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Um historiador ingles: Hugh Trevor-Roper

A Very English Controversialist

The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011

Oxford in the mid-20th century was a romantic place—ancient buildings emerging through the mists, a class hierarchy still in place, complete with grand accents. The place had character and produced characters as well. Hugh Trevor-Roper was one such, and Adam Sisman's biography, "An Honourable Englishman," is a marvelous evocation of man, place and time. Here was an Oxford historian who hunted, drove a Bentley, had duchesses at his parties, worked in British wartime intelligence and wrote a book about the last days of Hitler that was translated into dozens of languages.

There is that surprisingly common thing among the English upper-middle class, a family that offers no affection—like the one Trevor-Roper was born into in 1914. Growing up on the border with Scotland, he was "starved of affection, and even of attention," Mr. Sisman says, and "became a very abstracted child."

His parents made him go to church, but Trevor-Roper passed the time memorizing the Assyrian and Babylonian chronologies. Then it was boarding school, Latin and Greek to a very high standard, travel abroad to get good French and German (which he did not like), then to Oxford as an undergraduate. He had his foot on the academic ladder by the time war broke out in 1939—he'd already published his first book, on the Anglican Church and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud in the English Civil War, making waves with its anti-clericalism.

Trevor-Roper could not join the army because his eyesight was poor. (He needed spectacles of Palomar Observatory strength and often offended people by not recognizing them.) He went into military intelligence instead and flourished. It was the making of him, because he was assigned at war's end to examine Hitler's final days before his suicide in the Reichstag bunker. The Russians were making a mystery of them.

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Lord Snowdon/Camera Press/Retna

Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1968, the year he wrote 'The Philby Affair.'

Trevor-Roper's job was to locate witnesses in Berlin, and he did it well. He had some help, not entirely acknowledged, from a manuscript (which I saw in Moscow) written by Hanna Reitsch, a famous German pilot who had flown to Berlin in the war's final days with the newly appointed head of the Luftwaffe (his predecessor, Hermann Goering, having been dismissed for defeatism). The plane crash-landed outside the Reichstag as Red Army troops were taking the city. The Luftwaffe chief, badly injured, was hustled in a stretcher down the steps into Hitler's bunker, past the Goebbels children playing hopscotch. Reitsch saw the desperate last moments in the bunker but was ordered away before the very end—and she eluded capture for a time, only to find her entire family dead of cyanide poisoning around the breakfast table on a Salzburg mountain.

Trevor-Roper used Reitsch's manuscript to much effect in "The Last Days of Hitler" (1947). The book holds up well, even in light of additional evidence that became known when the Soviets began releasing German prisoners in the 1950s. The book is also very well written, the model being Edward Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire's decline. "The Last Days of Hitler" was a great success, critically and financially. Mr. Sisman reports that, in those days, Oxford professors like Trevor-Roper were annually paid £1,900 (before tax). "The total sum due him in the first accounting period from sales of the British edition alone would be £3,849."

And Trevor-Roper needed the money. He had upper-class habits—hunting (until he broke his back), smart cars, grand-ish houses (one put up by Sir Walter Scott in the Scottish borders). He also married well, to the daughter of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the World War I British commander. Alexandra, known as Xandra, had divorced her first husband, the British naval attaché in postwar Paris. She acquired a fabulous couturier collection while there; when she and Hugh ran short of money late in life, she began surreptitiously selling off the clothes.

An Honourable Englishman

By Adam Sisman
Random House, 643 pages, $40

Then, in 1957, when he was still in his 40s, Trevor-Roper was appointed Regius professor of modern history, a prestigious post more commonly awarded in recognition of a long and distinguished career. The appointment was made by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who a decade before had been working at the family publishing firm when it brought out "The Last Days of Hitler."

Mr. Sisman knows all the gossip. Trevor-Roper could enrage people, and not all of the ire was caused by envy. Part of the trouble was that he never wrote the promised Great Book, diverting his energies again and again into essays and higher journalism. He did so, apparently, to please Xandra: "You expect me to earn more money than I am paid at Oxford. To do this I must write for the Sunday Times. The Sunday Times wants me to write on foreign politics, and to do this I must go abroad." Mr. Sisman adds: "But she persecuted him for going on 'holidays' without her."

Trevor-Roper did make repeated attempts to take on big book subjects, but he would write four or five chapters before abandoning them for something else. His friends gathered these into collections of essays that were published; it was left to his former pupil, Geoffrey Parker, to write the epic volume on 17th-century European history that Trevor-Roper should have done.

Another distraction from book-writing was Trevor-Roper's willingness to undertake lecture tours. The practice could be fruitful: Some of his best-written pieces began life as lectures. There is a remarkable talk he gave in 1961 asking: "Why did the economic and social and intellectual life of the Roman Catholic countries sink or stagnate, while that of the Protestant countries bounded forward, in the three centuries after the Reformation?" It was an idea broached by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) but pursued with vigor by Trevor-Roper. He delivered the lecture to an unlikely audience: Irish nuns in Galway.

Weber launched his thesis about the Protestant ethic and capitalism at the turn of the century and for the next hundred years everybody said it was All Wrong—in other words, Weber was onto something. Trevor-Roper recognized this, then pursued an explanation. The capitalists were not especially Protestant, he showed, and the Protestants were not especially capitalist. The difference with Catholicism was that the Counter-Reformation in Europe, beginning in the mid-16th century, drove out the capitalists with taxes and bureaucracy, so they set up in Holland, or England, or America—just as happened, though Trevor-Roper did not spell this out, with the Jews of Central Europe in the 1930s. It was emigration, not religion, that made the difference. The explanation was an ingenious one, though in some ways it does just push the question back, leaving questions about the Counter-Reformation unaddressed.

The Trevor-Ropers' make-it-and-spend-it life meant that they improvidently neglected to buy a decent house in London; as he neared 70, Trevor-Roper was rather stuck in Cambridge, where he had become the head of Peterhouse College in 1980. (The year before, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had made him a life peer; he chose the title Baron Dacre of Glanton, for his birthplace in Northumberland.) By 1983, he was unhappy at Peterhouse, feeling isolated and pinched for money, and worried about retiring and about where he and Xandra would live.

The mixture was an explosive one, and it helps to account for that comic and sad episode when Trevor-Roper endorsed the authenticity of Hitler's purported diaries. "Ever since he made his name as a Hitler expert with the worldwide success of The Last Days of Hitler," Mr. Sisman writes, "Hugh had been called upon to judge the authenticity of documents from the Nazi period. It had become a profitable sideline." The German magazine Stern claimed to have obtained Hitler's diaries and was offering them for syndication to the Times and Sunday Times, who hired Trevor-Roper to examine the papers for a "five-figure fee," Mr. Sisman says.

Trevor-Roper's German had become very rusty, and anyway his eyesight could not handle the forger's scribbles—which were quickly revealed as fake after the diaries were publicly trumpeted. The whole episode is brilliantly written up in Robert Harris's "Selling Hitler" (1986). Oddly enough, Trevor-Roper had made a fool of himself in the Sunday Times two decades earlier, by pontificating about ballistics in support of some idiotic theory about the assassination of President Kennedy. God knows why he did these things. Adam Sisman has done a wonderful job with a life that, in its way, is very English.

—Mr. Stone is a professor of modern history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey

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