ABSTRACT
With the exception of the papers of Cecil Rhodes himself, no manuscript collection in Rhodes House Library can more properly be said to have come home than the papers of Dame Margery Perham. When she was a young lecturer at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, the Rhodes Trust had sponsored her study of colonial administration by means of a travelling fellowship and later, by contributing towards the endowment of her university post, enabled her to communicate its results. Much of her teaching was done in Rhodes House and all her books are on the library shelves. She was pre-eminent among those who in the 1960s launched the Colonial Records Project whereby colonial administrators were persuaded to donate their papers and memoirs to the Library. The Perham Papers now constitute one of the largest and most important personal collections in Rhodes House, and its value is enhanced by the way in which it relates to so many other colonial and academic records, particularly those deposited in Oxford.
