Mary Grigor was born in Glasgow on the 4th April 1904. Her father, James, was an Inspector of Schools. Before beginning her studies in the Law Faculty Mary completed an M.A. at Glasgow in 1924. She did well in Law, earning first class certificates in Civil Law and coming near the top of her classes in Conveyancing, International Private Law, Scots Law, Jurisprudence, Public International Law and Evidence and Procedure. She graduated LL.B in April 1927. Her undergraduate record reveals wide interests and she had begun her first year at university in 1922 by taking Nat Phil., Chemistry and Botany before settling to Arts and Law. After graduation she was drawn to both Education and Law. She became a classroom teacher in 1927 and gained a Diploma in Education on 12th January 1930. Over the same period, beginning in 1928, she matriculated once again in the Law Faculty to undertake research studies for a Ph.D. This was a very unusual path and she was the first woman law graduate to set out on it. In 1921 Lucy Agnes Carter had made history at Glasgow University by becoming the first woman to graduate Ph.D., for her research in Protozoology. Mary Grigor’s research topic was ‘The State and the Child’. Her supervisor was the eminent John Glaister, Professor of Forensic Medicine. She continued to teach and study for her Dip.Ed. while researching her thesis. It proved too much. On 30th September 1930 she wrote to Professor Glaister to explain that illness, her father’s and her own, had kept her away from her law studies. She assured him that she would ‘accomplish a good deal in the coming winter’ now that her health had improved and her tonsils had been removed. A year later, however, she wrote to the Clerk of Senate regretting that she would have to temporarily suspend her studies in Law. Mary never returned to her research. She may have practised as a solicitor for a time in the nineteen forties and her petition for admission as a solicitor is dated 1947, twenty years after her graduation. Details remain to be documented. Principally it seems she remained an educator, a career that took her to Northumberland as an Education Officer in the late 1930s and to Sierra Leone sometime in the 1950s. It was there that she met her husband, John Dudley Pollett, Director of the Geographical Survey of Sierra Leone. They married in September 1963. Under her married name and living in Uckley, Sussex, she is listed in 1970 as a member of the Law Society of Scotland, though not having a practising certificate. It suggests that the combination of Law and Education which characterised her early career remained throughout her life. Researching for a Ph.D remained elusive for women. Madge Easton Anderson progressed a little further in her Ph.D. studies, begun in 1930, the autumn in which Mary Grigor’s attempt ended. Examiners were selected in readiness for submission of her thesis on International Law in 1933. But she, too, was unable through circumstances to complete it. Remarkably, it was 1982 before the first woman, Rebecca Wallace, graduated Ph.D in Law from the University of Glasgow. Mary Rachel Grigor (Pollett) died in London on 20th July 1988 aged 84.
Sources
GU Archives Registry and General Council
Scotland’s People
CoSS Petitions List CS46 1947/9/31
