Mary A. Hamilton

Mary Agnes Hamilton was a writer, journalist, broadcaster, civil servant, and the Labour Member of Parliament for Blackburn from 1929 to 1931.

Mary Agnes Adamson (known as Molly), was born in Withington, Manchester, the eldest of six children of Scottish parents: Robert Adamson, a professor of logic at Glasgow University, and his wife Margaret, née Duncan, a Quaker who had been a teacher of botany at Manchester High School for Girls before their marriage in 1881. The family moved back to Scotland in 1889.

She was educated at Aberdeen and Glasgow Girls' High Schools before attending the University of Kiel in 1901 for seven months to learn German. She went up to Newnham College, Cambridge (where her mother had also been a student) in 1901 to read Classics, then Economics as part of the History tripos, graduating in 1904 with first-class honours.

In September 1905 she married Charles Joseph Hamilton, an economist colleague at the University of South Wales, Cardiff, where she had briefly been employed as a history tutor. She petitioned for and obtained a divorce in 1914.