Clare Spottiswoode, 1972

Clare read Economics at Clare. She is now Chair of Xoserve, a central data service provider for Britain’s gas market, and a non-executive director of RBC Europe.

Who was your greatest Clare influence and why?

Senior tutor Dr Charles Feinstein offered me a place and suggested that I refuse my upcoming Oxford interview. He propelled Clare into taking women, and was a great advertisement for the College - friendly, welcoming, interesting and clearly keen for me to join Clare. So I became the first woman to be (informally) admitted as an undergraduate to Clare in its 650 year history. 

Clare's Story

I had visited Clare the previous Easter with my father, who was also at Clare. I had fallen in love with the College and had been welcomed by all the porters and everyone else I came across…. such a contrast with the rather stuffy reception at the Women’s Colleges and at Oxford. 

Dr Nigel Weiss gave me an apocryphal Cambridge interview by pointing, without explanation, to a pile of wooden blocks. He clearly intended me to put them together into something coherent by quickly testing what no exam could have done - my ability to think fast in three dimensions. He was kind, thoughtful and genuinely interested in his students and their strengths. He was a tremendous mentor and was clearly watching throughout my career - interested in what happened to his students later in life. 

 Clare absorbed women easily. The first year was mildly strange as there were 28 of us in a College of 300 or so. But by the second year it felt totally normal - mainly because Clare did not make a fuss. We all felt that we belonged. The few die-hard objectors fell silent as they saw how well it was working and that women could actually enhance the College. It helped that Clare came top of the river that year as well as topping the academic charts - apparently achieved through osmosis since no women were taking finals! 

Clare not only gave me an extraordinary education, but enabled me to move smoothly from Mathematics to the subject I had wanted to study since my mid teens and which has become the focus of my working life - Economics.

 However the best of Clare was outside the academic world in the social hubbub of hundreds of students thrown closely together, studying a melange of different subjects, with differing backgrounds, personalities and extraordinary talents. This was all held together in a caring and supportive environment.  

The intensity of this experience stays with you forever, and undoubtedly helped enormously in setting up my fascinating and varied career.  Perhaps even more importantly I met my amazing husband (on the first evening, even if it took a year to realise that we should get together). 

I have always let life happen and have been surprised and delighted by how it turned out. I have also known that I was extraordinarily privileged to spend three years at Clare and to continue to Yale as a Mellon Fellow. I see it as a 2 way gift with a duty to use that privilege to give back to the world and I hope that I have achieved that. I have always taken opportunities, even if they might seem daunting in prospect. In retrospect they are always worth doing - the tougher the challenge, the bigger the reward.  And that would be my advice now to my younger self.

My career has spanned HM Treasury at the heart of Government, being an entrepreneur and creating and selling two companies, creating four wonderful human beings who are going on to create their own careers and children. I led the Gas industry as its Regulator through the huge transformation of creating competition, in a model which has been copied all over the world including in the UK in electricity. 

More recently I have been on many boards, including chairing the Ukrainian 100% state owned oil and gas company, Naftogaz. We only came off the board (we all resigned - long story!) five months before the war started.  Which means that I have been able to observe many world and national events at close quarters, and contribute in varied ways - because I was there.