Martha Kearney awarded the 2025 Watson’s Fellowship

Our Principal Lisa Kerr on the meaning of fellowship as she recognises this year's recipient. 

The Watson’s Fellowship, launched in 2023 to mark our new Foundation Week, recognises a Watsonian who has achieved distinction in their field of endeavour and exemplifies our School values and motto, Ex Corde Caritas.  

This year, at Saturday’s ‘Big Reunion’ lunch, I was delighted to present the 2025 Fellowship to award winning journalist and broadcaster Martha Kearney, Class of 1975.   

Martha grew up in an academic household — her father, Hugh Kearney, was a distinguished historian — so in many ways, learning and curiosity were in her blood. It’s perhaps no surprise then that she went on to Oxford to read classics, before beginning her career in journalism, starting her career, as I did, in local commercial radio.  

Martha has presented some of radio and television’s most iconic news and current affairs programmes. From Newsnight to Woman’s Hour, from The World at One to The Today Programme, becoming one of the country’s most respected journalists. She has interviewed every Prime Minister from Margaret Thatcher to Rishi Sunak, Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Shiller on ‘bubbly markets’, and many global cultural, business and political leaders. She has covered US elections and reported from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Handover of Hong Kong and the war in Afghanistan - and always with a combination of clarity, empathy, and at the perfect moment, the sharp question that makes even the most seasoned politician shift in their chair.   

One particularly special moment was the 2006 Radio 4 series she presented with her father on the history of universities in Britain, The Idea of a University - a chance not only to explore the role of higher education in society, but also to share an intellectual partnership rooted in family.  

But long before all that, she was here at Watson’s — where she excelled in drama and debating and in one account of a lively Burns supper stood on a chair to recite ‘The Rights of Women’! It’s tempting to think that those first debates and performances in the school hall were the perfect training ground for encounters with Cabinet Ministers years later!  

Martha’s generosity - her ‘ex corde caritas’ - extends far beyond broadcasting. She is a committed patron and fundraiser for Camphill Communities supporting adults with special needs – a cause I know is very close to her heart. And, as a curator and contributor of the BBC’s Pioneering Women project, she highlighted the work of pioneering war correspondent Audrey Russell.  

Equally well known perhaps is Martha’s passion for bees — proof, if we needed it, that Martha is equally at home nurturing the smallest of communities as she is holding the most powerful individuals to account.  

Martha’s life and work show us what it means to carry Watson’s, and our values, into the wider world: to aim high with integrity, to be kind in action, to respect all voices, and to join in with energy and commitment.  

It was my very great pleasure, on behalf of the Governing Council of George Watson’s College, and the entire Watson’s community, to present the 2025 Honorary Fellowship to a journalist of distinction, a Watsonian of warmth, and a woman whose voice has truly become part of the national conversation: Martha Kearney.