Famous British Educators

Apart from being the wife of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, Cherie Blair is also a successful attorney in her own right. The daughter of actor Tony Booth, she is has also taught at the University of Westminster. She is associated with charitable campaigns on breast cancer and other causes, too.

Born to a builder father, Alison Balsom showed an early interest in the trumpet and played regularly with the Royston Town Band. A Guildhall alumna, she is now a 3-time Brit Award winner and has also won the 2013 Gramophone Artist of the Year. She is also a fan of yachting.

Known as the most famous classicist in the world, Mary Beard is a Cambridge professor who is also quite popular for her controversial blog A Don's Life. A DBE and OBE, she also contributes to BBC radio and TV shows and has been an editor for The Times Literary Supplement.

Indian-born British author Anna Leonowens is best remembered for her memoir The English Governess at the Siamese Court, which related her experience as a governess of the children of King Mongkut of Siam. The musical The King and I and the novel Anna and the King of Siam were inspired by her life.

Alexander McCall Smith is a British-Zimbabwean writer best known for his The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels. A lawyer by qualification, he is a respected expert on medical law and bioethics. His books have sold over 40 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 46 languages. Also an amateur bassoonist, he co-founded The Really Terrible Orchestra.  

Peter Higgs is a British theoretical physicist. He studied at King's College London and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1954. He went on to have a brilliant academic career and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983. In 2013, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Belgian physicist François Englert.  

While she was initially a schoolteacher, who specialized in sex education, Mary Whitehouse later began a campaign against the moral standards of the media in Britain, particularly the BBC. She launched the Clean Up TV campaign, vocalizing her opposition toward content such as war and child pornography.

Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer known for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. He spent most of his career at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, serving as its director for six years. He was also an author of science fiction novels, short stories, and plays and appeared in a series of radio talks on astronomy for the BBC.  

English literary theorist and critic Terry Eagleton, presently serving as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, is a prominent critic of postmodernism and the New Atheism. His oeuvre includes over forty books among which Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which describes the emerging literary theory of the period, is considered to be one of his most notable works.   

Charles Freer Andrews was a Christian missionary and Anglican priest. He was also an educator and social reformer. A close friend of Indian freedom fighters Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, he supported the Indian struggle for independence. Gandhi fondly called him Deenabandhu, or "Friend of the Poor". Even today, Andrews is widely respected in India. 

William Brewster was an English official. He was among the passengers that traveled in Mayflower from England to the New World. When the ship landed at Plymouth Colony, William Brewster was accepted as the senior elder and hence became the religious leader of the colony. Eventually, he ended up serving as an adviser to Governor William Bradford.

Eighth-century Anglo-Latin poet and cleric Alcuin served as the head of the Palatine school, established by Charlemagne. A significant figure of the Carolingian Renaissance, he introduced English learning methods into Frankish schools and reformed Roman Catholicism. He also wrote extensively on education, philosophy, and theology.

The son of world-renowned composer William Lloyd Webber and his piano teacher wife, Julian Lloyd Webber is also the brother of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. A talented celloist in his own right, he has taught at Guildhall and has collaborated with musical legends such as Yehudi Menuhin and Elton John.

Halford Mackinder was an English geographer, politician, and academic. He is considered one of the founding fathers of geostrategy as well as geopolitics. Mackinder’s work helped establish geography as a separate discipline in the UK. An influential academic, Halford Mackinder held important positions in popular universities, including the University Extension College and the London School of Economics.

English novelist George Gissing is known for the way he showcased the realism of the lower-middle class in his works such as The Nether World. In spite of being a brilliant student, he was expelled from Owens College for theft. He specialized in the literary study of Charles Dickens and his works.

Renowned educator of the 1800s, Charlotte Mason introduced a new way of teaching children, which included the use of books which engage the reader, or what she called “living books,” maintaining a nature journal, and using music and art as resources. She helped develop homeschooling techniques that are in use to this day.

A leading free-market and neoclassical economist, Lionel Charles Robbins, or Baron Robbins, was known for his association with the London School of Economics. The son of a farmer, he trained to fight at World War I but went back home wounded. He also laid down his own definition of economics.

Jamaican-British Marxist sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall is remembered as a pioneering figure of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. A skilled academic, he was also the founding-editor of the New Left Review. His encoding and decoding model remains one of his most remarkable contributions to culture studies.

Konstantin Novoselov is a Russian-British physicist, currently serving as a professor at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials, National University of Singapore. He is the Langworthy Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester as well. Along with Andre Geim, he jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. 

Stephen Toulmin was a British author and philosopher. He is remembered for his efforts to develop practical arguments, which have been proved useful to evaluate the ethics behind morality. Toulmin's works were applied effectively in the field of rhetoric. The Toulmin model of argumentation, which was published in his book The Uses of Argument, is considered his most important work.

British-American economist and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton revolutionized applied economics with his work on consumption, savings, poverty, and development. Apart from teaching at Princeton, he has penned multiple award-winning papers and given rise to concepts such as the Deaton Paradox. He was also the first to receive the Frisch Medal.

British scholar and poet I. A. Richards is known for contributing to the New Criticism movement. While he initially taught English and moral sciences, he later focused on developing a new way of reading literature, known as practical criticism. The Meaning of Meaning remains one of his best-known works.

British jurist A. V. Dicey is best known for his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, which forms the basis of the modern British constitution. Apart from teaching law at Oxford, he also served as the principal of the Working Men’s College of London.

British composer Hubert Parry was a major figure behind the 19th-century revival of British music. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he later produced gems such as Songs of Farewell and Jerusalem, with the latter becoming an anthem of sorts during World War I. He was also a passionate sailor.

Best known for his theory on universal prescriptivism, British moral philosopher R. M. Hare initially studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. He had also been part of World War II and captured by Japan. Essays on Political Morality remains one of his most significant works.

Proving himself to be a brilliant classical scholar in school, Benjamin Jowett gained a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was eventually elected a master and vice-chancellor. The 19th-century academic and Anglican theologian is remembered for his translation of The Dialogues of Plato and other classical texts.

Austrian-born astrophysicist Thomas Gold is best-remembered for proposing the steady state theory of the universe and for his deep gas hypothesis through which he re-defined the abiogenic hypothesis and made it popular in the West. He served as professor of astronomy at Cornell University and remained a member of National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Nobel Prize-winning English economist Norman Angell had worked in multiple jobs in his early days and had even been a cowboy and a journalist. Best known for his iconic work The Great Illusion, he also designed a unique card game known as The Money Game, which focused on finance and currency.