Margaret Cole

Who was Margaret Cole?

Dame Margaret Isabel Cole, DBE was an English socialist politician.

Daughter of John Percival Postgate and Edith Allen, Margaret was educated at Roedean School and Girton College, Cambridge. While at Girton, through her reading of H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and others, she came to question the Anglicanism of her upbringing and to embrace atheism, socialism and feminism. On successfully completing her course, Margaret became a classics teacher at St. Paul's Girls' School. Her poem 'The Falling Leaves', a response to the First World War, and currently on the OCR English Literature syllabus at GCSE, shows the influence of Latin poetry in its use of long and short syllables to create mimetic effects.

During World War I, her brother Raymond sought exemption from military service as a socialist conscientious objector, but was denied recognition and jailed for refusing military orders. Margaret's support for her brother led her to a belief in pacifism. During her subsequent campaign against conscription, she met G. D. H. Cole, whom she married in 1918.

The couple worked together for the Fabian Society before moving to Oxford in 1924 where they both taught and wrote.