Grace spent her life challenging the Establishment view and the treatment of the less able and disadvantaged in society.
She was born in Brighton in 1864 and after attending the local high school, in 1883 she was one of the first women to be educated at Oxford University at Lady Margaret Hall college. A college more recently attended by Malala Yousafzai. At the time Grace attended university, before 1920, the university refused to give degrees to women or acknowledge them as full members of the university.
Lady Margaret Hall founded the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement, a charitable initiative working to develop opportunities for the poor in East London. It is likely this was the spark for Grace’s early work in Sussex creating holidays locally for children from London Special Schools.
She believed children and adults with physical or learning difficulties whose families often didn’t have the money or resources to care for them, shouldn’t be condemned to a hard life in the workhouse or large mental asylums, as Psychiatric hospitals were then called.
As early as 1899 Grace succeeded in creating a society in Brighton able to provide homes and work opportunities in the community. In line with the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 this society was registered as the Guardianship Society. Dr Helen Boyle (1869-1957) of Brighton, who was the first woman President of the Royal Medico-Psychological, joined as a trustee.
The society set up Industrial Training Centres and bought two farms to provide adults (sadly mostly men) with the skills and opportunity for employment.
Grace died in Brighton in 1935 but her pioneering work has been developed and is continued today by the Grace Eyre Foundation, Old Shoreham Road.