Marjorie Ethel Reeves 1905–2003

Marjorie Reeves turned her attention to politics and to the education of the young in the 1930s. In 1938 she returned to Oxford as Tutor in History to the Society of Oxford Home Students. Reeves was one of the small band of scholars who kept alive the Oxford Faculty of Modern History during the Second World War, and at the same time she was actively involved in the transformation of the Society of Home Students, first into a permanent Private Hall of the University, and eventually into full collegiate status as St Anne's College. She made a valuable contribution to public policy-making in the post-war years (1947–65). Reeves was an early a member of the Schools' Broadcasting Council, and from 1947 to 1961 of the Central Advisory Council of the Ministry of Education. She sat on the 1961–4 Robbins Committee on Higher Education, which resulted in the establishment of the first post-war wave of new universities including York, Lancaster, Sussex, Essex, Warwick, East Anglia, and Kent. In 1965, Reeves published Eighteen Plus: Unity and Diversity in Higher Education, and in 1988 The Crisis in Higher Education: Competence, Delight and the Common Good.

Glanmor Williams 1920–2005

Glanmor Williams, by dint of intellectual brilliance, far-sighted vision, and exceptional personal charm, achieved towering eminence in the field of Welsh historical studies. Few Welsh scholars in the modern era have served their profession, university, and country as admirably as him, and the flourishing condition of Welsh historical studies during the last half century is in considerable measure attributable to his influence. Yet, in spite of his unrivalled standing as a Welsh historian and the weight of honours he accumulated over the years, Williams remained unspoilt by his academic successes and public achievements.

Charles Martin Robertson 1911–2004

Martin Robertson published the History of Greek Art in 1975, which has continued to hold its place in English language scholarship. It was the culmination of years of patient research that had started when he embraced the teaching of the history of the subject nearly thirty years earlier. Reviewers remarked on the way in which the book was both a personal study of Greek art and also a comprehensive treatment of the whole field. Through its measured structure and the grace and power of its style, it shows the author at the peak of his talent.

William Brian Reddaway 1913–2002

Professor W. B. Reddaway, invariably known to friends and colleagues as Brian Reddaway, was an exceptional economist who had a huge influence on how economics in Cambridge has been taught and researched. He held leadership positions in the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Cambridge for twenty-five years, between 1955 and 1980. For nearly the first fifteen years, Reddaway was Director of the Department of Applied Economics (DAE). In 1969, almost at the end of his tenure as DAE Director, he was elected to succeed James Meade in the Chair of Political Economy, the senior chair in economics in Cambridge. Reddaway held this chair until 1980, when he formally retired. He continued his association with the Faculty for many years after this, doing occasional lecture courses, or one-off lectures: he positively loved lecturing on applied economic subjects and helping younger colleagues with their research.

George Donald Alastair MacDougall 1912–2004

Donald MacDougall was most concerned with economic policy. He was great public servant, his most important work being as a young man during the war, but with a great many other significant contributions during his long life. In 1948, Robert Marjolin, Secretary-General of the new Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in Paris, invited MacDougall to be its first Economics Director. He was the most important writer and editor of the OEEC's Interim Report on the European Recovery Programme, as well as of the succeeding Second Report. MacDougall played a crucial role at the start of the OEEC's effort to free intra-European trade from the network of quantitative import restrictions that hampered it. He also recruited the first members of its Economics Directorate.

Patrick Lancaster Gardiner 1922–1997

Patrick Lancaster Gardiner is best known and most widely esteemed for his work on the nature of historical explanation. By addressing the problem of the limits of objectivity in relation to a variety of philosophical issues, he presciently identified the source of a number of philosophical disputes well before they had properly developed. This was certainly the case in Gardiner's treatment of historical explanation, and it is true also of his later treatment of the claims of the personal versus the impersonal in ethical life.

John Stanton Flemming 1941–2003

John Flemming was a first-class economist in the field of macroeconomics and fiscal policy, but his greatest contributions were, rather, in his general services to the profession and to British public life. He was public-spirited, upright, and high-principled; deeply intelligent and strictly logical; quiet and reserved; kindly with a gentle humour; interested in everyone and everything; widely read; and a great listener. As such, Flemming made the perfect chairman, or committee member. Almost everyone enjoyed working with, or for, him; he had a wide and devoted circle of friends. Everyone sought to benefit from Flemming's advice and wisdom, and he gave that carefully and unstintingly.

Albinia Catherine de la Mare 1932–2001

Albinia de la Mare was one of the outstanding palaeographers of the 20th century. Just as E. A. Lowe in his Codices Latini Antiquiores mapped the earliest surviving Latin manuscripts, and Bernhard Bischoff classified by date and origin the Carolingian manuscripts, she undertook the task of tracing the careers of the hundreds of scribes writing the newly introduced humanistic script in Italy in the 15th century. The tasks were different in many specific ways, but the methodological principles were largely the same. They consisted in training the memory to recognise the characteristics of script, what palaeographers call the ductus, and combining that expertise with a thorough knowledge of the texts which were being transcribed, of the patrons for whom the manuscripts were written, and of the broader cultural and historical context.

William Sidney Allen 1918–2004

William Sidney Allen was an effective and charismatic teacher, and a significant number of those who attended his lectures or came into contact with him when they were students in Cambridge have made major contributions to the development of linguistics in the last thirty years or so. But the principal contribution he made to the promotion of linguistics in Cambridge was not as a teacher, but as someone who skilfully used his professorial authority and (in the early part of his tenure of his chair) his membership of the relevant university committees to get the Department of Linguistics established there and eventually a Chair of General Linguistics, separate from his own Chair of Comparative Philology. In the 1960s, when new departments of linguistics were being created in several British universities, Allen's advice was regularly sought, and on several occasions he served on the appointing committee or acted as an assessor for lectureships and chairs.

Michio Morishima 1923–2004

Michio Morishima was one of the most distinguished economic theorists of his generation. He taught in Japan at Kyoto and Osaka Universities and in the UK at the University of Essex and the London School of Economics, where he spent the last thirty-four years of his very creative life. Morishima was a Visiting Professor at the University of Essex, 1968–9 and the Keynes Visiting Professor there, 1969–70, and Professor of Economics, later the John Hicks Professor of Economics, at the LSE. He was a Senior Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where his friend and mentor Sir John Hicks, FBA was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy. Morishima also held a visiting position at the University of Siena in Italy for nearly thirty years from 1970. He was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975) and of the American Economic Association (1979).