THE wife of newspaper proprietor and former Oxford United owner Robert Maxwell helped him set up his business when they returned to the UK after the Second World War.

Dr Elisabeth Maxwell, who has died aged 92, worked as his secretary and assistant in his early days at a small office near Trafalgar Square.

In the early 1960s she took a more active role in the public relations work for Oxford-based Pergamon Press.

Known as Betty, she was also an active campaigner when her husband stood for Parliament in 1964 and became Labour MP for Buckingham.

Dr Maxwell also became an academic and in 1981 she was given a doctorate for her thesis on The Art of Letter Writing in France at the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era.

Dr Maxwell maintained she knew nothing about her husband’s fraud and shortly after his death said her “heart absolutely bleeds” for the Mirror Group pensioners who were robbed of £450m by Mr Maxwell.

In 1995 she returned to the city to speak at the historic Oxford Union debating club and told the audience she understood the anger towards her husband and said she felt “angry and very sad” for her children.

Elisabeth Meynard was born in south east France on March 11, 1921. She studied law at the Sorbonne before meeting Robert Maxwell in Paris towards the end of the Second World War and they married in 1945.

The couple returned to Britain and Mr Maxwell set himself up in business as the British and American distributor for Springer Verlag, a publisher of scientific books before setting up Pergamon Press.

Together they had nine children who were brought up first in Esher, Surrey, and then at Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, which was rented from Oxford City Council and dubbed the “finest council house in England”.

By the time her children were leaving for university she was in her 50s and returned to life as a student herself at St Hugh’s College in Oxford where she was awarded a BA in modern languages.

In 1987 she established the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and when putting together a family tree for her children she put a Star of David next to the name of each of her husband’s relatives who had been killed in the Holocaust, and would later say that when it was unfolded it looked like a “shower of yellow stars”.

She was given the Sir Sigmund Sternberg award in 1988 by Cardinal Hume for furthering Christian-Jewish relations and played a very active role on the executive committee of the International Council of Christians and Jews.

When her husband died under mysterious circumstances in 1991 it emerged he had taken £450m from his company’s pension scheme and her two sons Kevin and Ian faced trial for fraud.

Dr Maxwell then left her Headington Hill Hall home and returned to her native France.

The contents of the home she had shared with her husband for more than 33 years ended up being auctioned.

She was reported to be in tears as she sacked eight servants who worked at the Headington Hill estate with one departing worker saying the house was “empty”.

It was initially thought that Dr Maxwell might keep the hall, but by 1992 the city council had already negotiated a lease for the 26-room Victorian mansion with Oxford Brookes University.

In her autobiography A Mind of My Own, which was published in 1994 she remained loyal to her deceased husband.

Dr Maxwell died in the Dordogne, France, on August 7, and is survived by seven children and 13 grandchildren.

A private funeral is being held in France though memorial services will be held in London and New York.