Margaret Gowing

Margaret Mary Gowing (Elliott), (26 April 1921 – 7 November 1998) was an English historian.

Margaret Elliott was born on 26 April 1921 in Kensington, London, the youngest of three children of Ronald Elliott, a motor engineer, and his wife, Mabel Donaldson, a school teacher.

She had an older sister, Audrey, and an older brother, Donald.

The family was poor; her father suffered, and ultimately died, from tuberculosis and was frequently unemployed, while her mother was barred from working as a school teacher after she was married.

The family therefore often had to live on a weekly sickness benefit.

For entertainment, they took advantage of free entry to art galleries, museums and libraries.

Elliot's direct experience of poverty led to her becoming an ardent socialist later in life.

She attended Portobello Elementary School in North Kensington, and won a London County Council scholarship to Christ's Hospital in 1932.

She excelled academically, was a prefect, and played hockey for her house.

Elliott completed her School Certificate in 1936, earning distinctions in Latin, English and French and a pass in German.

She won a Leverhulme Entry Scholarship to the London School of Economics (LSE), which she entered in 1938.

Her first-year studies advisor was the economist Vera Anstey, who considered that Elliott had "a decided bent for economic history", Elliot later attributed her interest in the subject to lectures by her second-year studies advisor, Eileen Power, who urged her to pursue an academic career.

She was involved with the production of several volumes of the officially sponsored History of the Second World War, but was better known for her books, commissioned by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, covering the early history of Britain's nuclear weapons programmes: Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945, published in 1964, and the two-volume Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52, published in 1974.

She won both the Gladstone Memorial Prize and the Lillian Knowles Scholarship for economic history in 1939.

He was a vocalist who had also attended Christ's Hospital before winning a choral scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, in 1939.

Later that year, with the outbreak of the Second World War, the LSE was evacuated to Oxford, where Elliott graduated in 1941 with a BSc degree in economics with first-class honours.

Academic jobs in history were not easy to find in 1941, so Elliott joined the Civil Service, working in the Prices and Statistics Section of the Iron and Steel Control directorate in the Ministry of Supply.

He had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1941, and was serving at Combined Operations Headquarters.

They married shortly before he was shipped overseas.

He was taught Japanese in the United States and went on serve in the Pacific as a translator.

The marriage bar was suspended for the duration and Gowing was allowed to remain in the Civil Service.

On 7 June 1944, Elliot married Donald James Graham Gowing at the Wimbledon Registry Office.

Through her work in the Cabinet Office from 1945 to 1959, she knew personally many of the people involved.

She subsequently moved to the Board of Trade, and the Directorate of Housing Fitments, where she rose to the rank of Assistant Principal, before moving to the Cabinet Office in 1945.

There she became involved with the Official History of the Second World War, as assistant to Keith Hancock who was overall editor of the United Kingdom Civil Series of books within the Official History.

As an official historian of the History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Civil Series, Gowing had access to unpublished official papers and files.

She came to know personally many of the politicians and senior civil servants involved.

In 1950, Sir Norman Brook attempted to have Gowing retained in the Cabinet Office as the permanent historian, but was stymied by the Treasury and the Civil Service Commission.

They had two children, both sons: Nicholas Keith (Nik), a journalist who was born in 1951 and named after Hancock, and James, born in 1954.

In 1951, she was told that she had no chance of being appointed to the grade of Principal, which would have carried retirement benefits with it.

She later said that her years at the Cabinet Office were the happiest of her life, but she began looking for another position.

In 1955, she applied for a chair in economic history at Oxford, and for a position as a reader at LSE, but was unsuccessful.

Sir Norman exploited various administrative loopholes to allow her to be retained at the Cabinet Office, and was prepared to make her the Cabinet Office Archivist, but he could not offer her a pension.

The Public Records Act 1958 required all government departments to set up archives and records management systems.

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) was nominally exempt from the act, being a government corporation rather than a department, but voluntarily asked to be included under the Act.

This created a position at the UKAEA for an historian and archivist.

As historian archivist at the UK Atomic Energy Authority from 1959 to 1966 she had access to the official papers and files of the British nuclear weapons programmes.

Her husband, frustrated by his lack of professional success compared to hers, became an alcoholic, and died from a massive stroke in 1969.

She was the first occupant of a chair in the history of science at the University of Oxford, which she held from 1972 until her retirement in 1986.

As co-founder with physicist Nicholas Kurti of the Contemporary Scientific Archives Centre in Oxford, she helped ensure the preservation of contemporary scientific manuscripts.