View source for Royston Lambert

{{Short description|British educationalist and sociologist}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=March 2024}}
{{Use British English|date=March 2024}}
{{Infobox academic
| name               = Royston Lambert
| birth_name         = Royston James Lambert
| birth_date         = 7 December 1932
| birth_place        = [[Barking, London|Barking]], England
| death_date         = {{death date and age|25 October 1982|7 December 1932|df=y}}
| death_place        = [[Patras, Greece]]
| education          = [[Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge]] ([[Master of Arts (Oxbridge and Dublin)|MA]], PhD)
| thesis_title       = State Activity in Public Health, 1858-71
| thesis_year        = 1959
| workplaces         = Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge<br/>[[London School of Economics]]<br/>[[King's College, Cambridge]]
| occupation         = Educationalist, sociologist
| notable_works      = ''The Hothouse Society'' (1968) ''Beloved and God: the Story of Hadrian and Antinous'' (1982)
}}
'''Royston James Lambert''' (7 December 1932 – 25 October 1982) was a British sociologist, educationalist and historian, best known as the one-time headmaster of [[Dartington Hall#Dartington Hall School|Dartington Hall School]] and as the biographer of the Roman Emperor [[Hadrian]]'s catamite, [[Antinous]].

==Early life==
Royston Lambert was born in [[Barking, London|Barking]] in the [[East End]] of [[London]],<ref>"Royston James Lambert", [https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&u=ed_itw&id=GALE|H1000056915&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon|"Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors"], ''Gale Literature Resource Center'' (New York, NY: Gale, 1998). Retrieved 14 March 2024. {{Subscription required}}</ref> the son of Albert and Edith Lambert.<ref name="WW">{{Who's Who | title = LAMBERT, Dr Royston James | id = U166155 | type = was | volume = 2024 | edition = online}}</ref> Growing up in a "turbulent" household, he failed his [[eleven-plus examination]] and thus attended a [[secondary modern school]], before transferring to [[Barking Abbey School|Barking Abbey Grammar School]] when he was 15 years old.<ref name="Trust">Dartington Trust, [https://www.dartington.org/royston-lambert/ "Royston Lambert"], ''dartington.org'', 15 October 2019. Retrieved 14 March 2024.</ref> There he proved to be a model pupil, but having no Latin pass on his [[Higher School Certificate (England and Wales)|Higher School Certificate]] meant his [[exhibition (scholarship)|exhibition]] to study at Oxford was rescinded and he was unable to take up his place there.<ref name="Trust"/> Instead, the following year, he was awarded a major scholarship to attend [[Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge]], where he achieved a [[British undergraduate degree classification|first class with distinction]] in Part I of the historical [[tripos]] (the only student in his year to do so)<ref>"Tripos Results at Cambridge", ''[[The Times Educational Supplement]]'', 2 July 1954, p. 659.</ref> and a first in Part II.<ref name="WW"/> He graduated in 1955, winning the Hentsch Prize on the basis of his results.<ref name="WW"/> Lambert then embarked on postgraduate research at the same college with a thesis on "State Activity in Public Health, 1858-71", receiving his PhD in 1959.<ref>Lambert, Royston, [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3825691?seq=2 "Central and Local Relations in Mid-Victorian England: The Local Government Act Office, 1858-71"], ''Victorian Studies'', 6:2 (1962), p. 122n. Retrieved 14 March 2024.</ref>

==Academic career==
Following the completion of his doctorate, Lambert remained at Sidney Sussex for a further two years as a research fellow before moving to the [[London School of Economics]], where he worked on studies of poverty and nutrition as a Nuffield Senior Sociological Scholar from 1961 to 1964.<ref name="Times">"Dr Royston Lambert", ''[[The Times]]'', 9 November 1982, p. 14.</ref> He was appointed an Ehrman Fellow in sociology at [[King's College, Cambridge]], while still at the LSE, holding both positions for two years before moving back to Cambridge to concentrate solely on his fellowship at King's.<ref name="WW"/> 

During this period Lambert was a productive scholar, publishing firstly a definitive treatise on the Victorian pathologist [[John Simon (pathologist)|Sir John Simon]] and his impact on public hygiene in Britain upon being appointed the nation's first [[Chief Medical Officers (United Kingdom)|Chief Medical Officer]] in 1855.<ref>Lambert, Royston, ''Sir John Simon, 1816-1904, and English Social Administration'' (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963).</ref> Next came a summation of his research at the LSE, ''Nutrition in Britain 1950–1960'', published in 1964. Thereafter he turned his attention to the sociology of elite [[Public school (United Kingdom)|public school]] education in England, in particular that of [[boarding schools]]. In 1964, he founded and became the first director of the Research Unit into Boarding Education, based at King's, which was to provide much of the evidence for the Public Schools Commission report of 1968.<ref name="Times"/> His first monograph on the subject, ''The State and Boarding Education'', was published in 1966, to be followed in quick succession by ''The Hothouse Society'' (with Spencer Millham; 1968) and ''New Wine in Old Bottles? Studies in Integration in the Public Schools'' (1968). ''The Hothouse Society'', in particular, was an influential book, which featured extensive interviews with boarding school pupils; Nick Duffell, writing thirty years later, states that Lambert did a "fine job as a sociologist", leaving "a remarkable record" simply by letting the boarders' words speak for themselves, even if he did not always probe the system's darkest recesses.<ref>Duffell, Nick, ''The Making of Them: the British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System'' (London: Lone Arrow, 2000), p. 20. {{ISBN|0953790401}}</ref>

==Headmaster of Dartington Hall School, 1968–73==
{{Main|Dartington Hall#Dartington Hall School}}
Lambert established the Boarding Schools' Association in 1966, with the intention of providing a forum that would attract the support of progressive-minded educationalists similar to himself. That, and his recent research output, made him a known figure among the pedagogic community, and two years later he was selected by the Trustees of Dartington Hall to be their boarding school's next headmaster, despite the fact that he had no experience of working in such an environment.<ref name="Trust"/> Nevertheless, the opportunity gave Lambert a chance to put his research theories into practice. Although Dartington was widely regarded as a school for the offspring of the upper-middle class ''avant garde'', he recognised that it had lost the innovative streak upon which its reputation had rested prior to the [[Second World War]], and was "closer to most ordinary schools now than before".<ref name="NewSociety">Lambert, Royston, "What Dartington Will Do", ''New Society'', 30 January 1969, p. 158.</ref> He wanted to bring to Dartington a new era of radicalism, one that would deconstruct the school and leave it turned "inside out". "I have just become headmaster of a school", he wrote in ''[[New Society]]'' in January 1969,

{{blockquote|If things go well, by the time I leave, there might not be much of a conventional school left for me or anyone else to headmaster. I hope to have become non-head of the first anti-school in the country, the first of many."<ref name="NewSociety" />}}

In fact, as Mark Kidel relates, Lambert's ambitions were not quite as drastic as such rhetoric suggests. He did, however, emphasise the need for the school to engage with the outside world, to break down the divisions between school on the one hand and work and life on the other, and to transcend the class divisions that public schools had traditionally sought to uphold.<ref>Kidel, Mark, ''Beyond the Classroom: Dartington's Experiments in Education'' (Hartland, CT: Green, 1989), pp. 61-2. {{ISBN|1870098323}}</ref> One idea that was central to his ambitions was what became known as the 'Yorkshire project'. Originally intended to be a "branch" of the school "in a city centre", the project eventually focused on an exchange scheme involving pupils at Dartington and those at [[De Warenne Academy|Northcliffe School]], a secondary modern in the [[pit village|pit town]] of [[Conisbrough]], then in the [[West Riding of Yorkshire]].<ref>Kidel, ''Beyond the Classroom'', p. 62.</ref> The West Riding's chief education officer at that time was [[Alec Clegg]], another educationalist with "progressive" ideas, and he, Lambert and [[Michael Duane]] were to later use Northcliffe School as a test venture in a further project known as 'The Terrace', which aimed to provide an alternative means of secondary education for those alienated by conventional schooling.<ref>Duane, Michael, ''The Terrace: An Educational Experiment in a State School'' (London: Freedom Press, 1995). {{ISBN|978-0-900384-78-3}}</ref>

However, as the Dartington Trust has itself acknowledged, "not all of [Lambert’s] schemes succeeded", and lack of support from the Trustees eventually brought about his departure from the school in 1973.<ref name="Trust"/> He was to write about his experiences at Dartington, and to elaborate further on his educational philosophy, in his book ''The Chance of a Lifetime?'' (1975).<ref name="Times"/>

==Later years and death==
After leaving the school Lambert concentrated on running his own art gallery, the Reynolds Gallery, in [[Plymouth]]. He had always possessed a strong aesthetic sense, and restoring paintings was an abiding passion of his, alongside [[Victorian Gothic]] architecture and [[Irish setter]]s.<ref name="WW"/> He published several more books and articles in the 1970s and early 1980s, of which the last, ''Beloved and God: the Story of Hadrian and Antinous'' (1982) – a reconstruction of the short life and subsequent [[deification]] of [[Antinous]], the companion and lover of Emperor [[Hadrian]] – received the most widespread recognition, largely due to its publication in the United States two years after Lambert's death.<ref>The book received many laudatory reviews in the American press. See, for example, [[Bernard Knox|Knox, Bernard]], "Death On the Nile", ''[[The Washington Post]]'', 9 December 1984, BW6.</ref>

Towards the end of his life Lambert was dogged by illness, and he died in [[Patras, Greece]], in late 1982 at the age of 49.<ref name="Times"/>

==Bibliography==
* ''Sir John Simon and English Social Administration'' (1963)
* ''Nutrition in Britain 1950–1960'' (1964)
* ''The State and Boarding Education'' (1966)
* ''The Hothouse Society'' (with Spencer Millham; 1968)
* ''New Wine in Old Bottles? Studies in Integration in the Public Schools'' (1968)
* ''Manual to the Sociology of the School'' (1970)
* ''Alternatives to School'' (W. B. Curry Memorial Lecture; 1971)
* ''The Chance of a Lifetime?'' (1975)
* ''Body and Soul'' (1980)
* ''Beloved and God: the Story of Hadrian and Antinous'' (1982) 

== References ==

{{reflist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lambert, Royston}}
[[Category:1932 births]]
[[Category:1982 deaths]]
[[Category:Alumni of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge]]
[[Category:English educators]]
[[Category:Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge]]
[[Category:Fellows of King's College, Cambridge]]
[[Category:People associated with the London School of Economics]]