Helen Frances Newsome (1903-1992) was born in Clifton in 1903. After spending some years in secretarial work, including a short spell in the employ of the author and poet Walter de la Mare, she read French amd Spanish at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1930. She married the economist Alec T.K. Grant in the same year.
During the 1930s Grant combined an assistant-lectureship in Spanish at the University of Birmingham with tutorial work for Somerville and St Hilda's Colleges in Oxford. She made several visits to Spain, including one at the height of the Civil War. On the outbreak of World War II Grant joined the Foreign Research and Press Service, based at Balliol College, Oxford. She transferred to the BBC's Spanish Service in 1941. Although she enjoyed her work at Broadcasting House, Grant found it difficult to reconcile official respect for Spanish neutrality with her own dislike of the Franco regime. Her open political sympathies - she was a life-long socialist - and a very public disagreement with her superiors led to her dismissal from the Corporation soon after the War ended.
J.B. Trend, Fellow of Christ's College and a Professor of Spanish at Cambridge University, was an admirer of Grant's academic work, and secured her appointment to a Spanish Lectureship at Cambridge from early 1946. A Girton College Fellowship followed eight years later. Grant retired in 1971.
From the guide to the Helen Frances Grant: Correspondence and Papers, 1925-1985, (Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives)
