Richard S. Lambert


Richard Stanton Lambert was a biographer, popular historian and broadcaster. He was also the founding editor of The Listener and an employee of the BBC and CBC. His books mainly concern history and biography but he also wrote about crime, travel, art, radio, film and propaganda. In Ariel and All His Quality he wrote about his time with the BBC in its formative years. Propaganda, published in 1939, was a timely investigation of a subject already made familiar during World War I.
For Franklin of the Arctic: a life of adventure, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1949, Lambert won both the first Governor General's Award for Juvenile Fiction and the third Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award.

Life

Lambert was born in Kingston upon Thames, England, and was the son of Richard Cornthwaite Lambert a barrister and Liberal Party politician. He was educated at Repton School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied Classics. Some of his poems were published in the Oxford University literary magazine Oxford Poetry, then in its formative years. After leaving Oxford, he worked as a sub-editor with The Economist from 1914–1915, joining the staff in 1916.
During World War I, he served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, from 1916–1918. In a 1971 retrospective, he records that he was a C.O., to which fact he ascribed a difficulty in finding a job in the post-war years. However, he found part-time work at Sheffield University teaching economics and history to extramural groups of Yorkshire miners and railwaymen. This work left him free during the summer to pursue his literary work.
In 1918, Lambert married Kate Elinor Klein, a talented artist and wood engraver who signed herself Elinor Lambert. They established The Stanton Press together in 1921, producing fine, hand-printed volumes of poetry and translation. The press closed in 1924 when Lambert took up a full-time post as a tutor for the University of London.
In 1927, he joined the BBC as Head of the Adult Education Section and, in 1928, he became the first editor of The Listener magazine. At this time the magazine was intended primarily to disseminate talks delivered by the BBC. Under Lambert's editorship notable contributors to The Listener included members of the Bloomsbury Group Paul Nash, Roger Fry and Clive Bell.
In April 1939, R.S. Lambert resigned from the BBC and migrated to Canada with his family. There he joined CBC Radio, being named educational advisor in 1940. His collections of wartime broadcasts for CBC were published in several volumes.
In 1944, he divorced Kate Elinor Lambert and married Joyce Morgan.
From 1943 to 1959 he served CBC as Supervisor of School Broadcasts, retiring in 1963 to live in a neo-Gothic rectory called Claverleigh at Creemore. Always a prolific author, he continued to write books in his retirement about the history of Canada and Canadian folklore and legend. In 1990, Claverleigh was designated a National Historic Site of Canada.

Paranormal interests

Lambert was interested in the supernatural as a hobby throughout his life and wrote two books on the subject. The first, published in 1935, was entitled The Haunting of Cashen's Gap. The second book, entitled Exploring the Supernatural, was the first significant study of supernatural occurrences in Canada.
The first book was about the phenomenon of Gef the talking mongoose. The mongoose was said to be haunting an isolated farmhouse on the Isle of Man. Lambert accompanied his friend, paranormal investigator Harry Price and together they wrote the book. Lambert's apparent credulity about the talking mongoose led Sir Cecil Levita to criticise him, suggesting that he was unfit to serve on the board of the British Film Institute, of which Lambert was one of the founders and a prominent governor in the 1930s. Levita said that Lambert was "off his head" because he had believed in the talking mongoose and the evil eye. Lambert sued Levita for slander. Lambert was pressured to abandon his action by Sir Stephen Tallents but persisted with it and won, receiving £7,600 in damages, then an exceptional figure for a slander case, awarded because Lambert's counsel managed to introduce a BBC memo which showed Lambert's career had been threatened if he persisted with the case. The case became known as "The Mongoose Case".
The case achieved wide media coverage in the popular press of the day. It had important repercussions for Lambert's employer, the BBC, as well as for the British Film Institute.

Published books