Lilian Ritchie, one of the first hundred women to graduate in Law from the University of Glasgow, was born in Glasgow in 1916. Her father, James Bonnyman Ritchie, was a distinguished mathematician and schoolmaster who was elected an Ordinary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1914.The family made their home in Ayr, at 28 Carrick Road. Lilian went up to Glasgow University as a successful candidate in the University Bursary exam and held a Brown & Paton bursary (£17 for three years). After graduating M.A.(Hons) in History in 1937 and having passed degree exams in Political Economy and Constitutional Law and History which counted towards a Law degree, she began working towards an LL.B. She graduated in 1939 with an excellent record that included the Stair prize in Public International Law (the only woman on the prize list in that session of 1937-38) and a Merit in Evidence and Procedure. Like Madge Anderson twenty years earlier she was the only woman to graduate in Law that year. Armed with such impressive academic credentials and a completed apprenticeship in a law firm she would have been on the threshold of a promising legal career. She may have continued to work in a law firm though she does not seem to have petitioned the Court of Session for admission as a solicitor. She married Andrew Napier in 1943. She died, aged 83, in 2000 in Perthshire.
Sources
University of Glasgow Registry and General Council Records
Scoltlands People
