Betty Maxwell - Telegraph In the process, she earned the profound respect of members of the Jewish and Christian communities around the world. Cardinal Hume described her contribution as "quite outstanding"; Lord Coggan, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, accompanied her to her husband's funeral in Jerusalem in 1991. Betty Maxwell was born Elisabeth Jenny Jeanne Meynard at La Grive, near Saint Alban de Roche (between Lyon and Bourgoin), on March 11 1921, the younger daughter of Paul and Colombe Meynard, both of whom had been awarded the Croix de Guerre avec Palme during the Great War. Paul Meynard owned a silk weaving factory, and the family was prosperous. Betty was sent to the local school and then, aged nine, to England, to the convent of Our Lady of Compassion, Acocks Green, near Birmingham. Betty's mother had spent a portion of her school days there; her father let her go when he found that 180 of the 240 pupils were Protestant. Betty returned to France in 1932 and attended a series of schools, at Lyon and St Omer and finally the Lycée Sévigné in Paris, after which she obtained a place at the Sorbonne to read Classics and Philosophy. It was in Paris, after the Liberation in 1944, that she met her future husband, born Jan Hoch in Ruthenia, but then serving in the British Army as Sergeant Ivan du Maurier (after the cigarette brand). They met at the French Welcome Committee, in the Place de la Madeleine, where Allied soldiers could socialise with French civilians. Soon afterwards they became engaged, and when Sergeant du Maurier received a commission he changed his name to Robert Maxwell. Once the Meynards" initial misgivings about their daughter's proposed match with the handsome but penniless Ruthenian Jew of whom they knew nothing had been overcome, the marriage took place, at the Protestant Church of the Annunciation, rue Cortambert, on March 14 1945. The next month, Maxwell sent his young wife to England, where he was already planning to make his post-war career and to start a family. In the event, this plan was postponed due to Maxwell's postings to the Military Government and the Control Commission in Berlin, from 1945 to 1947. Betty joined him in Berlin in the winter of 1946 with their first child, Michael. Once in England together, and after a spell in London, the Maxwells settled at Esher and then, from 1960, at Headington Hill Hall, a Victorian mansion built by a local brewing family, the Morrells, with fine views over Oxford. The offices of Pergamon Press, the scientific publishing house that Maxwell founded, were in the grounds of the house. The last of the Maxwells" nine children, Ghislaine, was born in 1961. All the children were delivered by Betty Maxwell's elder sister, the gynaecologist Dr Yvonne Vittoz, at her clinic at Maison Laffitte, on the outskirts of Paris. A daughter, Karine, died of leukaemia, aged four; Michael died at 22, after almost seven years in a coma from which he never awoke, induced by head injuries sustained in a motor accident. Bob Maxwell leant heavily on his wife for support, and she provided it. During his time as an aspiring Labour MP, and later when he was MP for Buckingham (1964-70), she was a stalwart canvasser on his behalf and, by all accounts, a first-class constituency MP's wife. Long after her husband's connection with Buckingham had ended, she continued to support the Bletchley Pre-School Playgroup she had started in the 1960s. The scandal arising from the circumstances of Bob Maxwell's attempted sale of Pergamon Press in 1969, and the public hostility and rejection he experienced as a result, made life difficult for his wife and children. Living, not for the last time, under the cloud of opprobrium that hung over Maxwell, at home they had to put up with him venting his frustrations upon them. It was in large part due to the persistent irritant of her husband's repeated, noisy and unjustified remarks about her ignorance and stupidity - often made in front of embarrassed strangers - that Betty Maxwell embarked on the second phase of her academic career: an undergraduate degree at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and then a DPhil. Her doctorate was concerned with the art of letter-writing in France between 1789 and 1830. The body of materials on which she based her thesis was a mass of correspondence - 11 large volumes in all - generated by her ancestors in France and Switzerland. In the course of her researches she developed a keen interest in her family's genealogy, and then in her husband's. It was the horror she felt on discovering the extent of the destruction of Maxwell's family by the Nazis that led to her work on the Holocaust. When her husband died at sea in November 1991, leaving, as it soon transpired, a bankrupt estate and a mass of accusations against her sons, Kevin and Ian - both subsequently cleared of all criminal charges - Betty Maxwell was utterly shell-shocked. "God forbid," she said, when pondering the possibilities of an afterlife, "that I should run into him again." In 1994 Betty Maxwell published A Mind of My Own, a full, frank and readable account of her roller-coaster life with Bob Maxwell. In her seventies and early eighties, she lectured widely on Holocaust studies, especially in America. In 2005, the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, based in Cambridge, held a celebratory dinner in Middle Temple Hall to honour Betty Maxwell's "outstanding contribution" in the field. Latterly, as a heart condition began to slow her down, she travelled less and spent much of her time in France with her sister, Yvonne. Betty Maxwell is survived by three sons and four daughters. Betty Maxwell, born March 11 1921, died August 7 2013