Helena Mennie Shire, 1912-1991

Olive Fraser Olive Fraser was born in Torry, Aberdeen, on 20 Jan 1909, the daughter of Roderick and Elizabeth Fraser. Her parents emigrated to Australia when she was still an infant and she was brought up in Nairn, by her great-aunt, Ann Maria Jeans, who owned a lodging house in the town. She was educated in Nairn and at Aberdeen University, from where she graduated MA with honours in English in 1931. After graduation, she received a Scottish University scholarship to continue her studies in Cambridge, but chose to return to Nairn for 2 years, before taking up her place at Girton College, Cambridge in 1933. During her time there she began to display the first signs of mental illness which afflicted her for the remainder of her life, jeopardising her success at the college and affecting her ability subsequently to gain and hold down steady employment. During her time at Aberdeen she had already gained a strong reputation and won several awards for her poetry, and, despite other difficulties, at Cambridge she became the first woman to receive the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse, in Spring 1935. Her later life was characterised by many short periods of employment, including war service, and intermittent periods spent in hospitals in England and Scotland. She continued to write throughout her life, awarded with occasional publication and upwards of 20 literary prizes or medals, but most of her work remained unpublished and largely unknown until after her death, in Aberdeen, on 9 Dec 1977. A fuller account of her life is given in The Wrong Music: The Poems of Olive Fraser (1909 - 1977), ed. by Helena M. Shire (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1989).

Helena Mennie Shire Helena Mary Mennie was born in Aberdeen on 21 June 1912. She was educated at the Aberdeen High School for Girls, gaining the Dux medal in 1929, and at the University of Aberdeen, graduating with First Class Honours in English Literature and Language in 1933. After taking a First in Part II of the English Tripos in 1935 at Newnham College, Cambridge, she continued her studies there over the next two years, undertaking a special study of broadside ballads of the seventeenth century, focusing particularly on the Bedlam Ballads . In 1936 she married Edward Shire, a physicist and Fellow of King's College, and settled in Cambridge, where they had three children. She taught at Cambridge and London, and has written and published many books, primarily on the music and early poetry of Scotland. She died on 16 Nov 1991.

Over the final decade of her life, Helena Mennie Shire undertook a major project as a memorial to Olive Fraser (1909 - 1977), a friend of Aberdeen and Newnham days. As a result of her work a short volume of Olive Fraser's poems was published in 1981 by Aberdeen University Press as The Pure Account, followed by a second larger volume, The Wrong Music (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1989). For further details about the life and career of Helena Mennie Shire see GB 231 MS 3407.

From the guide to the Papers of Olive Fraser, 1920s - 1970s, (University of Aberdeen)