Florence Ada Keynes
Florence Ada Keynes (née Brown; 10 March 1861 – 13 February 1958) was a British author, social reformer, and Mayor of Cambridge in 1932.
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Work
Sister of Walter Langdon-Brown, Keynes was an early graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge.[1] She started an early juvenile labour exchange,[1] and was one of the founders of the Papworth Village Settlement for sufferers of tuberculosis,[2] a forerunner of Papworth Hospital. She was secretary of the local Charity Organisation Society, which provided pensions for the elderly living in poverty, and worked with inmates of workhouses to resettle them into society.[1]
She was the first female councillor of Cambridge Borough Council, and was also a town magistrate.[2] At 70 years of age, Keynes became Mayor of Cambridge in 1932. She chaired the committee responsible for the building of the new Guildhall, completed 1939. Retiring from public duties in 1939, she wrote a personal history of Cambridge, By-Ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge University Press, 1947).
Family
Keynes was the daughter of the Rev. John Brown of Bunyan's Chapel, Bedford. Her brother was the Regius Professor of Physic (medicine) Sir Walter Langdon-Brown.
She married the economist John Neville Keynes in 1882. They had two sons and a daughter:
- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), one of the most renowned economists of the 20th century.
- Geoffrey Keynes (1887-1982), a surgeon.
- Margaret Neville Keynes (1890-1974), who in 1913 married Archibald Hill, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology.
