Saint Catherine's College (Oxford) Foundation

Lord Bullock 1914-2004

Alan Louis Charles Bullock was born on 13 December 1914, the son of a gardener and a lady’s maid, both in service in the valley of the Avon near Bath. By the scale of his achievements as biographer and historian, founder of St Catherine’s College and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and by the warmth of his personality and the magnanimity of his character he ranks as one of the great men of his century. His father, Frank, whose life he recounted in one of his last books (Building Jerusalem. A portrait of my father) was self-educated, a voracious reader and captivating speaker who was ordained in the Unitarian Church, becoming minister in the chapel at Chapel Lane Bradford so that young Alan was educated at Bradford Grammar School. In his mid-teens he fell in love with Hilda Handy, always known as Nibby. They married in June 1940, in the week of Dunkirk and remained ardently in love. Nibby was unfailing in her support for her husband, in her intellectual stimulus and, as Alan would say, her spirituality.

From Bradford he won a classical scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford and took a First in Greats in 1936. Elected a Harmsworth Scholar at Merton he took a First in Modern History two years later. He worked briefly for Winston Churchill, devilling for the History of the English Speaking Peoples. Asthmatic, he was unfit for the armed forces so that when war broke out he entered the European Service of the BBC, eventually becoming Diplomatic Correspondent. After the war he became known to a wider audience, participating (with such as C E M Joad and J Bronowski) in the intellectual and entertaining Brains Trust.

He was elected Fellow and Tutor in History at New College and was also appointed Dean. He won the affection and respect of an exceptional generation of undergraduates, nearly all of whom had returned to Oxford after serving in the war. He was a demanding tutor, but was more at ease (son of his father) when lecturing. ‘I do love to perform’ he said, after delivering his last academic lecture at Boston University in 1997. The sometimes unconventional way in which he applied pre-war rules to undergraduates who were now adult veterans lost none of their respect or devotion. Meanwhile he was asked by Odhams to write a life of Hitler. His desk, always immaculately tidy, came to be loaded with records of the Nuremberg trials – an amazing archival source for a contemporary historian. No space was needed for a typewrite: a board across the arms of a chair and a fountain pen were, to the last page he wrote, his author’s equipment.

Hitler: a Study in Tyranny was published in 1952 with the aphorism from Aristotle: ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold’. In the same year Alan Bullock took up his appointment to the oddly-named office of ‘Censor’ of St Catherine’s Society – a male society, constitutionally part of the University, with a handful of tutors and no residential accommodation. Ten years later it became a College and, celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2002, was one of the largest Colleges, with some six hundred undergraduate and graduate members, male and female. In retrospect Alan Bullock’s achievement was formidable. He saw that for students in receipt of government funding a non-residential society was an anachronism which lacked ‘parity of esteem’ with Colleges. He also saw the poverty of the University in its scientific education. He sought funds, from Foundations and from Industry, to build a College and to increase undergraduate numbers, the increase being entirely in mathematics and the sciences. Between 1958 and 1964 he attracted £32 million in current money.

His personal and political skills were outstanding. He won the support of the University Delegates who still governed St Catherine’s, of the Registrar, the University Surveyor and the Heads of Colleges. He made no enemies. His approach to possible benefactors had to skirt around the University’s appeal for historic buildings; in Cambridge a new College was proposed with the great name of Churchill, but Bullock was a person whose credentials were unsurpassed. Four men, Sir Maurice Bowra, Sir Thomas Norrington and Jack Bullock, with Alan Bullock then went in search of an architect and chose Arne Jacobsen, who created what Pevsner has called ‘a perfect piece of architecture’.

For twenty-eight years no office was more important to Alan Bullock than the Mastership of St Catherine’s, even though he had to leave the running of the College to a pro-Master while he was Vice-Chancellor from 1969-73. He sat on the University’s governing body, Hebdomadal Council, for twenty-four years. He was Chairman of the Tate Gallery from 1973 to 1980. He chaired a committee on Reading and other uses of the English Language – and took far more interest in its report than did the government which had appointed him. He chaired too a less successful Committee on Industrial Democracy (1976-7) which ended by producing a majority and minority report and whose recommendation that there should be trades-union sponsored worker-directors on boards never took off. If through all this he remained an effective Master it was because of the loyalty and commitment of his colleagues who held College offices and above all because of the ‘mutual society help and comfort’ which he enjoyed with his wife. When he retired he was named Founding Master and Nibby, as well as he, was elected to an Honorary Fellowship.

Alan Bullock never stopped writing and because he had more ideas than even he could put on paper he conjured books out of other scholars. He wrote a life of Ernest Bevin in three volumes, the first published in 1960 the third – Bevin as Foreign Secretary – in 1983. In his last years, frustrated by recalcitrant memory, he was helped to abridge the three into a single volume. He edited The Twentieth Century (1971) and The Faces of Europe (1980) wrote The Humanist Tradition in the West (1985) created a short series of readings on British Political Tradition, was General Editor (with Sir William Deakin) of the magnificent Oxford History of Modern Europe. Spurred by the number of new words and new ideas he encountered in his voluminous reading he edited, with collaborators, a Dictionary of Modern Thought and the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thinkers. And in his late seventies he wrote the monumental Parallel Lives – an apparently impossible task after Hitler, but an idea of genius carried out with brilliant success.

His public service and his distinction were rewarded by a knighthood in 1972 and he was created Baron Bullock of Leafield in 1976. He took little part in national politics, apart from being a founder-member of the SDP. But wherever there were intellectual or academic ventures he was likely to be found as an adviser or council member – the Ashmolean Museum, the Arts Council, the British Library, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Observer and the Aspen Institute to name only some. He was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1967 and made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in 1970.

Alan Bullock is survived by his wife, their three sons and their grandchildren. He lived and wrote about a century of destruction and slaughter but he was himself a creator, of books and of a College and a guiding star for those around him.

- Wilfrid Knapp