Venetia Phair - the girl who named Pluto

Venetia Phair (née Burney) was born in Oxford in 1918 and before her accountancy career she had become known as 'the girl who named Pluto', aged 11.

Venetia had suggested the name of of Pluto, Roman god of the underworld, over breakfast with her grandfather, Falconer Madon, a retired Librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford. Madon in turn passed the suggestion to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, director of the Radcliffe Observatory, who sent the suggestion by telegram to the Lowell observatory in Arizona. The people at Lowell particularly liked the fact that the first two letters of Pluto were the initials of observatory founder Percival Lowell. Less than a month later, Pluto was announced as the official name for the newly discovered planet.

Her family had some pedigree in naming celestial bodies, her great-uncle, Henry Madan, a science-master at Eton, had suggested the names Deimos and Phobos for the moons of Mars in 1878.

Venetia got into Cambridge University at the second attempt, going up to Newnham College in 1938, reading Economics.  After graduation she took articles with the firm of C.W Shelford in London and took her exams in the war years, the intermediate examination in January 1943 and the final examination in August 1944. She remembers taking the Intermediate exam in the City and 'going down under our desks at intervals', which can be taken to mean that air raids were taking place at the time!

Venetia was one of 6 women admitted to ICAEW membership in 1944 (total female membership was still under 100) and she worked, after qualification, for Roley, Pemberton & Co, in Leadenhall Street, London EC3. until she married Edward Phair, a classicist who later became head of English at Epsom College, at the end of 1947. It seems that was the end of her practising, but she did remain a member, becoming an FCA in 1960 and last appearing in the List of Members in 1967. 

When her son was at prep school, Venetia returned to work as a history teacher at Gloucester House School in Sutton, Surrey, and then as a part time Economics Teacher at Wallington County Grammar School, until retiring in 1983 at the age of 65. She died in Banstead, Surrey on April 30 2009, aged 90.

In 2006 the NASA New Horizons mission which flew by Pluto, had onboard a Student Dust Counter instrument renamed the 'Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter' and In 2017 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on Pluto 'Burney' in her honour.

Read more about Venetia

• Interview with Venetia Phair (Cherry's Cache)
• NASA interview with Venetia Phair
• Venetia Phair's wikipedia entry