Royston Lambert

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, 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. 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be a model pupil, but having no Latin pass on his Higher School Certificate meant his exhibition to study at Oxford was rescinded and he was unable to take up his place there. and a first in Part II.

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. 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. 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.

Headmaster of Dartington Hall School, 1968–1973

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. 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,

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." 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 town of Conisbrough, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire. 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.

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.

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.