Royston James Lambert 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.
10 Facts About Royston Lambert
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Royston Lambert was born in Barking in the East End of London, the son of Albert and Edith Lambert.
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Royston Lambert graduated in 1955, winning the Hentsch Prize on the basis of his results.
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Royston Lambert 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.
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The Hothouse Society, in particular, was an influential book, which featured extensive interviews with boarding school pupils; Nick Duffell, writing thirty years later, states that Royston Lambert did a "fine job as a sociologist", leaving "a remarkable record" simply by letting the boarders' words speak for themselves, even if he did not always probe the system's darkest recesses.
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Royston 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.
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Royston Lambert wanted to bring to Dartington a new era of radicalism, one that would deconstruct the school and leave it turned "inside out".
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Royston Lambert did emphasise the need for the school to engage with the outside world, to break down the divisions between school on the one hand and work and life on the other, and to transcend the class divisions that public schools had traditionally sought to uphold.
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Royston Lambert had always possessed a strong aesthetic sense, and restoring paintings was an abiding passion of his, alongside Victorian Gothic architecture and Irish setters.
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Towards the end of his life Royston Lambert was dogged by illness, and he died in Patras, Greece, in late 1982 at the age of 49.