Deaf from childhood, Kathleen Ollerenshaw became one of the country’s most respected mathematicians and statisticians. Her achievements did not stop there. Known for her determination to get things done, she broke down one barrier after another for women in the 1950s and 60s, as a devoted public servant — especially in Manchester, her birthplace. She was a leading educationist, politician and amateur astronomer — just short of her 80th birthday she scrambled up a volcano in Hawaii with a tripod and camera to observe an eclipse.
Mathematics was Ollerenshaw’s lifeline. She had suffered a viral infection aged 8 that left her almost completely deaf and did not receive an effective hearing aid until her mid-30s. She described how at school maths was “the one subject in which I was at no disadvantage. Nearly all equations are found in textbooks or shown on the blackboard as the teacher speaks. Mathematics is a way of thinking . . . Archimedes managed very well with a stretch of smooth sand and a stick.” However, she had never aspired to be a professional mathematician: “If you are deaf, you are glad to ‘get by’, to keep up with others in an ordinary classroom and not to be condemned as being lazy, inattentive or merely ‘slow’.”
Small and blonde, Ollerenshaw was infectious in her enjoyment of teaching mathematics — especially magic squares (similar to sudoku puzzles). She lectured around the country. After giving a speech about the poor state of Manchester’s schools in the 1950s, she became one of the country’s most capable educationists, setting the agenda for James Callaghan’s “great debate” on the education system in 1976 and, later, advising Margaret Thatcher, a former education secretary. She used her statistician’s eye to prepare a study, published in 1955, into old school buildings in England. She found that 750,000 children were using schools built before 1870. She believed: “If one hopes to influence governments on social issues, it can only be done on the basis of accurately established numerical facts, not on mere opinions and protest. This was demonstrated by Florence Nightingale after the Crimea War in 1856.”
She also wrote two books and dozens of articles on improving girls’ education, emphasising the benefits of maths to future employment. She argued that every school should have one competent mathematician on the staff. In the 1970s, from a research post at the University of Lancaster, she led a government inquiry into how many women teachers were leaving the profession to bring up families and whether they were prepared to return. She was frequently consulted by ministers and once travelled to Japan to find out why education standards there were higher.
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During the 1970s and 1980s she served on multiple bodies. She was the chairwoman of Manchester’s education committee, the city’s lord mayor — a post of which she was most proud — and a Conservative councillor for 25 years. At one point she was responsible for the area’s 240 schools and 100,000 children. Her husband, Robert Ollerenshaw, was a leading surgeon and she said they were often so busy that they had no time for entertaining. They got rid of their dining room table to make space for paperwork. Instead they took their friends to public functions. The pair had met aged six at school. She said she knew it was love when Robert gave her his slide rule in sixth form. “He felt he wouldn’t be needing mathematics and I would make better use of it,” she said.
Ollerenshaw worked 80-hour weeks from morning to midnight and estimated that rather than making any money she lost £500 a year — “but it’s marvellous”, she said about being so busy. She might get 40 invitations to fairs, fêtes and openings in one weekend. “If your daughter has a love affair to sort out you’re absolutely sunk,” she said, but still found time to write a children’s book, The Lord Mayor’s Party.
She was born in Manchester in 1912, the younger daughter of Charles and Mary Timpson. Her grandfather founded the chain of shoe shops that bears the family name. She later wrote: “My parents did public work and I carried it on. If you had money, or didn’t have to slave for it, then the thing that counted was doing things for others.” After boarding at St Leonard’s School, St Andrews, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, lip-reading the questions at her interview.
She was sports mad and won a hockey blue despite being unable to hear the umpire’s whistle. She also learnt to ski and enrolled at Innsbruck University for a semester to qualify for a student discount on the mountain railways. She excelled at ice skating, too, and was runner-up in the English pairs championship of 1939, as well as representing England at ice hockey.
When she got engaged to Robert Ollerenshaw she foresaw a life in which she played the role of supporting wife: “I spent too much time playing hockey and going with Robert to dances,” she wrote. However, the Second World War broke out and Robert was posted abroad: “I cried non-stop for three days and then picked myself up and took the tramcar to the university to see how I could best use my mathematics (notwithstanding being deaf) to help the war effort.” She took up a post as a statistician researching the cotton industry at the Shirley Institute near Didsbury, Greater Manchester, until her son Charles was born in 1941. She then returned to Oxford to teach. After the war, the Ollerenshaws set up home in Manchester where she lectured in maths at the university, while bringing up her son and daughter, Florence. She exclaimed to her children in excitement when she solved a maths problem. On walks her son would stop passers-by to tell them: “Mother’s got a sum right, mother’s got a sum right.”
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Music was a lifelong passion. She was one of the architects of the Royal Northern College of Music, whose governors she chaired for the first 15 years. She became a keen astronomer, building an observatory at her cottage retreat outside Manchester and donating her telescope to the University of Lancaster, where an observatory is named after her. Once when a dramatic picture of an eclipse was shown on TV by Sir Patrick Moore, he said: “I wish that I had taken that photograph but I did not have the good fortune to do so — it was taken by my friend Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw.” She was also the first woman president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. She wrote an autobiography aptly entitled To Speak of Many Things.