Obituary Notice

Angela Hughesdon, who died on 15 February 1976, was the second of three gifted daughters, their father being an inventive engineer and their mother having been a student at the Slade School of Art, and a suffragette. They grew up in a country environment. The youngest (Dr Camilla Bosanquet), speaking of their childhood said, after Angela's death: ‘I was enormously proud of her … and jealous … and we fought and it was alive and it was good’. Angela knew well the value of being energetic, ambitious even, but also quietly creative and versatile, both in professional fields and in personal life. She was, I think, an intuitive person, who valued beauty highly and who enjoyed painting.

My friendship with Angela goes back to the mid 1930's, when Cambridge brought us together in a large circle of undergraduates. Angela stood out as really able and as seeming to work very easily. She was free from any anxious need to sharpen her mind, probably because she was a straightforward person, confident and uncompetitive. She took her degree with first class honours in natural sciences as a preliminary to medicine at University College Hospital, where she gained, with a scholarship, one of the four places available then to women. She played lacrosse for Cambridge, and the viola. She took part in university politics where there was at that time a particularly strong wish to keep the issues simple: good versus bad. But her desire to become a doctor was based on a more liberal breadth of humanity which was unsentimental, intelligent and generous. Another friend from those days remembers her as easily amused and completely tolerant, but also as already apt to belittle herself. Cambridge developed her capacity to reflect. Those traits of personality, combined with her experience acquired over the following decades, were the roots from which she later developed into an analytical psychologist.

Her medical career was closely linked with her personal life. She married Dr Benedic