Ray Strachey (nee Costello)
1887 - 1940

Author, journalist, suffragist and political campaigner

Ray’s contribution to Women’s Pioneer Housing was relatively short but invaluable. It’s likely that Etheldred knew Ray from The Common Cause, a suffrage newspaper that Ray edited and Etheldred had written for. Ray first appears in WPH’s records in March 1921 at an open meeting for potential investors. At a special meeting the following month, during the financial crisis, she seconded a motion ‘that WPH goes into liquidation’ but added an offer ‘to ascertain whether it would be possible to raise the necessary money ... and to call this meeting again’ – in other words, Ray offered to help look for funding to avoid WPH collapsing. Ray was a determined character and she succeeded in her mission: in the next meeting, she reported that she had found an investor to take £2500 in loan stock, which Ray Strachey herself would guarantee. Her actions saved WPH from bankruptcy or takeover just seven months after its founding. 

Ray became Chairman in 1921 and she assisted Etheldred in driving the completion, conversion and letting of 67 Holland Park Avenue, its first property. During this time, WPH issued the first share certificates, and formally appointed Miriam Homersham as an accountant. Ray also brought John Rowlatt on board, who was willing to become WPH’s solicitor, using his expertise to regularise WPH’s legal position. On her resignation the following year, WPH was in a strong position to continue with its mission.

As her efforts at WPH proved, Ray was a well-educated, well-connected woman. She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1908, and took a course in engineering at Oxford in 1910. Despite having a private income Ray was aware she needed to earn her own living. She took up writing and published her first book in 1907, fitting writing and journalism around her suffragist work. On 31^st May 1911, Ray married Oliver Strachey, one of the sons of suffragist and author Lady Jane Strachey, brother to historian Lytton Strachey (a member of the Bloomsbury Set and friend of Virginia Woolf). Like the rest of his family, Oliver shared Ray’s views on women’s suffrage and joined the NUWSS himself.

Following her marriage, a brief stay in India and the birth of her first child, Ray returned to suffrage work in 1913.  Ray’s role as Hon Parliamentary Secretary of the NUWSS meant that along with Millicent Fawcett and Ray’s sister-in-law Pippa Strachey she had a major input to the negotiations for the passage of the 1918 suffrage bill, drafting resolutions, lobbying MPs and writing speeches for them to support the bill. 

After the vote was won, Ray spent the 1920s and 1930s campaigning for an extension of women's professional employment and for equal pay. She fought particularly for women's admission to the legal profession and to the civil service. In 1935 she wrote Careers and Openings for Women, a practical handbook and a sociological survey of the female labour market. Ray also carried out pioneering work as became Organising Secretary of the Women's Employment Federation (WEF). Under Ray’s direction, the WEF was regarded as a valuable body, organising speakers, liaising with education and advisers individuals. It gained anonymous recognition in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. From 1938 WEF became more and more involved in war work, supplying the government with information on women with specialist experience. 

Ray unsuccessfully stood three times for parliament, but kept up her parliamentary influence as political private secretary to Nancy Astor MP; she was responsible for preparing briefs and writing speeches after Nancy’s election in 1919. After a period concentrating on her writing and family concerns, she returned in 1931 to resume work as Lady Astor’s political private secretary. 

Sadly, Ray’s trailblazing career was cut short in 1940, when she underwent what was thought to be a minor operation for a fibroid tumour; she never recovered and died on 16 July 1940 in the Royal Free Hospital, London.