside their normal academic studies. It was a Christian foundation, although non-Christian students were admitted, the religious aspect was always fundamental, although the intention was to make it unobtrusive. Amy Buller remained Honorary Warden at the college until 1966. She died in 1974, aged 83. (Taken largely from Walter James, A short account of Amy Buller and the founding of St. Catharine's Cumberland Lodge , printed privately (1979)).

From the guide to the St Catharine's Cumberland Lodge, 1925-1987, (Senate House Library, University of London)