Marjory Stephenson was the first Berkhamsted School girl to go to Cambridge. In 1945 she was elected as one of the first two women fellows of the Royal Society. With the advent of ‘Stephenson’ the new Girls’ House at Kings, the following two books have been sourced and purchased. A Chemical Passion writes about Marjory Stephenson thus - ‘the bacterial historian Robert Kohler has shown that the field of bacterial biochemistry was, in large part, defined by the work of Stephenson’ (Kohler, 1985). The authors, the Rayner-Canhams, visited Berkhamsted School in 2012, to carry out their research. Bacterial Metabolism was written by Marjory in 1929.
The Crusader Who Arrived by Canoe, tells the story of the founder of the Special Boat Service, the seaborne equivalent of the SAS. This man created and commanded Nos.1 and 2 SBS sections between 1940 and 1944. A real Boys Own adventure. His name was Roger James Allen Courtney and he was an Old Berkhamstedian (Uppers, 1919). The book SBS in World War Two was written by his younger brother G. B. Courtney MBE, MC, who also served in the SBS unit in the Far East, from April 1942 until the end of the war.