ABSTRACT
The title of this article is misleading: it promises much more than it could possibly provide. My intention was only to review what might emerge from her private papers about Margery Perham’s contacts with ministers and officials of the Colonial Office after a necessarily summary reconnaissance with the invaluable assistance of Patricia Pugh’s index to the archive. At the back of my mind when I embarked on that review was a question I was asked in Oxford forty years ago after I had given a talk on the Colonial Office: ‘How far is Margery Perham Miss Mother Country?’ I did not then think that she occupied any such position, and I do not now. Those who recall Charles Buller’s celebrated, witty, and grossly unfair caricature of the greatest of the permanent under-secretaries of the Colonial Office, Sir James Stephen, will understand why. 2 This account lays no claim to arriving at an assessment of her overall influence on colonial policy-makers or on public opinion on such issues. For my part, I believe this to have been considerable, notably on members of the colonial services as well as governors, those members of either house of parliament who were not Colonial Office ministers, and her academic and publicist colleagues. My review addresses only a much more limited problem: how influential was she in consequence of her personal contacts with ministers and officials?
