Margaret Mary Gowing (née Elliott), CBE, FBA, FRS (26 April 1921 – 7 November 1998) was an English historian.

As historian archivist at the UK Atomic Energy Authority from 1959 to 1966 she had access to the official papers and files of the British nuclear weapons programmes.

The family was poor; her father suffered, and ultimately died, from tuberculosis and was frequently unemployed, while her mother was barred from working as a school teacher after she was married.

[3] She attended Portobello Elementary School in North Kensington, and won a London County Council scholarship to Christ's Hospital in 1932.

[4] Elliott completed her School Certificate in 1936, earning distinctions in Latin, English and French and a pass in German.

Later that year, with the outbreak of the Second World War, the LSE was evacuated to Oxford,[2][4] where Elliott graduated in 1941 with a BSc degree in economics with first-class honours.

[2] Academic jobs in history were not easy to find in 1941, so Elliott joined the Civil Service, working in the Prices and Statistics Section of the Iron and Steel Control directorate in the Ministry of Supply.

[2] In 1950, Sir Norman Brook attempted to have Gowing retained in the Cabinet Office as the permanent historian, but was stymied by the Treasury and the Civil Service Commission.

[2] It prompted Mark Oliphant to seek the appointment of a historian to the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra, and the Cabinet Office to commission a new series of peacetime official histories in 1966.

To help out, the UKAEA brought in Lorna Arnold from its Health and Safety Division in 1967 to become the Departmental Records Officer (DRO) and Gowing's Assistant Historian.

Despite their being accredited as official historians, the Atomic Weapons Establishment would not let them take their notes away, so they had to do their writing on site, under the watchful eye of Aldermaston's DRO.

[2] Gowing attempted to negotiate better conditions at the University of Kent that would allow more time to work on the books, but this was denied.

In her subsequent Wilkins Lecture in 1976 she examined the history of British prejudice against science dating back to Victorian times.

[1] Gowing never got around to writing a planned sequel to Independence and Deterrence that would take the story up 1958, when the nuclear Special Relationship between Britain and the United States resumed.

Although she had worked in the Civil Service and Academia for 45 years, only 27 of them counted, so she was not eligible for a full pension; her son Nik supported her.