Grace Prestwich
Grace Prestwich was a versatile Victorian writer, scientific researcher and educationist who lived at Darent Hulme, the large house on the western hill overlooking the Darent Valley and Timberden. A specialist in geology, botany and palaeontology, she was a pioneer in women’s higher learning and was well-regarded among Fellows of the Geological Society, despite being barred from it because of her gender.
Born Grace Anne Milne in Morayshire in 1832, she was the daughter of a merchant and shipowner. After her husband and infant son died within two years of her marriage, she became an assistant to her uncle, Hugh Falconer, a botanist and fossil-hunter – travelling with him through Europe while sketching geological features and ancient finds. Falconer was friends with the palaeontologist Joseph Prestwich, whose discovery of a hand axe going back hundreds of thousands of years caused a sensation in 1859 – helping to shatter Victorian assumptions about how long humans had lived on earth.
Grace married Prestwich in 1870 and the couple moved to the house he had built at Shoreham. They spent some of each year in Oxford, where Joseph was an academic, and Grace began publishing her own work. This included articles about geology and prehistoric discoveries for popular outlets such as Good Words and Blackwood’s Magazine, plus a pair of novels, The Harbour Bar: A Tale of Scottish Life (1874) and Enga (1880). She was also prominent in setting up Somerville Hall, the early Oxford college for women.
She wrote: “We firmly believe that by higher and wider education the lives of women will be ennobled. Years, which might have been wasted in folly and frivolity, will be redeemed by earnest thought and work; and lots in life will be enriched and coloured by entrance into, and contact with, a wider world of thought.”
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In Shoreham she found time to be honorary secretary of the village Nursing Committee and help out at a maternity group at the vicarage. After Joseph’s death in 1896, Grace’s three sisters came to live with her at Darent Hulme and Grace wrote a well-received biography of her husband, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Prestwich (1899). She died in 1899, aged 66, and is buried in Shoreham churchyard along with Joseph and her siblings. A window on the south side of the church, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, commemorates the Prestwich family.