Lorna Margaret Arnold (née Rainbow; 7 December 1915 – 25 March 2014) was a British historian who wrote several books connected with the British nuclear weapons programmes. A graduate of Bedford College, London, she trained as a teacher at the Cambridge Training College for Women, but left teaching in 1940. During the Second World War, she served with the Army Council secretariat. In 1944, she transferred to the Foreign Office to head a section of the secretariat of the European Advisory Commission. In June 1945, she moved to Berlin as part of the Allied Control Council, working in the Economic Directorate alongside counterparts from France, America and Russia to co-ordinate administering the districts and supplying food to the population. She was posted to Washington, D.C., in November 1946 as part of the British negotiating team that agreed to merge the U.S. and British zones of Allied-occupied Germany into Bizonia, and remained at the Pentagon until 1949. In January 1959, she joined the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), where she worked within its Authority Health and Safety Branch (AHSB), coordinating the investigation of the 1957 Windscale fire, about which she would later write a book. In 1967, she joined Margaret Gowing in writing the history of the British nuclear weapons programmes. As its second official historian, she had access to previously secret documents and personally knew many of the people involved. She produced histories of the 1957 Windscale fire, the nuclear weapons tests in Australia and the British hydrogen bomb programme. In her old age she was still an active participant in intelligence/historical community debate.
Early years Lorna Margaret Rainbow was born at 35 Craven Park, Harlesden, Middlesex, on 7 December 1915, the eldest of five children of Kenneth Wallace Rainbow and Lorna Pearl Rainbow (née Dawson). She had three younger sisters, Hilary, Rosemary and Ruth, and a younger brother, Geoffrey. Her father served in the First World War with the Royal Naval Division and the Royal Navy Air Service. After the war he became a farmer, and the family moved to a farm called Flexwood near Guildford. She became a vegetarian when she realised at dinner one night that a cow her parents had sold had probably not found a better home. Rainbow attended Wanborough Primary School. No girls in her village had won a scholarship to attend secondary school before Rainbow sat for the examination in 1927, but she was awarded one, along with two other girls. She started at the Guildford County School for Girls in September 1927. The family moved to a dairy farm called Little Prestwick Farm near Haslemere in 1931, but she remained at Guildford, becoming its first student to win a scholarship to university. She sat exams for both Reading University and the University of London in 1934, and was offered scholarships by both. She opted to enter Bedford College, London, a small women's college of the University of London. It was the first college in the United Kingdom to award degrees to women. She studied English, graduating in 1937 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with upper second-class honours. After graduation, Rainbow trained as a teacher at the Cambridge Training College for Women, a small women's college with about fifty or sixty students at the time. Although it is adjacent to Fenner's, the University of Cambridge's cricket ground, it was not at the time a college of the University, and would not be accepted as one until 2007. She graduated with her teaching certificate, which allowed her to secure a position teaching English at Belper School in 1938. She began having fainting spells, and returned to the family's Little Prestwick Farm in 1940.
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