Margaret Lambert (1906-1995)
Dr Margaret Lambert (1906-1995) was appointed as Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews in 1956. She was the first woman historian at St Andrews to have been hired directly as a lecturer, rather than as an assistant first. Lambert had contemplated applying for employment as both a researcher and as a lecturer in the 1930s, but the onset of the Second World War intervened, and her aspirations, like the hopes and dreams of many others during this time of total war, were put to one side to help the war effort.
Photograph of Dr Margaret Lambert from ‘She edits tons of documents’, The Courier and Advertiser, Wednesday 5 September 1951.
Born in Devon in 1906, the Honourable Margaret Lambert was fascinated by politics from a young age. Her home life may have encouraged her interest: her father, who became the first Viscount Lambert, was Civil Lord of the Admiralty for ten years and Winston and Clementine Churchill would visit her family home.[1] Lambert’s fascination with politics was further fuelled when she went up to the University of Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall.
She then undertook doctoral research in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE), and her PhD thesis was entitled ‘The Saar Territory as a Factor in Franco German Relations’. Lambert’s PhD thesis was supervised by Charles Manning, a pioneer in the field of International Relations who promoted and moulded the subject as an academic discipline at LSE, as well as influencing its development at other universities.[2] For one semester in 1933, Lambert conducted research in the Saar as well as in Berlin and Paris; her resultant book, The Saar, was published in 1934, two years before she graduated with her PhD from LSE in 1936.[3]
During the Second World War, Lambert conducted research for the Institute of International Affairs and she then worked as a BBC Intelligence Officer for this organisation’s Austrian service. An obituary reveals that, ‘as she let fall only very much later,’ her work with the BBC ‘involved amongst other things the extraction of information from German POW [Prisoner of War] generals in the course of chats over the teacups – Lambert spoke excellent German – in various country houses where these officers were detained’.[4]
Following the war’s end, Lambert began her career as an academic while continuing her work in the diplomatic arena. In 1949, she was appointed to a new permanent lectureship in Modern European History at the University of Exeter. However, she left Exeter in 1951 and entered the Foreign Office in London to work on a project concerning German foreign policy and she worked as ‘British editor-in-chief of the captured German diplomatic documents’. As Clare Taylor explains, though, this was not a move detrimental to an academic career: ‘the position of editor-in-chief of the Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, [was] a project which was to shape Lambert’s academic career into the 1980s.’[5] A short article published by The Courier and Advertiser Wednesday on 5 September 1951 featured Lambert under the headline ‘She edits tons of documents’! It revealed that ‘Other editors-in-chief of the documents are French and American – both men.’[6]
Lambert became Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews on 1 October 1956 (having been appointed in spring 1956). With her arrival, there were now two women lecturers in the Modern History department (and not yet any in the new department of Mediaeval History). In Modern History, Lambert joined Caroline Doris Ketelbey, who was now a Senior Lecturer; it is intriguing to wonder whether Lambert and Ketelbey may previously have met at the LSE conferences that Ketelbey is known to have attended in the early 1950s.
The minutes of the University Court for that year also reveal that Lambert was appointed on a starting salary of £1,200 per annum, whereas A.F. Upton, who was appointed at the same time to the position of lecturer ‘with special qualifications in 17th century British political and constitutional history’, was to be paid only £700 per annum.[7] It is possible Lambert received a higher salary than Upton as she held a PhD.
Lambert seems to have been the first woman to teach in one of the History departments who had received a doctoral degree (the next would be Barbara Crawford, in Mediaeval). In fact, the Calendars of the University of St Andrews reveal that the only PhD holders among the Modern History staff from 1956 to 1961 were Lambert (B.A. Oxon., Ph.D. Lond.) and the lecturer in American and Colonial History, Geoffrey Seed (M.A. Dunelm. and Michigan, Ph.D.), though they were joined in academic year 1958-1959, by an American ‘exchange lecturer’, from Union College Schenectady, Frederick Lidell Bronner, who held a Ph.D. from Harvard University.[8] Over in the Mediaeval History department, only Lionel Butler and Donald Watt had doctoral degrees (DPhils from the University of Oxford).[9]
Margaret Lambert’s appointment was part of the expansion of History teaching at St Andrews in the 1950s. After the retirement of long-serving professor Jack Williams, in 1955, two separate departments of Mediaeval History and Modern History were created, each led by its own professor.
The St Andrews University Calendar 1956-57 reveals the curriculum that Lambert would have helped deliver. ‘Outlines of European History since the end of the Fifteenth Century’ was the subject of study for the first year of the Modern History ordinary degree and, for second-year ordinary degree students, ‘the course of study’ was ‘British History since the end of the Fifteenth Century’. These courses were available at both St Andrews’s St Salvator’s College and Dundee’s Queen’s College; the University of Dundee would be founded as an independent institution in 1967.
Honours students included amongst their course of study ‘modern British political and constitutional history’, including ‘the critical reading of selected texts’, and honours classes only took place in St Andrews. By the academic year 1957-58, presumably due to Lambert’s appointment, honours study could include ‘the detailed examination of certain optional periods of European and American history’. The 1958-59 calendar reveals more detail: ‘The periods provisionally approved for the current session are:- (a) History of Europe, 1600-1720; (b) History of Europe, 1871-1939; (c) History of the United States, 1776-1941.’ This calendar adds that ‘The subjects provisionally approved for the current session are:- (a) The American Revolution, 1763-87; (b) Britain in World Economy, 1874-1938; (c) The Origins of the Second World War, 1919-1939.’[10] (Read about the exam papers of the 1950s.)
Lambert resigned from her lecturing post at St Andrews at the end of 1960 (‘and with effect from 30 January 1961’) to return to the Foreign Office project on German documents. Gash suggested that Ketelbey, who had been retired for two years, be asked back to cover ‘that part of the teaching and examining of the General Class in Modern History which would have been taken by Dr. Lambert.’[11]
As well as politics and history, Lambert also had both a great love for and a great knowledge of art, which she shared with her partner, the artist Enid Marx (1902-1998), who was a distant relation of Karl Marx. Enid Marx lived with Lambert for a time in St Andrews, moving there from London when Lambert became a lecturer. In 1946, Lambert and Marx had published English Traditional and Popular Art and they also published English Popular Art five years later. When Lambert and Marx returned to London, Marx became the head of department of three art colleges and she created wood engravings which served as book illustrations, one of which provided a new cover for Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.[12]
An obituary reveals that Lambert and Marx particularly loved English folk art and that they enjoyed ‘foraging round the countryside for old inn-signs, inscriptions on tombstones, pieces of regional pottery, gingerbread moulds, in short, for examples of the products of scores of traditional crafts which their knowledgeable eye enabled them to spot.’[13]
By Dr Sarah Leith. Sarah is an historian of environmental thought, literature and culture in twentieth-century Scotland and she is currently a Research Assistant for the Women Historians of St Andrews project. With thanks to Ruadhán Scrivener-Anderson.
[1]Eleanore Bruening, ‘Obituary: Margaret Lambert’, The Independent (1 February 1995) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-margaret-lambert-1570961.html [Accessed: 4 June 2024].
[2] Alan James, ‘Manning, Charles Anthony Woodward (1894-1978)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-68879?rskey=3mwRFi&result=8 [Accessed: 4 June 2024].
[3] Taylor, ‘Margaret Barbara Lambert – “A thorough and energetic investigator’.
[4] Bruening, ‘Obituary: Margaret Lambert’.
[5] Clare Taylor, ‘Margaret Barbara Lambert – “A thorough and energetic investigator’, LSE History https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2018/03/09/margaret-barbara-lambert-1906-95-a-thorough-and-energetic-investigator/ [Accessed 27 May 2024]; Bruening, ‘Obituary: Margaret Lambert’.
[6] ‘She edits tons of documents’, Courier and Advertiser, Wednesday 5 September 1951, p.3.
[7] The Minutes of the University Court for the Academic Year 1954-5, p.172.
[8] St Andrews University Calendar 1958-59 (St Andrews, 1958), p.44.
[9] St Andrews University Calendar 1956-57 (St Andrews, 1956), p.45; St Andrews University Calendar 1957-58 (St Andrews, 1957), pp.44-5; St Andrews University Calendar 1958-59 (St Andrews, 1958), pp.43-4; St Andrews University Calendar 1959-60 (St Andrews, 1959), pp.43-4; St Andrews University Calendar 1960-1961 (St Andrews, 1960), pp.43-4.
[10] St Andrews University Calendar 1956-57 (St Andrews, 1956), pp.202-3; St Andrews University Calendar 1957-58 (St Andrews, 1957), p.203; St Andrews University Calendar 1958-59 (St Andrews, 1958).
[11] The Minutes of the University Court for the Academic Year, 1960-61, p.
[12] Alan Powers, ‘Marx, Enid Dorothy Crystal (1902-1998)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-67251?rskey=3LT6rB&result=1 [Accessed: 4 June 2024].
[13] Bruening, ‘Obituary: Margaret Lambert’.