Louise Howard

Louise Ernestine Howard, Lady Howard, born Matthaei (1880 to 1969), was an English classics scholar, international civil servant and supporter of organic farming. Born in Kensington and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, she became lecturer and director of studies in classics there in 1909 but was dismissed by the University of Cambridge during the First World War because her father was German. After working as an assistant to Leonard Woolf she completed an examination in Geneva and joined the agricultural section of the International Labour Organization, becoming its chief in 1924, and wrote Labour in Agriculture, an International Survey (1935). In 1931 she married the botanist Albert Howard, widower of her sister Gabrielle, joined his campaign against the use of chemicals in agriculture and, after his death in 1947, founded the Albert Howard Foundation, which merged with the Soil Association in 1953; she was honorary vice president of the Soil Association until her death.