by the architect Basil Champneys and officially opened by Queen Mary in 1913. The buildings continued to be extended and rebuilt throughout the 70 years that the college spent at Regent's Park, especially after extensive damage from wartime bombing. The college colours were green and grey, said to be those of Minerva. Purple was added in 1938 to represent the university; the resulting colours were, by chance or design, similar to those of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. A permanent record of the pictorial history of the college was made following the final reunion of former students and the collection and cataloguing of the archives in 1985. Bedford firsts include: First women to run a British institution. First Social Sciences department in the UK, established 1918 First woman to hold a chair in philosophy in the UK, Susan Stebbing. One of the first two women Fellows of the Royal Society Fourth woman chairman of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Marie Patterson The first art school in England where women could draw from life After a brief period of admitting a small number of male postgraduate students, the college became fully coeducational when 47 men passed through clearing in 1965, and the name reverted to Bedford College. In the early 1980s, Bedford College had approximately 1,700 students and 200 academic staff based in 20 departments. Merger with Royal Holloway In 1985, Bedford College merged with Royal Holloway College, another college of the University of London which, like Bedford College, had been a college for women only when it was first founded. The merged institution took Royal Holloway College's premises in Egham, Surrey, just outside London, as its main campus and took on the name of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (RHBNC). The decision to drop the Bedford name from day-to-day use caused some discontent among graduates of Bedford College, who felt that their old college had now essentially been taken over by Royal Holloway, and that Bedford College's name and history as a pioneering institution in the field of women's education were being forgotten. To give more prominence to the Bedford name, the merged college named a large, newly built library in the centre of its campus the "Bedford Library". Relations between RHUL and some of the Bedford College alumni remain somewhat strained, but many other Bedford College alumni maintain links with RHUL, supporting alumni events and other college