Margery Freda Perham was born on 6 Sep 1895 in Bury, Lancashire. She was the second daughter and youngest child of Frederick Perham, a wine and spirit merchant, and his wife Marion. The family soon moved to Harrogate, where Margery's formative years were spent. She was a confirmed tomboy. While sharing the activities of her brothers she learned how to ride, shoot, take, and develop photographs, and play gold, accomplishments that proved their value in her unusual career. As eleven years separated the births of Margery and her sister Ethel, they had little in common until the former reached her twenties. Edgar, the youngest brother, was her favourite. With him, she created imaginary countries and games of fantasy and wrote verses and plays, which he set to music and they performed for family and friends.

After a short period at a school in Harrogate, Margery was sent with her sister, in 1904, to St. Stephen's College, run by the Clewer Sisterhood in Windsor. In 1910, she transferred to the Woodward Foundation School of St. Anne's, Abbots Bromley. There, in 1913, she won a scholarship to Oxford but elected to stay on as head girl until 1914. She then went up to St. Hugh's College, Oxford, to read Modern History, gaining a distinction in the Preliminary Examination and the equivalent of first-class honours in the final degree examination in 1917, for which women sat but were not officially awarded degrees until 1929. Edgar was also up at Oxford for her first year, before he volunteered for the army and was killed in France, at Delville, in Jun 1916. This caused her immense grief.

In 1917, Margery was persuaded to go to Sheffield University as an Assistant Lecturer in Modern History. Although this was at first a temporary appointment, her tenure was confirmed within the year and she became the first woman member of the teaching staff. Between 1917 and 1919, under the War Office Educational Scheme, she spent her vacations lecturing on the historical causes of the war to the troops, both on Salisbury Plain and in Northern France. After the Armistice, a considerable number of former servicemen returned to or entered the university for the first time and her workload increased greatly. While at Sheffield, her relaxations were writing, producing, and acting in plays, walking or riding on the moors, and riding her motorbike. Nevertheless, overwork in 1920 caused a breakdown in health and she was granted a year's sick leave, which, fulfilling a childhood ambition to visit Africa, she spent in Somaliland with her sister, her brother-in-law Harry Rayne, a District Commissioner, and their children. She fell in love with Africa while observing the wildlife, tracking, and shooting game with her brother-in-law and accompanying him on patrol with the Camel Corps to round up the remaining followers of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan. After returning to Sheffield, she wrote the novel Major Dane's Garden to record her impressions of the country and what she had learned about the practicalities of colonial administration. She later regretted that she had not undertaken a more serious work on Somaliland administration. However, a course in Colonial History was added to the University's curriculum and she began lecturing on the colonisation of America and Africa and the anti-slavery movement.

In 1924, Margery Perham was invited back to her Oxford college as a tutor in Modern History and Modern Greats and was made a fellow in 1925. Between 1925 and 1929, she lectured on eighteenth-century British history, nineteenth-century imperial history, the history of native administration and the Mandate System controlled by the League of Nations Commission, whose sessions in Geneva she observed on more than one occasion. Colonial Service cadets undergoing postgraduate training before appointment to their first overseas post attended some of her lecture courses, and she was involved in running additional courses on colonial administration held in Oxford in the summer vacations. Holidays were spent visiting France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Poland.

In 1929, to further her research into native administration, Margery Perham was awarded a Travelling Fellowship by the Rhodes Trust. She embarked on a world tour which took her across America to Samoa, New Zealand, South Africa, the Rhodesias (Zambia and Zimbabwe), East Africa, and the Belgian Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo). During her travels, she wrote the first of her many articles for The Times. The Fellowship was renewed for a year in order that she might pursue her studies in greater depth. The additional funds also enabled her to extend her study tour to West Africa after spending a few months at home. However, there were drawbacks. Her college was unable to keep her post vacant for a further year and so, on her return to England, she had neither employment nor any financial support apart from a legacy from her father. St. Hugh's College elected her to a non-stipendiary research fellowship for five years, which enabled her to retain her connection with both college and university, and she was asked to give an occasional course of lectures on her chosen subject. To finance her research, she had to seek bursaries. During these years, her home was with the Raynes, who had returned to England to buy, with her help, Ponds Farm at Shere, near Guildford. A barn was converted into a library for her and there she wrote her articles for The Times, prepared the book based on her correspondence in that paper with Lionel Curtis, The Protectorates of South Africa, Oxford University Press (OUP), 1935, and wrote Native Administration in Nigeria, OUP, 1937.

Lord Lugard, whom she had met and impressed just before embarking on her world tour, lived nearby, and she frequently rode over to his home, Little Parkhurst, to discuss indirect rule and native administration with him. He introduced her to a number of influential people in the sphere of African studies. One, his close friend Joseph Oldham, procured for her a bursary from the Institute of African Languages and Culture, which enabled her to take the short course in anthropology given by Malinowski at the London School of Economics, in which Jomo Kenyatta was a fellow student. In 1932, Margery Perham was also awarded a Rockefeller Travelling Scholarship by the Institute so that she might visit East Africa and Sudan and produce two books on their native administration. Repeated bouts of what had been diagnosed as sleeping sickness while she was in West Africa, but which was probably malaria, prevented her from taking advantage of it at this time. Despite illness, she continued writing and in 1934 was awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for her paper on 'Some Problems of Indirect Rule'.

In Oct 1935, Margery Perham was again officially employed by Oxford University, being appointed Research Lecturer in Colonial Administration for five years. There was an informal understanding that each year her lecturing commitments should be fulfilled in two terms and that she should be free to travel the rest of the time. To finance the first period of travel, to East Africa, including Sudan, in 1936-1937, the Institute again came to her aid, appointing her a Research Fellow for nine months. While on tour, she was invited to travel as an observer with Lord De La Warr's Commission inquiring into higher education at Makerere and Gordon College in Khartoum.

Meanwhile, there had been considerable agitation in Oxford to establish colonial studies on a much firmer footing. The Trustees of Cecil Rhodes's estate and teaching members of the University, led by Reginald Coupland the Beit Professor, were eager to make Rhodes House an institute or centre for colonial studies of all kinds, anthropological, historical, administrative, economic, political, and social. Sir Edward Grigg and Sir Donald Cameron, the Governors of Kenya and Tanganyika (Tanzania), supported Coupland's ideas promising financial and other assistance. All of them expected her to play an important part in implementing these ideas. A book on East Africa, for which Evans-Pritchard, Coupland, Margery Perham, and William Stannard would each write a section was intended as part of this general scheme for expanding colonial studies in Oxford; because of the war, it was never completed. Many of the same people were instrumental in setting up the African Survey Project, administered by the staff of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Margery Perham was one of the advisory committee, which met at Lord Lothian's home, Blickling Hall, to discuss its scope and methods and appointed Lord Hailey to carry out the work on his retirement from service in India. She acted as a research consultant and lent Hailey her own files of notes to assist him in his work, which culminated in the publication of An African Survey by the Oxford University Press in 1938.

Before the plans for extending the functions of Rhodes House were finalised, a new Oxford college was endowed by Lord Nuffield; Margery Perham was made its first official fellow and member of its governing board. Through her, Colonial Studies became the prerogative of Nuffield College, running parallel to the Social Reconstruction Survey directed by G.D.H. Cole. Both were partly financed by government funds, and partly by the Higher Education Fund of the University which, for Colonial Studies, was subsidised by a grant from the Rhodes Trustees. After the passing of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1940, the Colonial Development Research Fund contributed towards the Nuffield studies of colonial legislatures and economies. They were supervised by Margery Perham as the University Research Lecturer in Colonial Administration and, from 1945 to 1948, as Director of the Institute of Colonial Studies, which evolved from the work of the College.

During the Second World War, she undertook a considerable amount of research on the administration of Ethiopia for the Foreign Office, assisted by Frank de Halpert, a friend of Lugard's who had served in Ethiopia before the Italian invasion. This study was intended to provide a background for those who would be advising the Emperor Haile Selassie on the introduction of more democratic methods after his reinstatement by the British army. Frank de Halpert became an adviser to the Emperor and Margery Perham's work was eventually published by Faber and Faber in 1948 as The Government of Ethiopia. It was the only country about which she wrote without having visited it.

Also during the war, Margery Perham was much in demand by various bodies as an expert lecturer on colonial affairs and the progress of the war and she sat on several Colonial Office Committees. In 1939, Lord Lugard, the former British representative, had proposed to the Secretary of State for the Colonies that she should be nominated Hailey's successor on the Permanent Mandates Commission. His suggestion was not followed up, but she was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies. Later, she was asked by Oliver Stanley to serve on the Irvine Commission on Higher Education in the West Indies which, early in 1944, went there to investigate the possibilities and evolve a plan for a University of the West Indies.

Having crossed the Atlantic, she made a brief lecture tour in the United States on behalf of the British Information Service, to enlighten American academic and business institutions on British post-war colonial policy. While there, she spent two days meeting the United States Committee on Dependent Areas and interviewing officials of the State Department on American attitudes towards imperialism and policy towards dependent nations. When the Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies was created, to implement and improve upon the proposals made by the Asquith Commission, the Irvine Commission and the parallel Elliot Commission on Higher Education in West Africa, Margery Perham was immediately appointed a member of its Executive Committee. On its behalf, she carried out many visits of inspection to the new colonial universities and university colleges. She also became a member of the Council of Makerere College and, wherever possible, timed her post-war visits to East Africa to coincide with its meetings.

As one who would be involved in the training of the Colonial Service after the war, her advice was sought by the Oxford University representatives on the committee set up by the Colonial Office, under the chairmanship of the Duke of Devonshire, to consider the reforms necessary to meet the very different administrative and technical requirements of the colonies in a post-war world. She wrote a series of memoranda for consideration by the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar of the University and Sir Ralph Furse, who was in charge of recruitment at the Colonial Office. The Devonshire Committee not only revised the curriculum for the cadets' courses at Oxford, Cambridge, and London Universities, but also initiated a refresher course for serving officers. Margery Perham had strongly advocated this, knowing how out of touch with developments in colonial policy and methods of administration the man in the field felt himself to be. In 1948, when a School of Administration at the University of Khartoum was being planned, she was also asked to draw up a curriculum for training Sudanese administrative officers.

In 1946, Margery Perham was reelected Reader in Colonial Administration for seven years and looked forward to renewing her travels, using her travel funds that had accumulated while wartime restrictions prevented overseas travel. Above all, she wished to resume her visits to Sudan to complete a book on its administration, in which she was being assisted by a specially funded research assistant and by the goodwill of the serving officers and the Sudan Office in London, all of whom had provided her assiduously for years with information, documents, and informal letters. The travel needed to breathe life into this book proved more difficult to arrange than she had expected. To her normal teaching, supervising, and editorial duties were added fresh responsibilities, both within Oxford University and extra-murally. She was deeply involved in introducing the new curriculum for the cadets and the B course for more senior members of the Colonial Service, attending and speaking at the Colonial Office Summer Schools on Local Government and African Administration, serving on the Colonial Social Science Research Council and on the committee investigating the political significance of colonial students in the United Kingdom. She was also acting as a referee in the appointment of teachers of economics at the London School of Economics whenever the applicants' work embraced anything to do with the Colonies.

In 1948, Margery Perham was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in recognition of her services to the Colonial and Foreign Offices, but she found that they imposed too great a burden when added to her full university teaching duties and the direction of the Institute of Colonial Studies. Since her health was suffering from this strain, she reorganised her life, resigning her Readership and the Directorship of the Institute to be appointed, instead, the Fellow in Imperial Government at Nuffield College. She thereby gained a certain degree of freedom, which enabled her to return to her research in Africa, especially in Sudan and East Africa, and apply herself to her biography of Lord Lugard and the publication of his expedition diaries. In addition, she could find time to make a considerable contribution to the Colonial Social Science Research Council's review of plans for research into the history and administration of the Colonial Empire and to serve on the Colonial Office secret committee investigating Constitutional Development in the Smaller Colonial Territories. By Jan 1950, she was serving on five different Colonial Office Advisory Committees. In fact, in these immediate post-war years, she came very close to the heart of government of the colonies through her friendships, not only with officials and administrators, but also with some politicians. A particular friend was Arthur Creech Jones, the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1946 to 1950, which whom she shared many hopes and ideals for the development, welfare, and political liberation of the colonial peoples.

Although a friend and adviser to the Colonial Office, Margery Perham did not hesitate to criticise and oppose its policies when she thought they were ill-conceived. In the 1950s, several occasions arose for her to criticise, not only in the press but also by supporting certain campaigns conducted by friends familiar with conditions in colonial territories and concerned about the future of their peoples. Although she had been one of the advisory panel of the Fabian Colonial Bureau from its instigation, ready to give its Executive Committee an expert opinion on any territory or administrative matter with which she was acquainted, her direct participation in its activities was very small. There, her influence was through conversations and correspondence with its members, its Secretary Rita Hinden, and its first Chairman, Arthur Creech Jones.

In 1950, at the instigation of David Astor, she combined with Colin Legum, the Reverend Michael Scott, and others in planning a book on British Imperialism, most of which was drafted by her early in 1952, but which never reached publication. Her opposition to the proposed federation of the two Rhodesias (Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (Malawi) led her to become one of the nine advisers of the Africa Bureau set up by the Reverend Michael Scott, Creech Jones, Dingle Foot, John Macallum Scott, and Mary Benson, its first Secretary. To help fund its Africa Protectorates Trust, dedicated to 'promoting the education, training, health and relief of the native peoples of South West Africa, Bechuanaland, Swaziland and Basutoland and any other charitable purposes for their welfare', she assigned to it the royalties of her book Ten Africans, Faber and Faber, 1936. With the same group of friends, Margery Perham conspired to bring about a reconciliation, under David Astor's roof at Sutton Courtenay, between the two exiled leaders of Bechuanaland (Botswana), Seretse Khama and his uncle Tshekedi Khama, whom she had known for many years. This reconciliation enabled the British Government to revoke the Orders in Council imposing exile on them.

Such criticism and intervention were not taken amiss by the authorities. In 1952, she was asked by the Colonial Office to submit a memorandum on the conditions that were essential before parliamentary government could function effectively in the colonies. In 1954, the Foreign Office commissioned her to undertake a lightning tour of the major universities in Germany in order to lecture on current British colonial policy and thereby counter the effect of certain statements on race relations made by the High Commissioner for South Africa during a recent visit to that country.

From 1952 honours and responsibilities from outside her own university were bestowed on Margery Perham in recognition of her knowledge and experience of Commonwealth affairs. That year, she received an honorary LL.D. from the University of St Andrews. She was also elected to the Council of the South African Institute of Race Relations as a representative of its overseas members. In 1958, she was nominated a member of the British Institute of Race Relations. To her delight and surprise, she was invited in 1960 to attend the independence celebrations of both Somaliland and Nigeria as a guest of the governments. Further pleasure and much work came her way the following year when she was invited by the BBC to give as that year's series of Reith Lectures and assessment of the significance of British imperial rule, six lectures to which she gave the title 'The Colonial Reckoning'. She was no novice to broadcasting, having given her first talk in 1934 in a series to celebrate the centenary of the abolition of slavery.

Earlier in 1961, she had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy and awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Mungo Park Medal. Royal recognition also came, that year, in the form of an invitation to a luncheon given by the Queen to honour the President of Senegal during his state visit. In May 1962, her old college, St. Hugh's, elected her an honorary fellow and Southampton University bestowed on her an honorary D. Litt. Such recognition by other universities prompted her to supplicate for the degree of Doctor of Letters to the University of Oxford. This she received in 1963, the year of her formal retirement from the teaching staff of the University, when she was also made an honorary fellow of Nuffield College. Earlier that year, Makerere, too, invited her to become an honorary fellow along with the Prime Minister Milton Obote, Julius Nyerere, and her old friends Sir Philip Mitchell and Sir Andrew Cohen. As the culmination of this year, of change she attended Kenya's Independence Celebrations as a guest of the government.

Like most academics, Margery Perham did not contemplate retirement as an abandonment of work. To her, release from routine duties promised an opportunity to write a definitive history of what she deemed to be the critical period in the political life of Kenya, 1929-1931. As one of its 'animators', she was already advising on the preparation for publication of Volume II of the Oxford History of East Africa, to which she wrote the Introduction. Her responsibility for editing Volume III, however, was soon relinquished to D.A. Low and Alison Smith. In any case, the format of the Oxford History did not permit her to include in it the kind of study she felt qualified to write both by personal contact at the time with the main political events and personalities in East Africa and Britain and by subsequent years of study. At the age of 68, with the aid of a series of research assistants, she embarked upon a formidable programme of revision and research into newly available primary sources on the Hilton Young Report on Closer Union in East Africa and the work of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on East Africa instigated by Lord Lugard and his friends to investigate its findings and implications. She had first two debts of loyalty and scholarship to discharge to her old friend. With the help of Mary Bull, Margery Perham finished preparing her publication the fourth volume of his diaries of expeditions in Africa and she wrote the introduction to, and prepared for publication, the final edition of his book on colonial administration, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, Faber and Faber, 1965. Wisely, she decided not to edit his diary of the expedition into Ngamiland for the British West Charterland Company.

Writing the book on Kenya was more difficult to find time for than the preparation. Her very eminence in Commonwealth studies compelled her to assume several offices in retirement. In 1963, she was chosen to be the first President of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. The same year, she became President of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa and presided over the meetings that negotiated its merger with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. For some time, she had been concerned about the safety and conservation of colonial archives, not only the public records but also those of private persons who, with the spreading grant of independence to colonial peoples, would be leaving the countries in which they had served. In some countries, she persuaded Governors and administrators to put in hand inquiries into the future housing and administration of the archives. In Oxford, with several colleagues, she instigated the search and retrieval programme of the Colonial Records Project and acted as its Chairman for ten years.

The years 1964 and 1965 brought Margery Perham ever more public recognition. The University of London honoured her with the degree of Doctor of Letters and she was made an honorary fellow of its School of Oriental and African Studies in 1964. Then, in 1965, she was created a Dame Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George to which so many of her gubernatorial friends had been appointed.

In this her 70th year, she began to withdraw from the remainder of the committees on which she had sat for many years, hoping to gain more time for writing. Nevertheless, heavy demands on her time continued. Several times each year, she was invited to broadcast on current African affairs, and in Apr 1965 she gave a series of four talks based on her own experience and views called 'Thinking Aloud about Africa'. In 1966, when there was a crisis in Nigeria, she herself asked the head of the Third Programme if she might speak on that country in 'Personal View'; the Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who was due to give a talk, courteously stood down to let her do so. Later talks, such as 'The Time of My Life' and the series 'Travelling on Trust', tended to be more autobiographical. While preparing these scripts, she reread her diaries written as letters to her sister while she was travelling as a Rhodes Fellow and partially edited for publication in about 1939. Public response to her talks confirmed her belief that those diaries were still worth publishing. She therefore resumed work on these. Two of them were published in her lifetime as African Apprenticeship and East African Journey. When she was no longer able to finish the task, Anthony Kirk-Greene completed the editing of two more for posthumous publication as West African Passage and Pacific Prelude.

While Margery Perham was intent on handing over many of her responsibilities and passing on much of her experience to younger people in the second half of the 1960s, the outbreak of civil war in Nigeria imposed on her a great moral responsibility. At first, her sympathies lay with the Biafrans, as her letters to the press in 1967 indicate, letters which brought her reproaches from some friends. However, an end to the war and reconciliation between the two sides was her real desire and aim. Therefore, when the Federal Nigerian leaders, who realised how much her partisanship was damaging their cause, invited her out to Lagos to see and judge the situation for herself, she accepted as swiftly as she had made her choice in 1930. At the age of 73, she flew to Nigeria, carried out an exhausting programme of interviews arranged for her by the Federal authorities and by the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, and visited the war front. What she learned convinced her that, though from the beginning she had assiduously studied press and radio reports of the Nigerian troubles, together with all the propaganda issued by both sides and by various pressure groups, her assessment of the situation had been in some respects mistaken or misled.

Admitting as much, she asked leave to make a broadcast appeal over the Nigerian radio to the Biafran leader, Colonel Ojukwu, to bring an end to the fighting. During her brief visit, she came to trust the intentions of the young Federal leader, General Yakobu Gowon, and to admire his attempt to bring order to the country. He, in turn, trusted her love for his country and her desire to use her knowledge of Africa and influence in Britain to help bring about peace and order throughout Nigeria.

On her return to England, despite exhaustion, Margery Perham plunged into giving radio talks and interviews, writing letters to The Times and articles and many personal letters, in an attempt to change public opinion and so give the new Federal Military Government a better chance of setting things to right in Nigeria. Many of the letters she received were hostile, accusing her of being a turncoat, but she had never been afraid to speak her mind, even when that meant admitting that she had changed her mind. The friendship forged with Gowon continued throughout his presidency of Nigeria, his fall from power, and his period as a student at Warwick University.

Margery Perham's last visit to Africa, to consult records and the memories of old friends for her major work on Kenya, was in 1969. Then, she met again, just before he was assassinated, Tom Mboya, her former protégé in Oxford. Ten years before they had planned to publish in book form a series of discursive letters on Kenya and politics, but both were too distracted by other matters to see the work through its final stages. In May that year, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and two months later received her final honorary degree from Birmingham University. These were not, however, the last of the distinctions and expressions of esteem she received. In the 1970s, she received invitations to lunch with the Prime Minister at Chequers or to dine at No. 10 Downing Street when African heads of state were being entertained. In May 1977, she was amused to receive a letter informing her she had been elected a 'Daughter of Mark Twain' by the International Mary Twain Society for her outstanding contribution to world peace. Some years before, Sir Winston Churchill had received a similar title from the society. As she resigned from bodies which she had served for a great many years, such as the Inter-University Council on Higher Education in the Colonies (IUC), dinners were given in her honour. In 1979, Nuffield College, too, gave a dinner to celebrate her 40 years as a fellow.

Amid all the public demands upon her time and energies, Margery Perham had been caring for her much-loved elder sister, who for many years had relieved her of household duties. Her own health deteriorated and she suffered a number of accidents. The amount of work she was able to do naturally diminished and, though she never lost interest in it, she never completed her book on Kenya. She died in a nursing home at Burcot in Oxfordshire on 19 Feb 1982. Two memorial services were held, one in Nuffield College Chapel on 5 Mar and the other, by the University, in St. Mary's Church, Oxford, on 1 May. In 1987, the college's jubilee year, a plaque in her memory was dedicated by the Bishop of Oxford in Nuffield College Chapel.