Edith Holt Whetham

Edith Holt Whetham (1911–2001) was an English lecturer and agricultural economist.

Early life

Edith Holt Whetham was born on 27 December 1911,^[1] the daughter of William Cecil Dampier Whetham, a scientist and agricultural academic from Cambridge^[2] and his wife Catherine, who had also pursued an education at Cambridge.^[3] She had one brother and four sisters, including Elizabeth Cockburn^[4] and Margaret Dampier Whetham,^[5] who also studied and worked at Cambridge. Whetham’s family owned a small manor House in Devon, and also inherited a small estate in Hilfield, Dorset^[6] where they spent family vacations.

Whetham suffered from hearing loss after a fall when she was an infant. She was educated at home and later at Downe House School near Newbury.^[1] In 1930, she enrolled in the University of Cambridge, Newnham College. She took classes in economics, attending a lecture by Maynard Keynes.^[7] As a resident of Newnham, her contemporaries included Elizabeth Caldwell, Dorothy Hill,^[8] Margaret Grimshaw, Jean Mitchell, Nancy Rees and Joyce Laing. She was a Fellow of the College on occasion.

Career

After taking her BA, she worked as a resident scholar at the Ministry of Agriculture. She moved to the journal, The Economist. During World War II, she worked in the Ministry of Food and the Cabinet Office’s civil history department.^[1]

Following the war, she returned to Cambridge^[9] and worked as Gilbey lecturer in History and Economics of Agriculture, which she held until 1963.^[1][10]

In 1952, she published the book, British Farming 1939-1949, a major study of the change in farming practices in England. She resigned from Cambridge in 1963 and took up a position at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria as a visiting Professor of Economics. Her interests had moved to the agricultural needs and economies of the developing world.^[1] She regularly travelled to England from Nigeria.

Her later publications included, the London milk trade 1900-1930 (1960), A history of British agriculture (1846–1914) (1964), Cooperation, land reform, and land settlement: report on a survey in Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria and Iran (1968), The economics of African countries (1969), Agricultural marketing in Africa (1972) and Beef, cattle and sheep 1910-1940 (1976).

In 1966, she was appointed to the executive of the Agricultural Economics Society; in 1971, she was elected president. She continued to research throughout the 1970s, writing the eighth volume of the Cambridge University series Agrarian History of England and Wales (1978).

She was President of the British Agricultural Society from 1977–79.

Whetham died on 28 January 2001 in Cambridge.^[1][11]

References