Lady Reid
Authority on Benjamin Franklin who separated facts from myths
LADY REID, who has died aged 85, began her professional life lecturing in Economics at the University of St Andrews, and later became Britain’s leading authority on Benjamin Franklin.
In between, she took an active part in the life of Brunei, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand and Australia as the wife for 60 years of Sir Bob Reid, the Fife-born chairman first of Shell and then of British Rail.
By a stroke of irony, one of her students at St Andrews was John Macgregor, who three decades later would as Transport Secretary privatise the railways while her husband was running them.
When the Reids’ expatriate life ended in 1983, she joined the council of the Royal Society of Arts. Through it, she discovered Franklin’s London home at 36 Craven Street, taking a central role in turning a derelict building into an unmissable heritage site (and using her front room as the project office).
Lady Reid recruited her husband to chair Benjamin Franklin House from 1997 to 2009, and selected as its director Dr Marcia Balisciano, who developed a stimulating range of educational programmes. Her own research separated the facts about Franklin from the myths, greatly assisting visiting American historians.
She was born Joan Mary Oram in Calcutta on October 18 1932. Her father John Oram was a financial executive, her mother Katherine Blackstock was a doctor. Both parents had their roots in Scotland.
Joan travelled “home” by steamer when she was three, settled with her mother in north-east England, then was sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. As a schoolgirl she played lacrosse at international level, and competed at junior Wimbledon.
Reading Political Economy and Modern History at the University of St Andrews, she was awarded one of the earliest Fulbright Scholarships to Sweet Briar University in Virginia, where she came face to face with racial segregation. Back at St Andrews she became president of the Women’s Union, securing it equal status with the Men’s Union and its own premises.
Graduating with a First in 1956, Joan Oram stayed at St Andrews to write a thesis on pollution in Manchester, then joined the university staff as a lecturer.
In 1957 she put her academic career on hold to sail to Singapore and marry Bob Reid; they had met as students. Their first home was in Brunei, where she taught.
Three years later the Reids moved to Port Harcourt in Nigeria, where she worked with a teaching colleague on a Nigerian history textbook and started a home for unmarried mothers and their babies – co-financed by the local “madam”.
The family had to leave Nigeria when civil war broke out in 1967, moving to Kenya for three years. Returning to Port Harcourt with her husband, now managing director of Shell Nigeria, she helped to create women’s support groups, breaking down tribal boundaries.
In 1974 they were moved again, to Thailand, then in 1980, after two years in London, to Australia. While getting her golf handicap down at Royal Melbourne, Joan Reid was asked to help stuff envelopes for the Liberal Party and ended up drafting its abortion policy.
Back in Britain, she became a director of the Urban Learning Foundation and through this a governor of Canterbury Christ Church University College, of which she became an honorary Fellow in 2001. Lady Reid also founded and chaired the Unicorn School for dyslexic children at Abingdon.
Latterly, she was researching the overseers who had administered England’s Poor Law system. Her first history, The Work of the Early Overseers: 15601600, was published in 2015. She was writing a second at the time of her death.
Lady Reid is survived by her husband and their three sons.
Lady Reid, born October 18 1932, died November 10 2017