Florence Ada Keynes

Florence Ada Keynes (née Brown; 10 March 1861 – 13 February 1958) was an English author, historian and politician.

Career

Keynes was an early graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. She established an early juvenile labour exchange, and was one of the founders of the Papworth Village Settlement for sufferers of tuberculosis, 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.

Cambridge Borough Council

She was the first female councillor of Cambridge City Council in August 1914, and was also a town magistrate. At 70 years of age, Keynes became Mayor of Cambridge on 9 November 1932, the second woman to hold the office. She chaired the committee responsible for the building of the new Guildhall, which was completed in 1939.

Works

Retiring from public duties in 1939, she wrote a history of Cambridge, By-Ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge University Press, 1947). In 1950 she published a memoir, Gathering up the threads (W Heffer & Son Ltd, 1950), in which she discusses her ancestors along with the childhoods of her children John Maynard, Margaret and Geoffrey.

Family

Keynes was the daughter of Rev. John Brown of Bunyan's Chapel, Bedford, and schoolteacher Ada Haydon, née Ford (1837–1929). Her brother Sir Walter Langdon-Brown was the Regius Professor of Physic (medicine) at the University of Cambridge.

She married the economist John Neville Keynes in 1882. They had a daughter and two sons:

• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the economist and public servant
• Margaret Neville Keynes (1885-1970), who in 1913 married Archibald Hill, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology
• Geoffrey Keynes (1887-1982), a surgeon