Mary Lawson: Born: February 14, 1919; Died: February 16, 2026
Mary Lawson was born Emily Mary Durrant in Sunderland just three months after the Armistice that ended the Great War. Her father, an army sergeant and veteran of the Battle of the Somme, was still overseas at the time.
Mary survived several childhood traumas, including her mother collapsing from Spanish flu soon after her birth, being run over by a lorry on the way to school, contracting pneumonia in a time before there were antibiotics and living through a diphtheria epidemic that claimed the lives of three of her classmates.
Mary attended the Bede School in Sunderland and went on to study science and mathematics at London University. She sat her final exams in May 1940, as Hitler’s army was marching across France.
During the Second World War, Mary worked as a recording engineer for the BBC in London. Using the cumbersome and temperamental electromechanical apparatus of the day, she recorded and broadcast Winston Churchill’s speeches, vital public service announcements and coded messages to the French resistance. And news reports from all over the world: the attack on Pearl Harbour, the fall of Singapore, the D-Day landings and Victory in Europe. Many of the recordings she made are permanently preserved in the BBC’s archives and are still broadcast today.
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When she wasn’t working, Mary volunteered as an ambulance driver, helping to save the lives of Londoners as V1 and V2 flying bombs were falling on the city. She almost became a casualty herself when a V1 flew over the ambulance she was driving and crashed into a nearby building. Fortunately, Mary saw it moments before it impacted and, shouting to her assistant, jumped out of the vehicle and lay face-down in the gutter. The ambulance’s windscreen was blown in by the explosion but Mary and her assistant were unscathed.
After the war, she began a career as a government scientist specialising in the physics and chemistry of building materials. She married John Lawson, a zoologist and entomologist working at Glasgow University, and moved to Glasgow. With several colleagues, she set up the Building Research Laboratory at Thorntonhall, near East Kilbride, to troubleshoot the considerable technical problems that were beginning to appear as the post-war construction boom got underway. While her colleagues investigated faults like crumbling concrete and rising damp, Mary specialised in bricks and soon became a leading expert in all the things that can go wrong with a brick from the moment the clay that it’s made from is dug out of the ground. Before long she was a familiar figure at brickworks and building sites all over Scotland. Her clients gave her the affectionate nickname “Mrs Brick”.
Despite being a woman in an exclusively male profession, Mary said she never encountered anything but courtesy and respect from all her clients, from the apprentice bricklayers on the building site to the company directors in the boardroom. Her dedication and expertise were always very much appreciated as is evidenced by the numerous thank you letters she received over the years.
She did, however, come up against significant discrimination from her employer, the British Civil Service. Year after year, she was passed over for promotion. Male colleagues with far less experience were recruited to fill senior posts for which she was much better qualified. The unspoken prejudice was that since she was married, she would soon be having children and so be forced to give up work. This was well before there was such a thing as maternity leave. Mary, however, continued working full-time after her first child was born, and her second, and her third. It was only when she started applying for jobs elsewhere, that the Civil Service realised how valuable she was and gave her the promotion she long deserved. Mary never expressed any bitterness about this, saying that in those days, married women with children were simply not expected to pursue careers.
As her career progressed, she built up a solid reputation for her diligence, expertise, energy and, especially, resourcefulness, which her colleagues summed up in the phrase, “Mary always finds a way”.
Later on, she carried out research aimed at recycling the waste bings from coal mining that littered the landscape across Central Scotland into useful building materials. She retired from Building Research in 1981 and was straightaway elected chair of the Scottish division of the Institute of Clay Technology (ICT), the first woman to hold the post. When the ICT became part of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IMMM), Mary was made a fellow of that institute. She continued to act, pro-bono, as consultant to the building industry into her eighties.
Mary’s mother was a professional musician and she passed on to Mary a lifelong passion for music. In her later years, Mary became an ardent supporter of Scottish Opera and Scottish orchestras regularly attending performances. In her eighties, Mary enrolled on a degree course in music with the Open University and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2009, at the age of 90.
She is survived by her three children and two grandchildren.
At The Herald, we carry obituaries of notable people from the worlds of business, politics, arts and sport but sometimes we miss people who have led extraordinary lives. That's where you come in. If you know someone who deserves an obituary, please consider telling us about their lives. Contact garry.scott@heraldandtimes.co.uk
