Lorna Arnold

Lorna Arnold OBE (* 7. December 1915 in London as Lorna Rainbow ; † 25. March 2014 ) was a British historian .

Life

Lorna Arnold was born in London in 1915 to a technician for the Royal Naval Air Service and grew up on a farm in rural England in the county of Surrey . In 1934 she received a scholarship to English Literature at Bedford College of the University of London to study. There she graduated in 1937. She then studied to become a teacher at the University of Cambridge and worked for a year as a teacher at a secondary school . However, she did not like the job of a teacher. When she had to interrupt her work due to a heart condition, she was given the opportunity to work in the public service in the course of the Second World War . After her recovery, she started her new job at the War Office . It later belonged to the Army Council Secretariat . In 1944 she was transferred to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office , where she was the first female diplomat, where she was involved in drafting the guidelines of the European Advisory Commission . In August 1945 she moved to Berlin and was a member of the Allied Control Council . In 1946 she worked at the British Embassy in Washington, DC . In 1949 she retired from the civil service and returned to the United Kingdom. Upon her return, she married the American musician Robert Arnold, whom she had met in Washington, DC. The two lived on Cheyne Walk in the Chelsea borough of London , where her husband ran a collection of National Trust musical instruments . In the first half of the 1950s, her husband left her and returned to the United States. From now on Lorna Arnold had to look after their two sons alone. She took a job as a packer in a biscuit factory and later worked as an office worker. In 1959, a chance to escape from her poorly paid office job arose when a former colleague from her time in Berlin gave her the opportunity to work again in the public sector, this time for the Atomic Energy Authority . First she worked in health and safety, including serving on the Windscale Accident Commission , then she worked in records management and assisted Margaret Gowing , the agency's official historian. When Gowing retired, Arnold took over her position. In the course of her further career as a historian, she published a number of books. Her eyesight deteriorated as she got older, and in 2002 she was blind. Over the next few years she revised two of her books and wrote her memoirs , which were published in 2012 as My Short Century . Already in poor health, she died in 2014 after a stroke.

In 1976 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire . She was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Fellow of the Institute of Contemporary British History . The Society for Radiological Protection made her honorary membership. In 2009 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Reading .

Publications

• with Margaret Gowing: Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945-52. Volume 1: Policy Making. Macmillan, London 1974, ISBN 0-333-15781-8 .
• with Margaret Gowing: Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945-52. Volume 2: Policy Execution. Macmillan, London 1974, ISBN 0-333-16695-7 .
• A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia. HMSO Books, London 1987, ISBN 0-11-772412-2 .
• with Katherine Pyne: Britain and the H-Bomb. Palgrave Macmillian, London 2001, ISBN 0-312-23518-6 .
• with Mark Smith: Britain, Australia and the Bomb: The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath. Palgrave Macmillian, London 2006, ISBN 1-4039-2101-6 .
• Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident. Palgrave Macmillian, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-230-57317-8 .
• My Short Century. Cumnor Hill Books, Palo Alto, California 2012, ISBN 978-0-9837029-0-0 .

Web links

• Lorna Arnold obituary. In: The Guardian . March 27, 2014.
• Official website