Teachers I have known and liked and those I came to criticise

I have been thinking a little about the impact of the teachers I have known during my life. Two of them, the historian Roger Howell and the philosopher Jan Rogan, are probably the teachers for whom I have most respect and enduring admiration. I took a couple of early modern history courses with the late Roger Howell at St John’s College, Oxford in the early-1960s and recognised as soon as I met him how demanding a tutor he was going to be. My intellectual expectations were met. Sadly, I lost touch with him after he went back to Bowdoin College in Maine and only saw him once again in the North Library of the British Museum in c.1970. Jan Rogan was a philosophy teacher working near where I live on the east coast of England and had an unrivalled capacity for explaining difficult concepts to people of all ranges of ability. I did exchange a few e-mails with her in recent years before her death. I am grateful to have met both of them.

There are or rather were other teachers whom I remember for other reasons. The two history Fellows at Hertford College, Oxford were John Armstrong and Felix Markham. Armstrong was a product of Harrow School and Hertford itself: his brief career as a diplomat in the 1930s led to his discovery of Dominic Mancini’s record of his time in London under Richard III and was the springboard for his return to Hertford as a Fellow from 1937 until 1976. Felix Markham had been educated at Eton and then at Balliol College securing first-class degrees in Greats and History within five years. He tried and failed to win a prize Fellowship at All Souls College before becoming a Fellow at Hertford from 1931 until his retirement. By the time I was one of their undergraduate pupils their best years were well behind them. Neither of them could, in my view, or would have secured a post in any university in the United Kingdom by the 1960s. It was only when I was a postgraduate that I realised they were trying to move me on from the college - to the Oxford Polytechnic in 1965-1966 and later to Liverpool University (where the presence of my friend, Brian Quintrell, who had worked largely in the same areas of research as I had, precluded any prospects of advancement.) I was considered for the post of Lecturer at Hertford in 1968 only to be rejected: when I heard the terms in which members of the Senior Commons Room had referred to me my links to Hertford were severed for ever. I was sorry about this but any College prepared to employ Markham and Armstrong for so many years was clearly not the place for me. Fortunately, later appointments to posts in history there have restored its reputation.