Who was Cecil Woodham-Smith? The name is pure Wooster, redolent of aristocracy, tweed jackets and a craving for post-prandial gaspers. Woodham-Smith was certainly aristocratic, and may well have worn tweeds and smoked, but there the resemblance to a Wodehouse figure ends. Cecil Blanche Fitzgerald, later Woodham-Smith, is quite possibly the twentieth century’s finest female historian. Yet she has been almost completely forgotten by academic historians, for two reasons. First, she was not an academic, holding neither chair nor tenure during her long and active life. Worse, she was wealthy and had a habit of arriving at the Public Records Office…