Isaac Schapera 1905–2003

Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, spent the second half of his long life in London but remained very much a South African. His parents immigrated to South Africa at the turn of the century from what is now Belarus, and settled in Garies, a small town in the semi-desert district of Little Namaqualand, in the Northern Cape. As an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, Schapera was introduced to ‘British social anthropology’ by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the founding fathers of the discipline, the other being Bronislaw Malinowski. He then became one of the first members of Malinowski’s post-graduate seminar at the London School of Economics. Towards the end of his career, Schapera preferred to describe himself as an ethnographer rather than as an anthropologist. His research in the 1930s and 1940s was distinguished by a concern with ‘social change’, a focus endorsed in South Africa by Malinowski in London.

Rodney Howard Hilton 1916–2002

Rodney Howard Hilton (1916–2002), a Fellow of the British Academy, was born in Middleton, England, to John James Hilton and Anne Howard Hilton. As a history undergraduate between 1935 and 1938, Hilton was attracted to the medieval period by the teaching of two outstanding Balliol scholars, Vivian Galbraith and Richard Southern. At the University of Oxford, he was influenced by ‘foreign ideas’ and joined the Communist Party. By 1956, Hilton had established an international reputation as an authority on the medieval economy in general, and in particular had put forward new ideas about social class, conflict, the crisis on feudalism, and the origins of capitalism. He was inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, Nikolai Lenin, and their more recent disciples, and applied their ideas. A constant theme running through all Hilton’s work was his commitment to the study of localities. He had a major role in making the subject of medieval economic and social history a lively field of enquiry and debate, which is a legacy that continues into the new century.

Richard Arthur Wollheim 1923–2003

Richard Arthur Wollheim (1923–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was an advocate of pacifism. Born in London to Eric Wollheim and Constance Baker, he went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar at the age of thirteen and was influenced by Aldous Huxley’s Encyclopaedia of Pacifism. After volunteering for service during World War II, he returned to Balliol College at the University of Oxford in 1945, obtaining two first class BA degrees, one in History in 1946, the other in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1948. His first substantial piece of work, F. H. Bradley (1959), notable for the elegance and lucidity of its writing and its unrivalled mastery of Francis Herbert Bradley’s philosophy, was immediately recognised as the best book on its subject. Underlying his concern with social issues was one of the deepest commitments of Wollheim’s life, ‘devotion to the cause of socialism’, and it is in the final section of his Fabian Society pamphlet Socialism and Culture (1961) that his own conception of socialism becomes clear.

Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett 1915–2001

Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett (1915–2001), a Fellow of the British Academy, spent much of his childhood in Oxford but his secondary education took place in the Grammar School at Watford, where his father had become minister. In 1935, Laslett went up to St John’s College at the University of Cambridge to read history, graduating with a double first in 1938. In 1947, he married Janet Crockett Clark, who provided the secure and happy foundation for all his other activities over the next half century. From his childhood, well before showing any special aptitude for formal historical study, Laslett was intensely fascinated by the past inhabitants of England. His work on John Locke produced two enduring achievements: an edition of the Two Treatises of Government and a catalogue of Locke’s library. He also exerted a wider influence upon political theory by his editorship of a series of collections of essays devoted to the changing status and vitality of political thinking.

Morris Keith Hopkins 1934–20041

Morris Keith Hopkins (1934–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, played a key role in broadening the study of ancient history, particularly the history of Rome. Having learned historical sociology, Hopkins was able to conduct a series of structural analyses of Roman society such as had rarely if ever been attempted by previous historians. Hopkins became a real sociologist in Hong Kong, whose massive housing problem he studied. He also spent time in North America; he was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Two major schemes occupied Hopkins’s scholarly energies during the 1970s: one was to put together the structural and sociological account of the Roman Empire which he had already been working on at intervals for several years — this was eventually to become both Conquerors and Slaves and Death and Renewal. Throughout his career as a scholar, Hopkins strove to solve fundamental and very difficult historical problems, and to do this in an exciting and immediate fashion.

Isaiah Berlin 1909–1997

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), a Fellow of the British Academy, was an extraordinary obituarist and memorialist. In the 1930s, Berlin was part of a small group of young and iconoclastic philosophers that included John Austin, Stuart Hampshire, and A. J. Ayer. Ayer was an early convert to logical positivism while Austin, Hampshire and Berlin were not. Berlin’s career was first interrupted and then spectacularly accelerated by the outbreak of World War II. The years he spent in Washington brought Berlin into close contact with the makers of American foreign policy and reshaped his sense of what he might do with his life. Even more important were his postwar encounters with Russian poets, novelists, dramatists and other intellectuals in the winter of 1945–1946. During the 1950s, Berlin became an important figure outside academic life in the broader cultural life of Britain. One of his more surprising insights was that the existence of the state of Israel was a necessity for Jews everywhere. He remained a confirmed liberal Zionist and a good friend of Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel.

John Cyril Smith 1922–2003

John Cyril Smith (1922–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Nottingham where he headed the Law Department for three decades. In 1952–1953, Smith was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at Harvard University and became impressed by the casebook method of teaching. The only subject he had taught every year throughout his career was evidence. His deep understanding of the law was apparent in his case commentaries on the subject for the Criminal Law Review, although by the mid-1980s he was handing over many evidence cases to his colleague and former student Diane Birch for commentary. He was a strong advocate of the presumption of innocence, in the form of the principle. It is chiefly for his work on the substantive criminal law that Smith will be long remembered. In addition to his three decades as Head of the Law Department at the University of Nottingham, and all his academic writings, Smith gave considerable time to official committees and other public service work.

Judah Benzion (‘Ben’) Segal 1912–2003

Judah Benzion Segal (1912–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a long career as a teacher of Semitic languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Segal’s principal interest was in Aramaic and Syriac, in addition to Hebrew and the other main Semitic tongues. Before his teaching career, he was employed in the Sudan Civil Service and, during World War II, his service was frequently behind the enemy lines in North Africa. He was educated at Magdalen College School, University of Oxford, and at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. One of Segal’s other abiding interests concerned the Jews of Cochin whose history he published in 1993. But it will probably be in the area of Aramaic studies that Segal will be best remembered in the academic world.

John Smith Roskell 1913–1998

John Smith Roskell (1913–1998), a Fellow of the British Academy, defended a broadly neo-Stubbsian view of the British Parliament against the revisionists, while making a more critical and balanced assessment of the role of the Commons in what his mentor, J. G. Edwards, termed ‘The Second Century’ of its history, after 1377. Roskell brought to his work an unrivalled familiarity with the text of the parliament rolls in Britain, carefully scrutinising language and context to establish the development of the procedures and powers of the House of Commons. He steered to successful completion the official history of The House of Commons, 1386–1421, which bears the imprint of his approach. While at the University of Nottingham, he began to compile and publish in the relevant local history journals a series of biographies of speakers. During his retirement, Roskell wrote The History of Parliament covering the period 1386–1421.

Geoffrey Marshall 1929–2003

Geoffrey Marshall (1929–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was regarded by many as the greatest constitutional theorist Britain has seen since Albert Venn Dicey. He brought to the study of politics and the law the tools of analytical philosophy and jurisprudence developed at the University of Oxford, and showed that they could yield insights of permanent value in the analysis of the British constitution. He was born in Chesterfield, just before the advent to power of Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government. Marshall believed that there was a gap between the jurisdiction of the courts and that of Parliament, a gap within which the powers of ministers had grown unchecked, as had a host of administrative bodies created by statute. This gap, he argued, should be filled by the creation of an Ombudsman and the development of administrative law. Marshall was also a strong supporter of a Bill of Rights for Britain.