William Gerald Beasley 1919–2006

William Gerald Beasley (1919–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the pioneer in introducing Japanese history into British academic circles as teacher, researcher, and author. He was born in Hanwell, Middlesex on December 22, 1919, and moved to Brackley, Northamptonshire, where he was educated at Magdalen College School. In 1937, Beasley registered for a degree in history at University College London. In the last weeks of World War II, he was in the Pacific Islands interrogating Japanese naval prisoners who were few in number and ‘never seemed to possess important information’. Late in June 1945, Beasley was ordered to join the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet, the HMS King George V, so as to be ‘available for duty in Japan, if needed’. In 1947, he began to teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which was the beneficiary of financial help under the recommendations of the Scarbrough Commission. In his great book Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford, 1987), Beasley re-examined the nature of Japan's imperialism.

Brian Woledge 1904–2002

Brian Woledge (1904–2002), a Fellow of the British Academy and formerly Fielden Professor of French at University College London (UCL), devoted his professional life, with remarkable consistency of purpose, to understanding the Old French Language. As head of department at UCL, he would encourage students to take options in comparative philology and in phonetics. In the pursuit of such interests, Woledge's own commitment was absolute and unwavering and he rejoiced in sharing them. In 1930, thesis completed, the young scholar contemplated his future with greater equanimity, for he was armed with his first major publication, a study dedicated to Paul Barbier. In 1967, Woledge was for some months Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and three years later received an honorary doctorate from the University of Aix-en-Provence. After his retirement he was a Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellow 1972–1973 and 1973–1974, and in 1989 was elected to Senior Fellowship of the Academy.

David Oates 1927–2004

David Oates (1927–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a distinguished Mesopotamian archaeologist whose name is closely associated with three of the best-known sites in the Middle East: Nimrud, Tell al-Rimah, and Tell Brak. He was a fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge and Lecturer in Archaeology from 1957 to 1965, as well as Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq from 1965 to 1969 and Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, from 1969 to 1982. In some ways, Oates was a product of the same tradition that had spawned eminent predecessors such as Sir Leonard Woolley and Sir Max Mallowan, but he brought to his task a keen appreciation of ancient languages and cultures, a sharp eye for the interpretation of ancient architecture, and a good understanding of political, social, and economic history and their relevance to archaeological enquiry. At Cambridge he had a brilliant career, reading classics and then archaeology, and graduating in 1948 with first-class honours.

Robert Edgar Megarry 1910–2006

Robert Edgar Megarry (1910–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a career in the law unmatched in its distinction, breadth, and diversity. He not only achieved an outstanding reputation as a practising barrister and then, for nearly twenty years, as a High Court judge, but also made what has rightly been described as an ‘immeasurable’ contribution to the law as scholar, teacher, and author. Megarry was born in Croydon, the elder son of Robert Lindsay Megarry and Irene Clark. He entered Trinity Hall at Cambridge University in 1929. It was A. L. Goodhart, editor of the prestigious Law Quarterly Review since 1926 and latterly Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, who had been one of those who encouraged Megarry to seek call to the Bar. Writing and teaching were among the traditional ways in which newly called barristers supplemented earnings from meagre practices, and Megarry was exceptionally well qualified for both these activities. His attitude of judicial restraint is now often regarded as dated.

Charles Henry Gifford 1913–2003

Charles Henry Gifford (1913–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a scholar-critic whose death at the age of ninety brought home what true piety is, in contemplation of his supple stamina and of his own discriminating piety towards the literary geniuses whose presences he owned: Leo Tolstoy and George Seferis, Boris Pasternak and Samuel Johnson, Dante and T. S. Eliot. He was a teacher for thirty years at the University of Bristol, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, as essayist for Grand Street, and general editor (for Cambridge University Press) of the Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Educated at Harrow and then at Christ Church, Oxford, Gifford gained his BA in 1936, securing those foundations in Classics that were once held to be indispensable to all humane literary studies. Though he changed his mind as to whether he was cut out to be a poet, he never dispensed with what underpinned his love of poetry, the trained analytical and synthesising powers that his study of classical literature had helped to establish within him.

Charles Hilliard Feinstein 1932–2004

Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, worked out the structure and size of the British economy from 1965 and back to mid-Victorian times. Beyond scholarship, his life subsumed a longer arc: the quest for an equitable South Africa in his youth, and its resumption in his final years. The economics that appealed to Feinstein were those of Karl Marx, and he submitted an honours dissertation on the labour theory of value. He was attracted to the University of Cambridge by the presence there of the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and the two remained close for years afterwards. In 1958, Feinstein took a research position in Cambridge's Department of Applied Economics, where he adapted national income series for immediate use. In 1963, he became an assistant university lecturer in economic history, and fellow and director of studies in economics at Clare College. Feinstein published a book entitled National Income towards the end of the heroic phase of historical national accounting.

Austin Herbert Woolrych 1918–2004

Austin Herbert Woolrych (1918–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a scholar whose career, distinguished though it was, really only blossomed after his 60th birthday. By the age of 60, he had published just over 500 pages of academic prose; between his 60th birthday and his death 25 years later, he had published another 2,000 pages. Two terms into graduate study, Woolrych was recruited to join the rapidly expanding History Department at the University of Leeds. One of his books was Battles of the English Civil War, a study of three battles (Marston Moor (July 1644), Naseby (June 1645) and Preston (August 1648)). Woolrych was credited for creating an excellent History Department at Lancaster University. As he neared his 80th birthday in 1998, he decided to devote himself more single-mindedly to his last great work, his single-volume history of Britain in Revolution 1625–1660.

Robert Andrew Glendinning Carson 1918–2006

Robert Andrew Glendinning Carson (1918–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, spent his career at the British Museum, where he rose to be Keeper of the Department of Coins & Medals. He was the leading British expert in Roman numismatics of his generation. Carson was a prolific scholar and his bibliography runs to more than 350 items. He had been set high standards by his mentor, Harold Mattingly, who served as Curator of Roman coins at the British Museum from 1910 to 1947. But perhaps Carson's most influential contribution to the study of Roman coins lay in the work he carried out in collaboration with John Kent. As Curator of Roman coins at the British Museum, it was perhaps inevitable that Carson should take an interest in the coins of the British usurpers Carausius and Allectus, and he published a series of papers on their coinages. Carson had an international reputation: he was actively involved in the organisation of international numismatic congresses from the 1950s.

David Roy Shackleton Bailey 1917–2005

David Roy Shackleton Bailey (1917–2005), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a prodigious scholar, a towering figure in textual criticism and the editing and translating of Latin literature, and a brilliant student of Roman Republican history, prosopography, and society. His work amounts to some fifty volumes and more than 200 articles and reviews. Shackleton's own prose style, whether in translations of Cicero, justifying an emendation, or just in correspondence is a delight to read, and frequently quotable. Born in Lancaster on December 10, 1917 to Rosamund Maude Giles and John Henry, he had always been attracted to the poet Horace. However, Shackleton's name is most closely associated with that of Cicero, whose letters in their entirety and speeches selectively he edited, with translation and commentary.

Maurice Frank Wiles 1923–2005

Maurice Frank Wiles (1923–2005), a Fellow of the British Academy, was an Anglican theologian who was able within that tradition to develop the field of ‘doctrinal criticism’. He began his career concentrating on the period of the early Fathers of the Church, and it was this grounding that sowed the seeds of his later work on modern doctrine. Arianism would remain a particular interest. Yet Wiles retained a profound respect for tradition and, like the Fathers, constantly measured his doctrinal critique against the experience of believers in life and worship, regarding theology as second-order discourse – reflection on the significance of what was primary for Christianity, such as the experience of salvation. During his student days two people particularly influenced him: Ian Ramsey, who was Chaplain of his college and his first Theology tutor; and Henry Chadwick, who encouraged his early research in the Church Fathers. The evolution of Wiles' thinking is perhaps best observed in the collection published as Working Papers in Doctrine.