Across the pond

When I first met Professor John Ramsden, who died last Friday,  aged 61, I was struck by his military bearing and his rather brusque manner. He led the way from his office at Queen Mary, University of London, to a restaurant on the other side of the Mile End Road, walking at his usual brisk pace, which forced me into a trot to keep up. Before I had a chance to catch my breath, let alone think about what to eat, we were down to business. He had prepared himself and he put his cards down on the table.

The business was a suggestion I had made to Professor Peter Hennessy three weeks earlier, for a joint degree, Journalism and Contemporary History, with City University doing the journalism teaching and QM’s history department teaching the contemporary history. Hennessy had liked the idea but for it to be a starter it required the support of his colleagues and, most particularly, of his then Head of Department, Ramsden.

Since Ramsden was in New Zealand, I had ample time to prepare myself for the fateful lunch. What I learnt did not cheer me up.

Unlike Hennessy,  who like me had been a journalist for several years before he became a university teacher, Ramsden was a career academic, many of whom even now think journalism is not a serious subject. And, unlike Hennessy, who has pictures of Harold Wilson in his office, Ramsden had made his reputation as the historian of the Conservative Party. His sixth book on the Conservative Party, An Appetite for Power, was published in 1998, the year of my first meeting with him, to considerable acclaim. He had also been very active in Conservative politics as a councillor and constituency chairman and councillor.

So I went into that lunch not expecting a meeting of minds, and halfway through the lunch I was already thinking I would have been better off approaching King’s College, in the Strand, which many of my own colleagues favoured, not least because it was much closer geographically than QM. Ramsden was not against a joint degree but he favoured the option of doing a joint Masters degree rather an undergraduate degree. Masters’ degrees were favoured by university bosses because they made money and by most university staff because they required less teaching, and therefore ate less of the time staff had to do their own research and publishing.

From the student’s point of view, however, there was a major snag. There was no time at all to give student’s a proper grounding in contemporary history as well as practical journalism in a one year course. And, Ramsden made his decisions primarily on what was in the best interests of the students. At the end of the lunch he announced that he was willing to give it a try, despite the considerable problems of winning the support of his own colleagues and bosses and of the University of London Senate.

He was a joy to work with, combining a boyish enthusiasm with the skills of a general planning a campaign. He continued to support the joint BA in Journalism and Contemporary History long after he had stepped down as head of department and started to work on his massive book, Man of the Century, Winston Churchill, and his legand since 1945.

The JCH is only one thing he did in his life. For a much fuller appreciation go Hennessy’s obituary in The Guardian.

I will conclude with a few more observations about the man as I knew him. He enjoyed his moments of glory, as when he was invited by Churchill societies in the US to talk to them about their hero. But he was much better at giving his colleagues credit for what was achieved. When I was looking for a photo to go with this blog, I went to the celebatory photos of the graduation ceremony of 2004 of the five students who had been awarded first class degrees (out of a cohort of 24) with their main teachers.

Ramsden is not on them.

The photo here was taken in the garden of my house, where he came more than once when we had plots to hatch during the vacation. He was scrupulous in insisting that we took it in turns to meet on our own territory. Totally ignoring the fact that it was for him a tedious one hour journey by tube and bus, whereas for me it was a mostly enjoyable twenty minute ride on my scooter.

A small thing. But an important one.