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Margaret Haig Thomas was born into a life of wealth and privilege, but struggled throughout to gain legal, social and economic equality for all women. She was the only child of Liberal MP and successful industrialist David Alfred Thomas, first Viscount Rhondda and his wife Margaret. If mother and daughter shared feminist sympathies, it was her father that Margaret adored and his business legacy that she sought to uphold after his death, always trying to reconcile her business practices with her feminist ethics. Her education, however, was totally unsuited for such a task, since she was tutored in ‘trifles’ at home by governesses until the age of thirteen. The situation was somewhat remedied when she was sent to Notting Hill High School, one of the more renowned establishments managed by the Girls’ Public Day School Company, and then on to St Leonards School in St Andrews. On leaving school she followed the path of most upper-class girls and endured three chaperoned London Seasons, before very briefly escaping to Oxford University for less than a year. She returned home, from where she drifted into marriage with a neighbouring baronet, Colonel Sir Humphrey Mackworth in 1908. Despite her best efforts she found the life of a country landowner’s wife stifling and both spouses were temperamentally ill suited. They eventually divorced amicably in 1923, but in the meantime Margaret found an outlet for her energy and her desire to do something worthwhile, in the suffrage cause.

Both Margaret and her mother joined the great suffrage march to Hyde Park in July 1908, but Margaret became a fully fledged member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union and set up a branch in Newport. She explained how the cause, ‘gave us release of energy, it gave us that sense of being some use in the scheme of things, without which no human being can live at peace. Margaret became fully committed to the feminist cause: she invited Emmeline Pankhurst to speak, and spoke herself from public platforms on many occasions, sometimes enduring hostile audiences and being pelted with food. She embraced militant policy by harassing Prime Minister Asquith from the running board of his car in 1910 and, in 1913 by setting light to a pillar box. For the latter offence she was arrested and imprisoned, but released after five days of hunger strike.

It was Margaret’s mother who suggested that Lord Rhondda, or D.A.T as he was affectionately known, should employ his daughter. D.A.T had been looking for a ‘highly confidential secretary and right hand man’ to help him run his numerous business enterprises. On a salary of £1,000 p/a, Margaret began to learn the business skills so lacking in her own education, and acquired a knowledge of finance, as well as of the coal and newspaper industries from the dockside offices in Cardiff. By 1914 she was running the newspaper interests and, since her father was being drawn back into politics, she had a more active overall roll in his other enterprises. By the end of the war, she was a director of more than 20 companies. Nevertheless she suffered from lack of confidence and found both her sex and lack of business orientated education a great drawback in a male dominated commercial world of.

In 1915 however, a tragic event served to greatly bolster her courage and self esteem. She was travelling on board the Lusitania with her father when it was torpedoed, and she survived many hours in freezing Irish waters before being rescued. Having faced death she felt there was little else to fear.

Determined to play a worthwhile role in the war Margaret also took on posts as, commissioner for Women’s National Service in Wales, controller of women’s recruiting, and with the Women’s Advisory Council of the Ministry of Reconstruction. She believed that even after the war women should retain an active role in the workforce, so in 1918 she set up the Women’s Industrial League to campaign for the rights of women workers. But personal tragedy struck again when her father died in July 1918 and she lost not only a beloved parent, but her mentor and closest friend. She inherited his title and his vast business interests in coal, shipping, publishing and insurance, which she felt honour bound to make a success of and thereby preserve his reputation. She became a director of 33 companies (28 of which she inherited) and chairman or vice chairman of 16 of them. Despite her enormous commercial responsibilities, however, she was determined not to compromise either her belief or her efforts to obtain full equality for women. She set up the Six Point Group in 1921 to campaign on key issues that affected women, such as equal pay, child custody and equal opportunities. Yet in this she was a true egalitarian; she never practiced positive discrimination and only ever promoted people within her companies on the basis of ability.

Without her father’s protection, Margaret still faced stiff opposition, even from men who had supported her presence in the boardroom while he was alive. In her efforts to gain acceptance she tried to play down her good looks and ‘feminine’ appearance by dressing in sharp, sombre suits and smoking cigars. She hated being classed as an ‘Exceptional Woman’ but equally deplored the practice of ascribing one businesswoman’s mistakes to the frailties of the whole sex. Throughout her career as businesswoman and publisher, she also railed against female exclusion from the masculine networking carried on in male clubs, which was where essential gossip was exchanged and major deals made. As publisher of Time and Tide, she later declared that, ‘if we were men the task of securing the advertisements or subsidies we need would not be half so difficult.’ Yet she continued to acknowledge the lack commercial skills she had gained during her brief apprenticeship with her father, compared to the years of practice men received. In this she revealed some her continuing insecurity; she explained how ‘the struggle between early training in diffidence and later acquired knowledge and confidence never totally ceases.’

Lady Rhondda spent at least the first five years after the war mastering basic business skills and learning how to manage people successfully. This she mastered extremely well and contemporary reports stress her sharp business acumen, common sense and practicality, as well as her persuasive manner of speaking. Her personal philosophy, however was that the meaning of life from work well done was more important than monetary gain when making business decisions. To her business should work to provide a public service and not pursue financial rewards at any cost – an attitude shared by many upper-class male industrialists at this time, but one that could and did lead to financial losses. During the 1920s Lady Rhondda’s commercial activities reaped many accolades. In 1923 she was elected a member of the Council of the Institute of Directors and became its first woman president in 1926. This was a highly public recognition of her abilities but Margaret herself thought that since there were now c. 300 women directors, it was only right that they should be recognised. Her success was further recognised when she became one of the first five women members of the London Chamber of Commerce and the first woman to speak at the annual meeting of the British and Latin American Chamber of Commerce. She has been named as probably the most successful inter-war businesswoman, and crowned ‘Britain’s Queen of Commerce’ and ‘the feminine Cecil Rhodes’ by the press.

In accordance with her egalitarian feminist beliefs, Lady Rhondda used her personal commercial success to support the cause of all women in business. She helped set up the Efficiency Club, which functioned as a support group for professional women, as well as a ‘clearing house’ for inside information and a lobbying group for women’s entry into the Chamber of Commerce. Together, she and Professor Caroline Spurgeon, of Bedford College, University of London, formed the Business and University Women’s Association, which aimed to publicise career options for women. When the Rotary Club refused women entrance, she set up the rival Provisional Club for women on the same lines. She became a frequent and prominent speaker at numerous events to keep the issue of women’s full inclusion in commerce and the continued obstacles to it in the public eye through press coverage. Despite all this recognition, Margaret remained rather self-deprecating about her achievements in her autobiography, emphasizing her financial and commercial inheritance (both huge) and somewhat downplaying her own hard work, determination and personal ability. In fact, despite her success in the field business was never her sole or necessarily her first ambition. By the early 1930s she began to sell of many of her holdings and resigning from the directorship of all but six companies. The great depression and her insistence on putting ethics and service before money had also begun to deplete her financial resources. She was also increasingly devoted to perhaps her greatest passion, the magazine Time and Tide which she had set up in 1920. The magazine fulfilled her publishing, journalistic and business ambitions as well as her staunch promotion of equal-rights feminism.

Lady Rhondda financially subsidised the journal from its inception, investing over £250,000 in it over her lifetime. She controlled 90% of the magazine’s shares, acted as Vice and then Chairman of the all female board, and took over the editorship in 1926. Time and Tide mixed coverage of social issues, literature and the arts with politics and economics. Virginia Wolf, Dorothy L. Sayers and E. M. Delafield, as well as the historian Eileen Power were among its celebrated female authors. T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and George Bernard Shaw were among many other equally famous male contributors. After 1928 when equal suffrage was granted, the magazine became more politically right wing and the feminist element receded. During World War II it had a circulation of around 30,000 copies a week and Hitler had Lady Rhondda placed on his planned invasion blacklist – a testament to her perceived influence. By the 1950s however, circulation had almost halved and the magazine was losing substantial sums of money every week. A call for support from readers brought in £25,000 of donations, which bolstered Margaret’s contributions from her almost exhausted personal fortune. She continued to work extremely hard on the magazine right into old age and refused to give in to ill health. She even refused treatment for cancer, because she wanted to maintain a clear mind to work on Time and Tide. She died in 1958 at the age of 55, having remained true to her beliefs and achieved momentous personal, business and social goals for a woman of her time. Her high social status and vast inherited wealth clearly aided these ambitions but it took her tremendous energy, shrewd determination and firm belief in social justice to realise them fully, and further the cause of all other working women as she did so. Yet it is also clear that she had taken some time out from work and social causes to enjoy spending her wealth on foreign travel, lavish entertainment of friends and some expensive shopping sprees.