Dictionary of Glengarry Biography

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====== Mair, David Beveridge ====== 
 (24 March 1868-21 July 1942), civil servant, author. Born at Martintown, GC. Parents: Rev. James Mair and his wife Margaret Beveridge (d. 1918). He was only a few months old when his parents left Martintown. Several years of his early childhood were spent in the United States. After the death of the father, which was in 1875, Mrs Mair took the family to his home country (and hers), Scotland. David Beveridge Mair attended Dollar Academy, near Stirling, and Edinburgh University (M.A.) and Cambridge University (A. M., 1895). He was elected a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1894. In 1896 he became an examiner in the Civil Service Commission. A mathematician by training, he was the author of //A School Course of Mathematics// (1907), //Junior Mathematics// (1911), //Exercises in Mathematics// (1914), and //Fourfold Geometry// (1926). The records of the Clarendon Press, one of his publishers, include the statement of one observer that Mair’s textbooks did not sell well because they were “too good for the average teacher.” During World War I, when Mair was employed as a cryptographer in the British Admiralty, his breaking of a coded German message led to the capture of the German agent and Irish nationalist hero, Sir Roger Casement (executed 1916).

<tab>David Beveridge Mair was married on 14 Oct. 1897 to Janet (Jessy) Philip. (four children) From the First World War onwards, she was secretary to William Henry Beveridge (1879-1963), who later became Lord Beveridge and is a major historical figure as the author of the celebrated Beveridge Report of 1942. The Beveridge Report was one of the major foundation stones of the welfare state in Britain. It has also had a powerful influence on the creation of state welfare programs elsewhere in the world. David Beveridge Mair and Lord Beveridge were second cousins. In the life of Lord Beveridge in the //Dictionary of National Biography// and its recent successor the //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography//, Mrs Mair is uncompromisingly described as “an overbearing and temperamental Scotswoman.” She is said to have been much disliked by the teaching staff when Beveridge was director of the London School of Economics. Mrs Mair formed a close personal association, which quite likely did not include a sexual liaison, with Beveridge. Though she and her husband apparently never wholly broke with each other, they eventually lived separately. David Beveridge Mair, who had retired from the British civil service in 1933, died in Scotland, where a daughter provided him with accomodations after his brother’s house in England, where he had been living, was damaged by a bomb in 1941. On 15 Dec. 1942, five months after David Beveridge Mair died, Mrs Mair married Beveridge.

<tab>David Beveridge Mair was one of remarkable group of well-connected Glengarrians who were living in England about the beginning of the 1920s. (See this dictionary for Mrs David Fraser, Archibald MacGillivray, Sir Donald Macmaster, and Sir Edward Peacock) The fact that Mair appears in both the 1898 and the 1912 editions of Morgan’s biographical dictionary suggests that he maintained Canadian contacts, if not necessarily Glengarrian ones. He is of some general historical interest and significance as someone who through his peculiar connection with Beveridge stood for many years at one of the centres of modern thought and planning on state welfare. David Beveridge Mair was a severe and austere man, but this was true also of Beveridge, who besides was thought by some people to be emotionally more than a little pinched; so evidently Mrs Mair made her choice between two highly restrained men.

<tab>David Beveridge Mair’s son, Philip Beveridge Mair, in reply to Beveridge’s biographer José Harris, wrote a book in defence of his parents called //Shared Enthusiasm// (1982). Another child of the Mair marriage, Lucy Mair (28 Jan. 1901-1 April 1986), was a professor of applied anthropology at the London School of Economics, and the author of many scholarly publications. A festschrift in her honour, //Choice and Change: Essays in Honour of Lucy Mair//, ed. J. Davis, was published by The Athlone Press, University of London,1974. That her life appears in the //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography// (several pages, with portrait) is plain evidence that she was seen as having more than usual academic significance. The entry has material on her parents and the Beveridge entanglement, and notes her description in a 1983 interview of her parental family as “awful.”


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<fs small>Philip Beveridge Mair, //Shared Enthusiasm: the Story of Lord and Lady Beveridge// (Surrey, Ascent Books, 1982) * José Harris, life of Beveridge in //DNB//: Supplement 1961-1970, and José Harris, //William Beveridge: a Biography// (1977) * Morgan (1898) 600-601, and Morgan (1912) 726 * Oxford University Press Archives, Clarendon Press editorial file LB2096, courtesy Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press * Royce MacGillivray, “Glengarrians in 1920s England: a Note,” //Glengarry Life// No. 37 (2003) * Lucy Mair: festschrift as cited (portrait, list of publications, biog. sketch); //Who Was Who 1981-1990// (London 1991) 493 * note on a Mair household servant, //Shared Histories: Transatlantic Letters between Virginia Dickinson Reynolds and Her Daughter Virginia Potter//, ed. Angela Potter (University of Georgia Press, 2006), cited in review, //The Spectator// 16 Sept. 2006
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