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Diana Reader Harris


Dame Muriel Diana Reader Harris, DBE (11 October 1912, Hong Kong – 7 October 1996, Salisbury, Wiltshire) was an English educator, school principal and public figure. She was a keen advocate of women's ordination in the Church of England.

Diana, the elder child of Montgomery Reader Harris (born 1887) and his wife, Frances Mabel (née Wilmot Wilkinson), returned to England at the age of two, but lost her mother to meningitis almost immediately, and as her father remained in the Far East, she was brought up by an aunt in London. She was educated at Francis Holland School for Girls in London and Sherborne School for Girls in 1925. She graduated with an external first class degree in English from the University of London in 1934.

Reader Harris immediately joined the teaching staff at Sherborne School for Girls, then one of the foremost girls' boarding schools in England. During the war she was evacuated with a group of pupils from Sherborne to Branksome Hall School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This led to an exchange relationship between the two schools that was still operating seventy years later. She returned to England in 1943 to join the staff of the National Association of Girls' Clubs. She returned to Sherborne as headmistress in 1950, achieved eminence in her profession, and remained there until her retirement in 1975. According to an obituary, "Those who were pupils during her headship grew up in an atmosphere in which it was assumed that everyone had something of value to give, a better nature to be appealed to, and a duty to the community in which she lived."

While still at Sherborne, Reader Harris was involved in a bewildering variety of outside bodies. She chaired the Association of Headmistresses in 1964–66, orchestrating its response to the Plowden Report. She was at various times a member of Dorset Education Committee, the Independent Television Authority, the councils of the National Youth Orchestra and the Outward Bound Trust, the Church Missionary Society, where as its first woman president she brought it to espouse the 1980 Brandt Report on bridging the North-South divide, and Christian Aid, where she was also chairman in 1978–83. She joined the council of the Royal Society of Arts in 1975 and chaired it in 1979–81. She was a governor of Godolphin School, Salisbury, from 1975-86.


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