| Collection | Shirley Foundation Collection |
| Admin history | Dame Stephanie Shirley CH is an IT entrepreneur, successful businesswoman, and philanthropist. Her philanthropy, mainly delivered through her charitable foundation – the Shirley Foundation, has focussed on IT projects and autism research. Dame Stephanie decided early on in her philanthropic career that she wanted to support funding and research during her lifetime, and structured the Shirley Foundation to spend all of its funds by 2018.
Early Life:
Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley was born in Germany in 1933 as Vera Buchthal. Her parents - Arnold Buchthal, a high-court judge, and his Austrian wife Mary – lived in a variety of places in Europe before settling near Vienna in Austria. At the start of the Second World War, Arnold and Mary sent Dame Stephanie and her older sister Renate to safety in Britain on the Kindertransport. They arrived in Britain in 1939 as unaccompanied child refugees, and were placed in foster care. Their foster parents were Guy and Ruby Smith and the family lived together in Sutton Coldfield. Dame Stephanie grew very close to her foster parents calling them Uncle and Auntie.
She attended a convent school, and then Oswestry Girls High School, where she began to show a talent for mathematics. As this was not a subject taught to girls at Oswestry, she received additional lessons at a local boys grammar school. At age 18, along with her mother who had also travelled to live in Britain, Vera became a British Citizen and changed her name to Stephanie Brook.
Career:
She decided not to go to University, but instead to go straight into work, her first role being with the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in north west London, where she built computers and wrote computer code. The Post Office Research Station supported Dame Stephanie in further studies so she took evening classes for a number of years and achieved an honours degree in mathematics.
In 1959 she moved to a new job at CDL Ltd, the designers of the ICT-1301 computer. After experiencing sexism and increasing discrimination against her gender, resulting in her missing out on promotions within the company, and on occasions dealing with unwanted sexual advances, Dame Stephanie decided to branch out on her own and run her own software company. She wanted her company to provide flexible working opportunities for women, especially those with dependents.
This was especially important to Dame Stephanie as she had met her husband Derek Shirley while at Dollis Hill, and they had married in 1962. In 1963 Dame Stephanie and Derek had a son, Giles, which made her flexible approach to her company even more relevant.
With £6 initial investment, she founded her company Freelance Programmers. This was later known as FI, then Xansa. It was later acquired by Steria and is now part of the Sopra Steia Group. Freelance Programmers was initially run from her dining room table and employed a network of mainly female staff skilled at mathematics and programming. While fairly successful, the company was still experiencing difficulty in attracting work, and Dame Stephanie and Derek considered whether her double-feminine name – Stephanie Shirley – should be one part of the problem. Dame Stephanie changed her name to ‘Steve’ Shirley, and changed all her business correspondence to this name, which resulted in a vast improvement in their success. Dame Stephanie became known as ‘Steve’ from this point onwards.
Freelance Programmers became a highly successful company working for organisations such as Tate & Lyle, Rolls Royce and British Railways, and including projects such as programming Concorde’s black box flight recorder. In 25 years as the Chief Executive, Dame Stephanie developed the company into a leading business technology group which pioneered new work practices and changed the position of professional women along the way. The internal sale of the business and flotation of FI was the source of her wealth and the foundation of her next passion – philanthropy.
In her career she served as a non-executive director for Tandem Computers Inc (1992-1997), The Atomic Energy Authority (later AEA Technology) from 1992-2000 and The John Lewis Partnership (1999-2001). She was the first woman Master of the IT livery company, the first woman President of the chartered Computer Society. She was awarded the Institution of Engineering and Technology Mountbatten Medal in 1999, and was appointed Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2001. When she was awarded her OBE in 1980 it was for services to industry, and her Dameship in the Millenium honours was for services to IT. She retired in 1993 at the age of 60 and began to focus on her philanthropy.
Philanthropy:
Dame Stephanie has a strong belief that people should give back to society. She set up her charitable foundation – the Shirley Foundation – in 1986 to begin her plan to give back to society as much as possible.
The Shirley Foundation spend out its funds in October 2018, having made over £67m in grants over the life of the Foundation. Many of the projects funded were pioneering and strategic in their impact and many were of substantial amounts. Dame Stephanie’s philanthropy had a focus on her professional and personal interests: IT due to her skills and career in software and computing, and autism research due to her personal experiences after her son Giles was diagnosed with autism in 1966.
Dame Stephanie focussed much of her life on providing the best care and support for Giles, including funding residential care homes and developing schools that more specifically met the needs of children and adults with autism. After Giles died in 1998, Dame Stephanie continued this focus to ensure that other families were able to receive the best care possible for family members with autism.
Alongside the many projects supported by the Shirley Foundation, Dame Stephanie considered there to be five key projects/organisations where the greatest impact was felt. The UK Philanthropy Archive has additional papers relating to some of these projects and their impact (see related collections in this catalogue description). These five projects are: The Kingwood Trust, Prior’s Court School, Autistica, The National Autism Project, and the Oxford Internet Institute.
The Kingwood Trust, now called Autism at Kingwood, provides support for autistic people and people with Asperger Syndrome. Originally a residential home, Autism at Kingwood now provides support for people to live successfully in their own homes. Dame Stephanie founded the Trust in 1994 to provide residential support for her son Giles and others so that they would experience a better quality of life than they had previously experienced in state provided care. The Trust started with one home – The Cuddy – and expanded to two other homes in Reading and Abingdon. The Kingwood Trust was one of Dame Stephanie’s first experiences philanthropy – where she felt she was putting her money to good use.
The Prior’s Court Foundation, is a charity that manages a specialist school for children with autism. It was conceived when Dame Stephanie visited the Higashi School in Boston which inspired her to create something similar in the UK. In 1998 the property – Prior’s Court in West Berkshire – was acquired and funded through a donation from The Shirley Foundation. It was officially opened by the Princess Royal in 2000. Today the Foundation manages a specialist residential school, young adult provision and a training and development centre that supports and improves the life chances for young people who are severely affected by autism.
Autistica is a charity focussed on autism research founded in 2004 by Dame Stephanie. The charity remains of high importance to Dame Stephanie, and the proceeds of her book sales and other charity events are often directed to support Autistica.
The National Autism Project was an initiative supported by the Shirley Foundation to provide authoritative recommendations on autism research and practice which have demonstrable effectiveness in benefitting autistic people and their communities. The project published a report in 2016 – The Autism Dividend.
Dame Stephanie gave £10m to Oxford University in 2001 to establish The Oxford Internet Institute, which focusses on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues relating to the internet.
In 2003, Dame Stephanie received the Beacon Fellowship Prize for her contribution to autism research and for her pioneering work in harnessing information technology for the public good. In 2012 she donated her entire art collection to the charity Paintings in Hospitals and to Prior’s Court School.
Dame Stephanie decided early on that she wanted to give away her wealth during her lifetime, and agreed that the Shirley Foundation would spend out its funds by 2018. She became a philanthropist with a strong reputation in the UK, being appointed the UK’s Ambassador for Philanthropy in 2009/2010. In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.
She was awarded the Order of Companions of Honour (CH) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June 2017 for services to the IT industry and to philanthropy, one of only 65 Companions across the world.
The Shirley Foundation trustees included Michael Macfayden, Anne Menzies, and Professor Eve C Johnston CBE. Other employees of the Foundation included Hannah McDonald (Manager of the Foundation c2010), and Eileen Hopkins.
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