Edith MacQueen PhD (1900-1977)
Edith Edgar MacQueen (1900-1977) MA 1922, PhD 1927 (later Mrs Haden-Guest, later Lady Haden-Guest)
Edith MacQueen appears to have been the first woman historian to be awarded a Ph.D. in History by the University of St Andrews. She submitted her thesis in 1927, on the topic ‘The General Assembly of the Kirk as the rival of the Scottish parliament, 1560–1618′.
Ph.D. degrees, awarded for research, were a relatively new phenomenon in the UK. St Andrews had only begun awarding them in 1920, just a few years behind Oxford and Cambridge. Edith MacQueen appears to have been just the fourth person to be awarded a History Ph.D. at St Andrews. (The fifth person was also a woman, Edith Thomson, in 1928).
Edith MacQueen was the daughter of George MacQueen, of Mongus, Angus, who appears to have been a ship captain trading out of Liverpool. Edith spent the first few years of her life in Cheshire, but after her father’s death (1903), she and her sister returned to Angus with their pregnant mother. Edith was educated at montrose Academy, and was Dux in 1918. From there, she went to the University of St Andrews to study English and History.
Her first two years at St Andrews were an unusual period for women students, because there were a handful of women assistants still covering male lecturers absent on war duties. It is possible that Edith was taught History by Janet Low in her first year, and by Elizabeth Hewat in her second year – but we do not know for sure. By her third year, John D. Mackie had returned to duties – and in any case, the women assistants had only covered the junior years of the History teaching.
She summarised her own academic achievements in the ‘career statement’ that prefaced her PhD thesis in 1927:
“I matriculated in the University of St Andrews in 1918, and followed a course leading to graduation in Arts with First Class Honours in English and History in October 1922. I was awarded the Berry Scholarship in History for the academic year 1922-23 and submitted a Monograph upon the Life of John Duke of Albany which was awarded the Hume Brown Essay Prize in Scottish History in June 1923. In October 1923 I commenced the research on the results of which the present thesis is being submitted. I was appointed in October 1923 to a Carnegie Scholarship in History which was renewed in 1924-25. Since October 1925 I have held a Carnegie Research Fellowship.”
This pattern of education, prizes and fellowships is very similar to that of her near-contemporary Edith Thomson.
Through the recommendation of principal James Irvine, MacQueen was awarded a Commonwealth Fund scholarship to pursue postdoctoral research at Yale University 1927-30. She worked on Scottish emigration to north America.
She applied for academic jobs in Britain after the end of her fellowship, but was unable to find a position. She took a job with the BBC in August 1930, initially based in Edinburgh, but she had moved to London by 1934. She organised speakers for educational broadcasting, wrote several series of historical programmes for BBC Radio’s programming for schools [see, for instance, this Radio Times listing for November 1938], and also wrote for various magazines. She described herself as a programme assistant in the Schools Department of the BBC from 1934-39, and then as a broadcast scriptwriter till 1943.
In 1944, she married the Labour MP, Leslie Haden-Guest. When he was raised to the peerage as Baron Haden-Guest, in 1950, she became known as Lady Edith Haden-Guest.
During 1946-47, and again in 1950, presumably through her husband’s influence, she acted as secretary to a committee in the Ministry of Health. She also did occasional work for the BBC.
In the 1950s, she finally managed to find employment as a historian. Around 1954, she took a research post with the History of Parliament project, based at the Institute for Historical Research. This continued until 1960 or 1961. After the deaths of both her husband and her project director (Lewis Namier), she left London for Glasgow, taking up a position as archivist at the University of Glasgow from 1961 to 1971.
She died in Glasgow in 1977. She bequeathed her papers to the University of St Andrews: they include unpublished material relating to Scottish emigration to north America, dating back to her Commonwealth Fellowship years.