Cecilia Payne began school in Wendover at a private school run by Elizabeth Edwards. When she was twelve her mother moved to London for the sake of the education of Cecilia's brother Humfry, who later became an archaeologist. Cecilia attended St Mary's College, Paddington, where she was unable to study much mathematics or science, but in 1918 changed schools for St Paul's Girls' School. There she was urged by Gustav Holst, who taught music at the school, to pursue a career in music, but she preferred to focus on science. The following year she won a scholarship that paid all her expenses at Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she initially read botany, physics, and chemistry but she dropped botany after her first year. Her interest in astronomy began after she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his 1919 expedition to the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa to observe and photograph the stars near a solar eclipse as a test of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. She said of the lecture: "The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. [...] My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown." She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948.