Margareta Burkill

Burkill was born in Germany. Her father was a journalist. She was educated in Germany, Russia and after her mother married an Englishman then at Harrogate Ladies' College and Newnham College, Cambridge.[1]

In 1928 she married John Charles Burkill, a mathematics professor at Liverpool University. He had been know as John or Charlie but she insisted that he use the name of Charles.[1] In the following year her husband joined Peterhouse College which is where he spent the rest of his career.[2]

In 1933 she became involved with the efforts to get refugees out of Germany. She is credited with arranging for hundreds to be refugees in Britain[1] This was as part of the Kindertransport[3] however many of those help were older and their studies had been interrupted by changes in Nazi Germany.[2] Two of the refugees became noted mathematicians Harry Reuter and Harry Burkill.[4]

She founded the Society for Visiting Scholars when she realised that visiting students and their spouses were brought to the university, but they were not well looked after.[3]

She was a fund raiser for different causes including the idea of creating a new postgraduate college in Cambridge. This college emerged to be Wolfson College and they gave her an emeritus fellowship.[3]

In 1980 the Imperial War Museum recorded her verbal history.[5]

Burkill died in Cambridge in 1984. Her husband put her papers in order regarding her work with refugees and they are held in Cambridge University Library. He survived her until 1993.[1]

The Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee, which she set up, is a subject of study for British school children.[6] In 2017 her alma mater Newnham had an exhibition of the work by the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee.[7]