Richard Bruce Wernham, 1906–1999

Bruce Wernham was born on 11 October 1906 at Ashmansworth, near Newbury, Berkshire, the son of a tenant farmer. He attended St Bartholomew's Grammar School, which he remembered with affection all his life, serving as Governor from 1944. In 1925 he went on to Exeter College, Oxford, and took a first in Modern History in 1928. He returned to study towards a D.Phil. His chosen theme was ‘Anglo-French relations in the age of Queen Elizabeth and Henri IV’, a subject that would remain at the centre of his interests for the rest of his life. After a year, he moved to London in order to work on the State Papers in the Public Record Office and the British Museum.

John Harold Plumb, 1911–2001

Sir John Plumb was a commanding figure, both within academe and also far beyond. He was as much read in the United States as in the United Kingdom; he was a great enabler, patron, fixer and entrepreneur; he belonged to the smart social set both in Mayfair and Manhattan; a race horse was named after him in England and the stars and the stripes were once flown above the US Capitol in his honour; and he appeared, thinly disguised but inadequately depicted, in the fiction of Angus Wilson, William Cooper and C. P. Snow. Yet one important aspect of Plumb's career has been repeatedly ignored and overlooked: for while his life was an unusually long one, his productive period as a significant historian was surprisingly, almost indecently, brief.

Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918–2001

By the time that he completed his fiftieth year, Dimitri Obolensky had been Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford for nearly seven years and had achieved distinction in a number of fields. But it was a work then in progress that drew together his literary and historical talents to spectacular effect, offering a new vision of the development of East European history across a thousand-year span. A well-paced narrative and reliable work of reference within a clear conceptual framework, The Byzantine Commonwealth is likely to remain indispensable for anyone interested in exploring the pre-modern history of Europe east of Venice and the Vistula. The distinctive texture of the book not only derives from its blend of careful scholarship and bold advocacy of an idea. There is also a tension, well contained, between the scrupulous presentation of the facts and possible interpretations arising from them and passionate recall of the religious affiliations and values that once had underlain eastern Christendom.

Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919–2002

Richard Hare's ambition was to have united elements from Aristotle, Kant and Mill in a logically cogent way that solved the fundamental problems of ethics (though with unfinished business); and he usually believed himself to have achieved this. For much of his career, his ‘prescriptivism’ formed an important part of the curriculum, certainly in Britain. His disappointment was not to have persuaded others (an occasional ‘we prescriptivists’ was always uncertain of reference), and to have left no disciples; he once told John Lucas that this made his life a failure. Yet he leaves behind generations of pupils grateful for the transmission not of a doctrine but of a discipline; and posterity, while unlikely to ratify the logical validity of his theory, will admire it for its uniting of apparent opposites: freedom and reason, tradition and rationalism, eclecticism and rigour.

Hrothgar John Habakkuk, 1915–2002

Hrothgar John Habakkuk was an outstanding economic historian, greatly admired Principal of Jesus College Oxford for seventeen years, and a distinguished Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. The publication of his first book, in 1962, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century not only consolidated his position as one of the leading figures on the international stage, but also created a whole school of (mainly) American economic historians, who have paralleled in their vigour and significance the school of (mainly) British historians of landownership which grew out of his 1940 article. The book remains the most brilliant example of Hrothgar's historiographical methodology, the ‘marriage of history and theory’ expressed in the elegant prose of a master of the logical deduction of theoretical explanations from concrete empirical observations.

Raymond William Firth, 1901–2002

Raymond Firth was an anthropologist, working chiefly in the Pacific, Malaysia and London, in the fields of economics, religion and kinship. Firth held permanent teaching posts at Sydney (1930–2) and at the London School of Economics (1932–40, 1944–68). During the Second World War he served in Naval Intelligence; he became secretary of the Colonial Social Science Research Council in 1944–5, and was a founding member of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth in 1946. Firth was a patient and generous teacher whose many graduate students remained loyal throughout their lives; he was an able and purposeful administrator of great integrity: no one alive can remember him doing a mean or malicious or self-interested act. In anthropology he was resolutely humane and empirical: his aim was always to convey the variety and complexity of people's experience, and to show how his theory was based on that understanding.

Charles Frederick Carter, 1919–2002

Charles Carter was appointed Lecturer in Statistics at Cambridge in 1945, and in 1947 became a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He wrote many papers in his six years at Cambridge on a range of post-war economic problems. In 1959 He became Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy and Cobden Lecturer at the Victoria University of Manchester. In 1962 the University Grants Committee had appointed a Planning Board to establish the University of Lancaster, with Sir Noel Hall, Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, as Chairman. The Board made its plans for the nature of the University and its buildings on a greenfields site, and then sought a Vice-Chancellor. Charles Carter was the Board's choice. He soon proved himself to be a superb administrator. When grants for residential buildings were less than expected he borrowed the necessary funds, and had buildings designed suitable for letting to visitors during student vacations. He attracted academic and research staff of high quality, and he was influential in providing for more students choice in the nature of their degree studies.

Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915–2002

Ian Mcfarlane belonged to the generation of scholars whose early careers were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Drawing on the sense of a new start and a radical break with past habits and prejudices that characterised the post-1945 era, that generation brought about a major renewal of modern languages as a university discipline, ensuring that it would henceforth be regarded as equal in status to other arts subjects. The importance of this task in post-war Europe can hardly be over-estimated, and Ian was certainly conscious of its magnitude. He spent the thirty-eight years of his academic career training the modern linguists of the next generation, many of whom are now themselves leaders in the subject, and he set an example of meticulously thorough yet enlightened scholarship in each of the several distinct areas in which he worked.

John Lough, 1913–2000

John Lough was in very many ways an exemplary member of the British academic establishment. He was a punctilious scholar and industrious researcher, who shared the results of his inquiries with the intellectual community in a prolific series of books and articles. Although he was essentially a man of the written, rather than the spoken, word, he took his duties as teacher very seriously, and also played a prominent part in the governance of Durham University, where most of his career unfolded.

Nicolai Rubinstein, 1911–2002

Nicolai Rubinstein was appointed to a Lectureship at Westfield College (University of London) in 1945, which was to be his academic home up to the time of his retirement in 1978 (he was promoted to Reader in 1962 and to Professor in 1965). At Westfield he taught European history 400–1500 ad, the History of Political Thought from the classical to the early modern period, and a ‘special subject’ (studied in Italian texts) ‘Florence and the Renaissance, 1464–1532’. He also, from 1949, conducted a weekly seminar at the London University Institute of Historical Research and came to have close links with the Warburg Institute. In his Westfield years Rubinstein supervised a considerable number of doctoral candidates and many of these pupils are now familiar names in the world of Renaissance studies.