Dame Margaret Isabel Cole, DBE
Margaret was educated at Roedean School and Girton College, Cambridge. Cambridge University did not permit women to graduate formally with degrees until 1947, however, when she left university, Margaret became a classics teacher at St Paul's Girls' School.
During the First World War, Raymond Postgate applied for exemption from military service, on the grounds that he was a conscientious objector. His application was turned down and he was sent to prison. Margaret’s support for her brother led to a belief in pacifism and she began a campaign against conscription, during which she met George Douglas Howard Cole (1889 – 1959), who was Head of the Research Department of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and adviser to the Trades Unions on war-time economic problems. They were married in August 1918. George was also a poet.
The Coles worked together for the Fabian Society before moving to Oxford in 1924, where they both taught and wrote.
In the early 1930s, Margaret abandoned her pacifism in reaction to the suppression of socialist movements by the governments in Germany and Austria and to the events of the Spanish Civil War.
Margaret wrote several books including a biography of her husband. Margaret's brother Raymond became a labour historian, journalist and novelist. Margaret and her husband collaborated to write several mystery novels.
Harold Wilson awarded Margaret an Order of the ritish Empire (OBE) in 1965 and she became a Dame of the British Empire in 1970.
Margaret died on 7th May 1980.
Margaret Postgate Cole’s WW1 poetry collection “Poems” was published by Allen and Unwin, London in 1918.
She also had a poem included in “An Anthology of War Poems “ compiled by Frederick Brereton (pen name of Frederick Thomson Smith), which was published by Collins, London in 1930.
Margaret and her husband also collaborated on a WW1 collection of poems – “The Bolo Book” (Labour Publishing Company, Allen & Unwin, 1921)
“The Veteran”
We came upon him sitting in the sun
Blinded by war, and left. And past the fence
There came young soldiers from the Hand and Flower,
Asking advice of his experience.
And he said this, and that, and told them tales,
And all the nightmares of each empty head
Blew into air; then, hearing us beside,
"Poor chaps, how'd they know what it's like?" he said.
And we stood there, and watched him as he sat,
Turning his sockets where they went away,
Until it came to one of us to ask "And you're-how old?"
"Nineteen, the third of May."
Published in “Poetry” Magazine, August 1918
“The Falling Leaves” November 1915
Today, as I rode by,
I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree
In a still afternoon,
When no wind whirled them whistling to the sky,
But thickly, silently,
They fell, like snowflakes wiping out the noon;
And wandered slowly thence
For thinking of a gallant multitude
Which now all withering lay,
Slain by no wind of age or pestilence,
But in their beauty strewed
Like snowflakes falling on the Flemish clay.
From “Poems” (Allen and Unwin, London 1918).
Sources: Catherine W. Reilly “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) and Find my Past
