Dame Bertha Surtees Phillpotts DBE (25 October 1877 – 20 January 1932) was an English scholar in Scandinavian languages, literature, history, archaeology and anthropology.

Having received all of her basic education at home, in 1898, Phillpotts won a Pfeiffer Scholarship to Girton College in the University of Cambridge, where she studied medieval and modern languages, Old Norse and Celtic under Hector Munro Chadwick.

[5] Her other elder brother, Brian ("Broo"), was an officer of the Royal Engineers who served in the First World War and was fatally wounded in action near Ypres in September 1917.

[citation needed] However, she was elected to a research fellowship and continued to be an active Fellow of the college, commuting between Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge in her Morris Cowley car which she nicknamed "Freda".

[10] In June 1931, when she was already in failing health, Phillpotts married a long standing friend and fellow Cambridge academic, the astrophysicist and educator, Hugh Frank Newall, FRS.

[citation needed] The Dame Bertha Phillpotts Memorial Fund for the promotion of Old Norse and Icelandic Studies at the University of Cambridge awards grants and scholarships for postgraduate students and other scholars in the relevant fields.

[17] Phillpotts possessed a lively personality and an intrepid spirit, as the following tribute by a Cambridge colleague shows: Is there another woman head of a College, who not only is a yachting expert, but has had distinguished professors for her disciples in the art of sailing?

On her first visit to Iceland a pony was the sole companion of her wanderings; and we know not which to admire most – her rapid assimilation of University affairs, when called to serve on the Statutory Commission, or her intrepidity in driving a motor, as to the manner born, through Bridge and Sidney Streets, as a novice with but four or five lessons behind her.

[18]This telling observation was contributed after her death by Bertha's friend Mary Anderson, Madame de Navarro: Summer before last she came to stay with us at Blakeney [Norfolk], having motored in ‘Freda’ from Cambridge.

The story, later retold from memory by Marion Delf-Smith, one of Phillpotts' colleagues at Westfield College in London, concerned a stay in a remote house with the Dean, who provided them with a spartan meal of hard dried fish, sour milk, and ship's biscuits too hard to eat; the bed was infested with vermin; and she was visited in her bedroom by a pony which gave her a kick on the leg.