Enid Mary Porter (8 October 1908 – 16 January 1984) was a collector of folklore in Cambridgeshire and the longest serving curator of the Cambridge & County Folk Museum, now the Museum of Cambridge, working from 1947 to 1976. Her work was invaluable in recording the cultural and social practices of people in Cambridgeshire; she was innovative in the discipline of social history collection, employing working practices such as oral history, and engaging with people in areas that had previously been overlooked by folklorists. Her notebooks, now in possession of the Museum of Cambridge, hold a treasure-trove of information about Cambridgeshire customs, stories and songs. Early life Enid Mary Porter was born on 8 October 1908 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, to father Hugh Porter and mother Ethel Mary Porter. Her father Hugh, originally from Bedford, completed his teacher training at a higher-grade school in Cambridge before becoming a secondary master at Southend High School. Her mother, Ethel Mary (née Scott), was from a family which could trace its roots in Cambridge as far back as the seventeenth century. As a result, Enid regularly visited relatives in the city of Cambridge and knew the area well. In her later career she would record local lore gleaned from her Cambridgeshire family. The Porter family was of the professional middle class and employed a servant until the First World War. After obtaining a degree in modern languages at University College London (which at this time housed the Folklore Society library, deposited in 1911), Enid followed her father and trained as a teacher at the Catholic Training College, London before working in schools for some years until after the Second World War. Her true interests however, lay outside teaching, and seeing a staff vacancy advertised at the Cambridge and County Folk Museum in 1947, she applied and was appointed Assistant Curator in September of that year. Career Curatorship at the Museum of Cambridge The museum grew out of the 1934 ‘Festival of Olden Times’ hosted by the Cambridge Guildhall and organised by Catherine Parsons, the then chair of the Cambridgeshire Women's Institute. The Museum was formed in 1936 by members of the local Rotary Club and University of Cambridge, in the site of the abandoned White Horse Inn; the museum occupies the same site today. The original aim of the museum was ‘to collect and preserve for the benefit of the general public and for