Margaret Steuart Pollard

Margaret Steuart "Peggy" Pollard, née Gladstone (1 March 1904 – 13 November 1996), was a scholar of Sanskrit, a poet and bard of the Cornish language. She was the founding member of Ferguson's Gang, a secret society of supporters of the National Trust, who had their headquarters at Shalford Mill.[1] She was the great great-niece of Liberal prime minister William Gladstone.[2]

From 1920, she attended Newnham College, Cambridge,[3] where she was the first woman to gain first-class honours in Oriental Languages. She married Captain Frank Pollard, an expert on Cornish history, and they lived in Truro, Cornwall. By 1938, she had become a bard, and a member of the Cornish Gorsedd. She published Bewnans Alysaryn, a Cornish-language miracle play, in 1941.[4] She was an enthusiastic supporter of campaigns to defend the landscape, language and traditions of Cornwall and rural England. On one occasion she donated £100 to the National Trust as part of Ferguson's Gang, wearing a full mask to preserve her anonymity.[2]

In 1947, a book about her home county, entitled Cornwall, that she had written was published by Paul Elek.[5] She has been described as "humorous, perceptive, and intelligent".[4] In 1951 she converted to Roman Catholicism, and in 1973 built a Roman Catholic church dedicated to Our Lady of the Portal and St Piran on the site of a medieval chapel in Truro. For this she received the Benemerenti Medal from the Pope.[2]

She remained an active poet and translator throughout her long life. She had given away much of her inherited wealth after her husband's death in 1968 and lived in a one-up-one-down, which was an old tin miner's cottage at Quenchwell, Kea, near Truro.[6] She remained a romantic figure, dressed as she was in a long skirt and a scarf wrapped around her head. She died at the age of 93 on 13 November 1996 at Truro.[4]