Hugh
Trevor-Roper, the son of a doctor, was born in Northumberland on 15th
January, 1914. Educated at Charterhouse
and Christ Church, Oxford, he became a
research fellow of Merton College in 1937.
His first book, Archbishop Laud,
was published three years later.
During
the Second World War Trevor-Roper served in
the Radio Security Service. Later he worked for the Secret
Intelligence Service where he was involved on the project to penetrate
the German Secret Service. Trevor-Roper later claimed that his boss,
Kim Philby, undermined attempts by Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris to negotiate with the
British government.
In
1945 he was sent to Germany to find out
if the claims being made by Joseph Stalin
that Adolf Hitler was still alive. This
involved him interviewing all the survivors of Hitler's staff. This
material became the main source for his book, The
Last Days of Hitler (1947). He also produced Hitler's
Table Talk (1953).
In 1957 Trevor-Roper became
professor of Modern History at Oxford University.
A post he was to hold for twenty-three years. A supporter of the Conservative
Party, in 1959 Trevor-Roper led the campaign to get Harold
Macmillan elected
as Chancellor of Oxford University.
Other books by Trevor-Roper
include Historical Essays (1957),
Hitler's War Directives (1964),
Religion, The Rise of Christian Europe
(1965), The Reformation and Social Change
(1967), The Philby Affair (1968)
and edited The
Goebbels Diaries (1978).
In 1980 Trevor-Roper became
Master of Peterhouse College. He was
also director of Times Newspapers (1974-1988) and in 1985 claimed
that the Hitler Diaries serialized
in the Sunday
Times were
authentic. Unfortunately for his reputation, the book was later discovered
to be a forgery.
In retirement he published
Renaissance Essays (1985), Catholics,
Anglicans and Puritans (1987),
From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1992).
Hugh
Trevor-Roper, Baron
Dacre of Glanton, died of cancer in an Oxford hospice on 26th January,
2003.
(1)
Hugh
Trevor-Roper,
The Philby Affair (1968)
As an undergraduate at
Oxford I had heard admiring accounts of him from a friend who often
travelled with him in vacations. And, sure enough, while we were still
waiting for Philby, my old Oxford friend himself appeared in Section
Five as a herald of the coming Messiah. I admit that Philby's appointment
astonished me at the time, for my old Oxford friend had told me, years
before, that his travelling companion was a Communist. By now, of
course, I assumed that he was an ex-Communist, but even so I was surprised,
for no one was more fanatically anti-Communist, at that time, than
the regular members of the two security services, MI6 and MI5. And
of all the anti-Communists, none seemed more resolute than the ex-Indian
policemen, like Colonel Vivian and Major Cowgill, whose earlier years
had been spent in waging war on 'subversion' in the irritant climate
of the Far East. That these men should have suspended their deepest
convictions in favour of the ex-Communist, Philby, was indeed remarkable.
Since it never occurred to me that they could be ignorant of the facts
(which were widely known), I assumed that Philby had particular virtues
which made him, in their eyes, indispensable. I hasten to add that,
although I myself knew of Philby's Communist past, it would never
have occurred to me, at that time, to hold it against him. My own
view, like that of most of my contemporaries, was that our superiors
were lunatic in their anti-Communism. We were therefore pleased that
at least one ex-Communist should have broken through the net and that
the social prejudices
of our superiors had, on this one occasion, triumphed over their political
prejudices.
(2)
Hugh
Trevor-Roper,
The Philby Affair (1968)
Late in 1942 my office
had come to certain conclusions - which time proved to be correct
- about the struggle between the Nazi Party and the German General
Staff, as it was being fought out in the field of secret intelligence.
The German Secret Service (the Abivehr) and its leader. Admiral Canaris,
were suspected by the Party not only of inefficiency but of disloyalty,
and attempts were being made by Himmler to oust the Admiral and to
take over his whole organization. Admiral Canaris himself, at that
time, was making repeated journeys to Spain and indicated a willingness
to treat with us: he would even welcome a meeting with his opposite
number, 'C'. These conclusions were duly formulated and the final
document was submitted for security clearance to Philby. Philby absolutely
forbade its circulation, insisting that it was 'mere speculation'.
He afterwards similarly
suppressed, as 'unreliable', a report from an important German defector.
Otto John, who informed us, in Lisbon, that a conspiracy was being
hatched against Hitler. This also was perfectly true. The conspiracy
was the Plot of 20 July 1944, and Canaris, for his contribution to
it, afterwards suffered a traitor's death in Germany.
At the time we were baffled
by Philby's intransigence, which would yield to no argument and which
no argument was used to defend. From some members of Section Five,
mere mindless blocking of intelligence was to be expected. But Philby,
we said to ourselves, was an intelligent man: how could he behave
thus in a matter so important? Had he too yielded to the genius of
the place?
(3)
Blair Wordern, The
Guardian (27th January, 2003)
While Trevor-Roper occupied the public eye, his critics,
sometimes even his friends, were urging him to write a long and weighty
book. In reality his learning, though never paraded, indeed at times
almost secretive, was formidable and exact. He has left behind an
extraordinary range of scholarly writing, not all of it completed
or published.
But the world, he felt,
was not short of fat books on single subjects. His favoured form was
the essay, sometimes the long essay - where insight must be concentrated,
proportion maintained and the evidence of learning kept mostly beneath
the surface. The genre allowed him to move across time and space and
to draw on the breadth of his reading and reflection. He liked to
notice resemblances here, or contrasts there, between societies or
events or circumstances. Comparison was his essential intellectual
instrument, as it was of the "philosophic historians" of
the 18th century, Gibbon at their head, whom he admired. Everything
that interested him seemed to remind him of something else.
In 1967 he brought together
perhaps the most remarkable of his collections of essays, Religion,
The Reformation And Social Change. Employing an almost dizzying range
of material, the book centred on the revolutions that shook Europe
in the middle of the 17th century and related them to the mental ferment
that preceded and accompanied them. The essays reflected the influence
of French historians, particularly Fernand Braudel and Marc Bataillon,
who had deepened his interest in early-modern Europe. They also marked
the movement of his thinking away from economics to ideas. They were
the boldest exposition of lifelong persuasions: of his equation of
historical progress with pluralism; of his impatience with closed
intellectual systems (both past and present); and of his rejection
of historical determinism.
(4)
BBC Online
(January, 2003)
Along with AJP Taylor,
Lord Dacre was one of the most-respected historians of the modern
era. But his reputation was seriously undermined when he backed the
Hitler Diaries in April 1983. Both the German magazine Stern and Britain's
Sunday Times were humiliated when it became apparent that they had
paid millions for a hoax. The 60 volumes, supposedly the personal
thoughts of the dead dictator, were in fact the work of a German fraudster.
There had been a great deal of initial scepticism, with many won over
by Lord Dacre's backing.
In reality, the diaries
were made of paper, ink and glue of post-war origin. The text was
also peppered with historical inaccuracies and anachronisms. Forger
Konrad Kujau was jailed in Germany for four-and-a-half-years for the
scam. Kujau had based his work on a book called Hitler's Speeches
and Proclamations compiled by a Nazi federal archivist. He had added
banal comments such as "Must get tickets for the Olympic Games
for Eva" to give the work a personal touch.
(5)
Daily
Telegraph (27th January, 2003)
Though
never restricting himself to any speciality, Trevor-Roper was particularly
well versed in the intellectual, as well as in the political and social,
history of the 16th and 17th centuries. He might - perhaps he should
- have written a great work on the English Civil War.
A J P Taylor once mischievously
remarked that Trevor-Roper had written only one full-length book "of
real excellence", and that was a work of immediate reportage,
The Last Days of Hitler (1947). But Trevor-Roper's preferred
form was the historical essay, into which he would concentrate more
pith than many writers bring to a book.
Like Taylor, he believed
that history should be widely accessible. Taking Gibbon as his ideal,
he breathed life into a discipline overpopulated in his youth by Soviet-inspired
ideologues and by pedants of the German school. Trevor-Roper was a
stormy petrel who enjoyed routing his enemies, even if his love of
excitement occasionally brought him low.
In his article The Gentry,
1540 to 1640, he claimed - in opposition to the prevailing Marxist
orthodoxy - that the gentry had been declining, rather than rising,
economically in the century before the Civil War. This conclusion
led to a ferocious dispute with Lawrence Stone.
Trevor-Roper further sharpened
his polemical gifts with a bitter attack upon Arnold Toynbee, and
in intermittent sparring with Evelyn Waugh, who regarded him as an
open and obnoxious anti-Catholic, and considered that his appointment
in 1957 as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford "showed
malice to the Church".
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