20 May 2025

Sir David Attenborough is known throughout the world, and so is his brother Richard.  Some local people might also be aware that their father, Frederick, was a Principal of University College, Leicester, before it became a full university in 1957.  But who knows anything about their mother?  Our speaker in May was Richard Graves, who is on a mission to tell the story of Mary Attenborough and demonstrate that she deserves recognition in her own right.

Mary (née Clegg) was born in 1896 and grew up in New Sawley, Derbyshire.  By chance, her family home in the Arts & Crafts style has been beautifully preserved.  Her father was a progressive headmaster and Mary attended his school, where she was a bright pupil.  In 1914, she went to the Sorbonne to study modern languages but on the outbreak of the First World War she was forced to return home and she completed her degree in Nottingham.  Her father employed two refugees from the fighting in Belgium as French teachers in his school and this seems to have had a big influence on Mary, as we shall see.  Frederick Attenborough was also a teacher at the school.  The couple were married in 1922 and three children followed: Richard, David and John.

Frederick was appointed to Leicester in 1932 and the family lived on campus in College House, which is today surrounded by the blocks and towers of later university development.  Mary soon embarked on various social projects in the city, founding a luncheon club and a local branch of the Soroptimists, who campaign to improve the lives of women.  She was active in another organization that provided support for girls from the North of England who came to find work in Leicester.  She became a marriage guidance counsellor and a magistrate and continued those roles for the rest of her life.

In 1936, Mary led Leicester’s movement to receive Basque children fleeing the Spanish Civil War.  They leased Evington Hall to house 50 of the children and David remembers his mother scrubbing the floors to make it fit for their arrival.  With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Frederick became involved in helping Jewish academics move to the UK.  Through these connections, he and Mary learned of the three Bejach girls, who were under threat as daughters of a Jewish doctor.  The two youngest, Helga and Irene, escaped Germany on one of the final Kindertransport evacuations and the Attenboroughs took them in.  The expectation was that the girls would soon travel on to join their uncles in New York but that proved impossible and in fact they stayed on as part of the Attenborough household until 1946.  The girls’ father had died in Auschwitz but they built new lives in America, always remaining in touch with their adoptive family.

In 1951, Frederick retired and he and Mary moved to London to be closer to their sons.  There, Mary continued her good works until her life was sadly cut short in a car accident in 1961.

Richard Graves’ biography of Mary Attenborough was published in 2022, with a foreword by Sir David, and it can be bought online.  Richard also urged the University to provide some recognition for Mary, as a result of which her name has now been given to one of the buildings on the new Freeman’s Common site.