Mingay, G.E. 1923–2006

(Lee Lambert, Gordon Edmund Mingay)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born June 20, 1923, in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, England; died January 3, 2006. Historian, educator, and author. A professor emeritus at the University of Kent, Min-gay was best known for his research and publications on agrarian history in the United Kingdom. He served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War II, during which he was commissioned as a cipher officer and was involved in D-Day operations support. Just after the war ended, he also served in Asia, leaving the service as a lieutenant commander in 1947. He then returned to England, paying for his education at Chatham Technical College through employment with the Kent education department. Next, he entered Nottingham University, where Min-gay was convinced by one of his professors to focus on agrarian studies. He left the university with a Ph.D. in 1958 and taught at the London School of Economics as a lecturer in economic history until 1965. Min-gay moved on to a better paying position at the University of Kent in 1965, where he was a reader in economic history and eventually professor of agrarian history from 1968 until his 1985 retirement. Best known for his writings on agrarian history, such as English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (1963), Rural Life in Victorian England (1976), and A Social History of the English Countryside (1990), Mingay also wrote biography and more general histories, such as Arthur Young and His Times (1975) and Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence, and Impact, 1750–1850 (1997). While not teaching or writing, Mingay was a former editor of the Agricultural Review and was active in professional associations, including as a former president of the British Agricultural History Society. Interestingly, he also occasionally indulged in writing escapist thriller novels under the pen name of Lee Lambert. Among these are The Guaymas Assignment (1979), Blonde for Danger (1980), and The Balinese Pearls (1982).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), April 5, 2006, p. 58.