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So I might have solved a very small 
Cambridge MYSTERY
Cambridge MYSTERY
We found this borrowing receipt tucked in a book @eflcam in 2018. It was a stock check treasure (original copy hopefully still somewhere at the EFL)
I'm assuming this is from 1944 so it would only be four years before women were admitted as full university members in 1948.
Women from Girton & Newnham had been borrowing from the UL (under various restrictions) since the 1870s — thanks @JillWhitelock @akennedysmith https://akennedysmith.com/2020/08/19/locked-out-of-the-library/
So it's not that surprising that a woman was borrowing from the EFL in 1944, but what is surprising is that Joan isn't from Girton or Newnham. She's from Bedford(?) College.
I think this could be Bedford College in London, now merged with Royal Holloway (where women were getting degrees a whole 70 years before Cambridge) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_College,_London
But if Joan was from Bedford College in London how did she end up borrowing at the English Faculty Library in Cambridge?
Well... it turns out that in 1939 Bedford College was actually evacuated to Cambridge: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb505-bc
You can read some of the details in this fascinating article from @isobel_maddison https://web.archive.org/web/20120913061918/http://www.artichokewebdesign.com/roomsofourown/essays/bedford_college.pdf
The evacuees stayed until 1944 (long enough for complaints about their "straying tennis balls") so *maybe* Joan was one of them!
This was all discovered in the process of trying to figure out who the women in this 1950s(?) photograph from the @Tyndale_House archive might be. They remain a separate mystery...
