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 School and as the biographer of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's catamite, Antinous.
Early life
Royston Lambert was born in Barking in the
East End of
London,
["Royston James Lambert", "Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors", Gale Literature Resource Center (New York, NY: Gale, 1998). Retrieved 14 March 2024. ] the son of Albert and Edith Lambert.
Growing up in a "turbulent" household, he failed his eleven-plus examination and thus attended a secondary modern school, before transferring to Barking Abbey Grammar School when he was 15 years old.
[Dartington Trust, "Royston Lambert", dartington.org, 15 October 2019. Retrieved 14 March 2024.] There he proved to be a model pupil, but having no Latin pass on his Higher School Certificate meant his exhibition to study at Oxford was rescinded and he was unable to take up his place there.
Instead, the following year, he was awarded a major scholarship to attend Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he achieved a first class with distinction in Part I of the historical
tripos (the only student in his year to do so)
["Tripos Results at Cambridge", The Times Educational Supplement, 2 July 1954, p. 659.] and a first in Part II.
He graduated in 1955, winning the Hentsch Prize on the basis of his results.
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.
[Lambert, Royston, "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.]
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.
["Dr Royston Lambert", The Times, 9 November 1982, p. 14.] 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.
During this period Lambert was a productive scholar, publishing firstly a definitive treatise on the Victorian pathologist Sir John Simon and his impact on public hygiene in Britain upon being appointed the nation's first Chief Medical Officer in 1855.[Lambert, Royston, Sir John Simon, 1816-1904, and English Social Administration (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963).] 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 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.[Duffell, Nick, The Making of Them: the British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System (London: Lone Arrow, 2000), p. 20. ]
Headmaster of Dartington Hall School, 1968–73
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.
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".
[Lambert, Royston, "What Dartington Will Do", New Society, 30 January 1969, p. 158.] 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,
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.[Kidel, Mark, Beyond the Classroom: Dartington's Experiments in Education (Hartland, CT: Green, 1989), pp. 61-2. ] 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 Northcliffe School, a secondary modern in the pit village of Conisbrough, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire.[Kidel, Beyond the Classroom, p. 62.] 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.[Duane, Michael, The Terrace: An Educational Experiment in a State School (London: Freedom Press, 1995). ]
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.
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
.
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.
[The book received many laudatory reviews in the American press. See, for example, Bernard Knox, "Death On the Nile", The Washington Post, 9 December 1984, BW6.]
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.
Bibliography
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Sir John Simon and English Social Administration (1963)
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Nutrition in Britain 1950–1960 (1964)
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The State and Boarding Education (1966)
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The Hothouse Society (with Spencer Millham; 1968)
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New Wine in Old Bottles? Studies in Integration in the Public Schools (1968)
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Manual to the Sociology of the School (1970)
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Alternatives to School (W. B. Curry Memorial Lecture; 1971)
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The Chance of a Lifetime? (1975)
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Body and Soul (1980)
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Beloved and God: the Story of Hadrian and Antinous (1982)
