Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography
Roper, Hugh Redwald Trevor-,
Baron Dacre of Glanton
(1914–2003)

Richard Davenport-Hines

https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/88756
Published in print: 05 March 2009
Published online: 04 January 2007
This version: 06 January 2011

Roper, Hugh Redwald Trevor-, Baron Dacre of Glanton (1914–

2003), historian, was born on 15 January 1914, at Glanton,
Northumberland, the elder son of Bertie William Edward Trevor-
Roper (1885–1978), physician, and his wife, Kathleen Elizabeth, née
Davison (1885–1964). His younger brother, Patrick Dacre Trevor-
Roper (1916–2004), followed their father in pursuing a distinguished
career in medicine. As a boy Hugh was solitary, self-reliant, and
studious: boarding at Charterhouse (after Stancliffe Hall school,
Derbyshire, and Belhaven Hill preparatory school, Dunbar) provided
relief from a grim household where the children were often rebuffed,
but never praised. He was awarded a classical scholarship at Christ
Church, Oxford, in 1932, the Craven scholarship in 1933, and a first
in classical moderations and the Hertford and Ireland scholarships in
1934; but he then transferred to modern history, in which subject he
won first-class honours in 1936. As an undergraduate he moved in a
set of hard-drinking hunting men, but read long, challenging works
of scholarship with ferocious concentration: he taught himself
German so as to study Wilamowitz, but then used his skill to read
Mein Kampf.

Trevor-Roper became a research fellow of Merton College, Oxford,

in 1937 and embarked on research which was published by
Macmillan in 1940 as Archbishop Laud. At this time he was a tory
Marxist, committed to economic motives and causation, although his
interests later focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
political and social structures, and in later middle age his work
turned towards the history of ideas and the origins of the
Enlightenment.

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 War service and Hitler's death
Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Trevor-Roper
was recruited to MI8, the Radio Security Service (RSS), a newly
formed War Office department initially based at Wormwood Scrubs,
which (after he and a colleague had deciphered a crucial code)
became expert in monitoring the intercepted wireless traffic of the
Abwehr, the German intelligence service. Trevor-Roper had an
intelligence of rare clarity and incisive force that exceptionally fitted
him for the task of analysing and interpreting this welter of material.
In recognition of their successes he and the RSS were transferred in
1941 to MI6's counter-espionage section. Trevor-Roper was a
resolute, independent-minded officer, who more than once was
threatened with court martial: although never insubordinate, he was
impatient and provocative of complacent mediocrity. In 1943 he
became head of the radio intelligence section, a new branch of MI6,
and developed a special interest in the workings of the German
underground opposition. During 1944 he joined the War Room, a
counter-intelligence group preparing for the occupation of Germany,
headed by his friend Dick White.

It was at White's instigation that in the autumn of 1945 Major

Trevor-Roper began a systematic investigation into the
circumstances of Hitler's death, including interrogation of
eyewitnesses, and compiled an official report on the subject. After
returning to Christ Church as a Student (tutor) in 1946, he expanded
his report into a book, The Last Days of Hitler, which was published
to high acclaim in 1947. It was never out of print in its author's
lifetime.

Oxford don
Trevor-Roper was a relentless scourge of zealots, cheats, and bores,
and had exacting standards of historical evidence. But although he
required the truth to be pure, he liked his mentors to be wicked
gossips. In 1940 he was befriended by the selfish but winsome
Chelsea man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith: Trevor-Roper's supple,
exact, indelible prose, his elaborate elegance as a raconteur, and his
malicious pleasures owed much to Smith. In 1947, while visiting
Italy as a special correspondent of The Observer, he met Smith's
brother-in-law Bernard Berenson, the tutelary genius of I Tatti, to
whom he became gratefully devoted for training his pictorial
imagination and for quickening his interest in the history of
European ideas. Another enduring friendship, dating from 1951, was
with Gerald Brenan. These contacts were proof of Trevor-Roper's
interest in European, rather than merely national or regional,
history. He had a reading knowledge of at least eight languages and
was an inveterate traveller; and he thus acquired a breadth of
experience and scholarship that English historians seldom attain—
there had been no one to rival the cosmopolitanism of his

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 professional expertise since Lord Acton. He was the pioneering
advocate in Britain of l'histoire totale. He extolled the Annales school
in France, and particularly the early work of Fernand Braudel:
during the 1950s he attended their seminars in Paris.

In 1953 Trevor-Roper, whom Pearsall Smith had encouraged in a

taste for the coroneted haute monde, began a passionate affair with
Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (1907–1997), the
wife of Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston and
eldest daughter of Field-Marshal Earl Haig. After an acrimonious
divorce the lovers were married on 4 October 1954: Trevor-Roper
thus acquired three stepchildren.

The success of The Last Days of Hitler, and Trevor-Roper's

beautifully limpid prose, made him a sought-after and well-paid
reviewer, essayist, and travel writer in the Sunday Times, the New
Statesman, the New York Times, and other periodicals. These
worldly successes, and his sardonic humour, were resented by some
contemporaries in Oxford, where his appointment to the chair of
modern history was blocked in 1951. He was a dialectic historian,
who investigated and tested the truths of other historians,
sometimes with grave irony and on other occasions with destructive
zest. By now he detested talk of ineluctable historical forces and all
mechanistic theories of history: he cherished the free wills and
moral choices of historical protagonists. His formidable powers as a
controversialist were evident in his essay demolishing Lawrence
Stone's views on the Elizabethan aristocracy (1951); in his
annihilating opusculum directed against R. H. Tawney's 'The gentry
1540–1640' (1953); and in his Encounter polemics, 'Arnold Toynbee's
millennium' (1957) and 'A. J. P. Taylor, Hitler and the war' (1961).

These activities distracted him from writing the big book that his
friends expected of him. After 1948 he started but discarded several
monographs, produced an edition of Hitler's table talk in 1953, and
collected his Historical Essays in 1957; but his efforts after 1958 to
produce a magnum opus—conceived as a three-volume study of the
age of Cromwell and modified into a volume on the crisis in English
government from 1600 to 1658—were abortive. He could not find a
satisfactory form or ending for his manuscript, which was, he felt,
overcrowded with argument. This failure caused him anguish, which
was not relieved by the ambivalent critical reception of The Rise of
Christian Europe (1965). His default also gratified his proliferating
enemies, for Trevor-Roper was a combative man whose razor-edged
intelligence caused wounds that in some cases never healed. He was
a sceptic who hated closed intellectual systems, despised
metaphysics, and was revolted by the enforced submission of
personal judgement to doctrinal authority. This led him into
trenchant criticism of Catholicism, especially fashionable converts
and their Jesuit confessors; of Stalinists; but also—for in these
matters he was even-handed—of communist witch-hunts. His keen
scrutiny after 1966 of the bogus traditions and theocratic Calvinism
underlying some currents of Scottish nationalism was never forgiven
in some quarters.

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 Regius professor
Trevor-Roper was an astute if mischievous intriguer in university
politics, and after careful manoeuvres he secured his appointment as
regius professor of modern history in 1957. This required him to
relinquish his studentship at Christ Church for a fellowship at a
smaller, more staid college, Oriel, where his colleagues, rather than
feeling refreshed by a healthy breeze after his arrival, initially
shuddered at his chill Northumbrian blast. Of his predecessors in the
regius chair he most admired York Powell, 'a universal man
accidentally thrown up among our grim specialists' (Lloyd-Jones and
others, 13), as he said in his inaugural lecture, which attacked
obscurantism and timid pedantry among scholars, and urged that
historical writing must be provocative, even playful, if history was
not to seem a dead subject. Though Trevor-Roper disdained
irresponsible frivolity, or any other form of cowardice in the face of
life's difficulties, he cared even less for unrelenting seriousness,
which seemed to him a form of fanaticism that stultified scholarship.
He wanted Oxford University to be saved from 'solemn, pompous,
dreary, respectable … experts' and to be instead 'gay, irreverent,
genial, unpompous' (Trevor-Roper, 307). To this end he
masterminded the campaign that resulted in the defeat of Oliver
Franks and the election of Harold Macmillan as chancellor of the
university in 1960.

The range of Trevor-Roper's interests was exceptional: only he could

have published, in the same year (1964), editions of Gibbon's Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire and of Hitler's War Directives. His
many time-consuming digressions included investigations in the
1950s into the Swedish humanitarian Count Bernadotte's murky
dealings with Himmler's Estonian masseur Felix Kersten; his report
on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961; and his scrutiny of the
Warren commission's report, which convinced him that President
Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy. Trevor-Roper, who had
known and liked Kim Philby, wrote of twentieth-century espionage
with subtle authority in The Philby Affair (1968). In that year, too, he
began occasional contributions to The Spectator of witty pastiches,
purporting to be the letters of a seventeenth-century Oxford don,
‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’, commenting on the vagaries of academic life
and the absurdity of contemporary manners: these were collectively
published as The Letters of Mercurius (1970). In 1973, at Basel
airport, the manuscript memoirs of the Sinologue Sir Edmund
Backhouse were confided to Trevor-Roper's keeping. He found them
obscene, fantastic, and risible; but his testing of their claims
resulted in A Hidden Life (1976), which (with cool, unwavering
irony) revealed Backhouse as a fantasist, forger, and swindler. It
confirmed Trevor-Roper's place as the funniest historian since his
hero, Gibbon.

Trevor-Roper's forte, like Namier's, was the historical essay; but—

perhaps unlike Namier—he valued historical evidence for its quality,
not its massed quantity. It was a joy to watch him in a record office,

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 as his eyes darted with hawk-like vigilance over the papers on his
desk: he mistrusted those who delved interminably in muniment
rooms, and liked to reach his conclusions not from dogged archival
trawls but by swift, confident assessment of the sources followed by
the play of his intelligence over his selection of evidence. The lack of
evident intensity in his research suggests one reason why colleagues
such as V. H. Galbraith felt reservations about him. Religion, the
Reformation and Social Change (1967) showed Trevor-Roper's
powers as an essayist at their finest. His approach was always
eclectic, not doctrinaire; he was a historian of moods and tempers,
who used social structures and systems as explanations. He admired
moderate social critics, like Erasmus and Bacon, but deprecated
historians such as Christopher Hill who sentimentalized saboteurs,
outsiders, and nihilists. His luminous, penetrative, discriminating
mind was equally joyous in three further collections: Renaissance
Essays (1985); Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (1987); and From
Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1992). Original ideas,
fertile speculations, and dazzling comparisons, which narrower
historians might achieve only once or twice in their careers,
sparkled through his pages.

The Thatcher government recommended Trevor-Roper for a life

peerage in 1979, and he took the title Baron Dacre of Glanton. As an
impish anti-clerical he most enjoyed, among his other honours, his
doctorate of divinity from the University of the South, Sewanee,
Tennessee (1980). He had been elected a fellow of the British
Academy in 1969.

Master of Peterhouse
Dacre retired early from the regius chair to become master of
Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1980. His appointment was instigated by
a group of high tory bachelor dons, led by Maurice Cowling, who felt
confident that his sallies would enhance the gaiety of the senior
common room and that he would oppose moves to admit women to
the college. They had misjudged their man, for Dacre was a
reforming whig, who believed that a clerisy should be open, plural,
civilized, and efficient. He wanted constitutional process, not die-
hard custom, to govern college business. He resisted, and in some
cases defeated, reactionary tendencies in the college, and vigorously
promoted its 1984 appeal. The state of the college library in 1980
scandalized him, and he was especially proud of instigating the
creation of a new library. The rancour at Peterhouse exasperated
Dacre, and at times became too dominant an obsession, but never
wholly soured him. The Dacres made the master's lodge a centre of
hospitality and culture, and had grateful admirers, as well as
detractors, among the fellowship.

Gavin Astor, his wife's brother-in-law, had secured Trevor-Roper's

appointment as an independent national director of Times
Newspapers in 1974. Dacre opposed the selection of Harold Evans
as editor of The Times in 1981, and deplored the sales strategy of

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 Rupert Murdoch who, he believed, wished to degrade British
institutions, especially the monarchy, by a campaign of constant
belittlement, trivialize British politics, vulgarize national culture, and
reduce the population to a boorish, infantilized mass. Trevor-Roper,
in the post-war period, had sacrificed some of his best energies to
journalism; and the great calamity of his life, in 1983, arose from his
involvement with the newspaper world. Sixty handwritten volumes
purporting to be Hitler's diaries were concocted by a Stuttgart
confidence trickster and sold for £3.5 million to Stern magazine.
After Murdoch decided that he wanted an immediate decision on
serialization rights, Dacre rashly submitted to pressure from Charles
Douglas-Home, editor of The Times, to inspect the diaries in a Zurich
bank vault. Following a cursory examination, and misled by false
assurances that were intended to further the criminal conspiracy,
Dacre allowed the correct processes of historical verification to be
sacrificed to the exigencies of a newspaper scoop. On the very day
(23 April 1983) that Dacre's exuberant authentication of the diaries
was trumpeted in The Times, he developed sharp misgivings, of
which he warned Douglas-Home; but these doubts were not
conveyed to the Sunday Times, which published a farrago of
humiliating nonsense the next day. His reputation was permanently
besmirched, although it was not until 1988 that Murdoch dislodged
him from his directorship of Times Newspapers.

Character and final years

The enmities that Dacre aroused could obscure the affection that he
generated. At Christ Church and Oriel he was solicitous and stylish
in his treatment of undergraduates: he preferred them to be high-
spirited and sociable, and regaled them with indiscretions about
wartime MI6. In the 1960s he baited student revolutionaries, and
after those disturbances had subsided he continued to retaliate
against undergraduate sloppiness and self-indulgence, whether in
work, appearance, or emotions, for he always was reticent,
fastidious, and self-controlled. He was not an academic empire-
builder, but gave meticulous, witty, and subversive encouragement
to young scholars.

After he left Peterhouse in 1987 Dacre's personal tensions and

intellectual assertiveness both relaxed. He nursed his wife through
the distressing course of Alzheimer's disease. He developed Charles
Bonnet's syndrome, which in 1998–2001 gave him such alarming
hallucinations that, for a time, this most unswervingly rational of
men feared that he was losing his sanity. Although nearly blind, he
maintained a large international correspondence, and spent months
painfully rereading voluminous notes for long-abandoned
biographies to write the entries for this dictionary of, among others,
Theodore Mayerne and Thomas Sutton. Finally, he was stricken by
prostate cancer, which he faced with stoical fortitude, and of which
he died, on 26 January 2003, at Sobell House hospice, Oxford. His
ashes were scattered at Dryburgh Abbey, Berwickshire. He was
survived by his three stepchildren.

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 Sources
H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl, and B. Worden, eds., History and
imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (1981)

Christ Church (2003), 72–80

Oriel Record (2003), 32–5

A. Huth, Well-remembered friends (2004), 421–4

Peterhouse Annual Record (2002–3), 200–15

H. Trevor-Roper, Letters from Oxford, ed. R. Davenport-Hines (2006)

WW (2003)

The Times (27 Jan 2003)

Daily Telegraph (27 Jan 2003)

The Guardian (27 Jan 2003)

The Independent (27 Jan 2003)

Daily Telegraph (28 Jan 2003)

Burke, Peerage

PBA, 150 (2007), 247–84

Christ Church Oxf., Dacre papers

private information (2007)

personal knowledge (2007)

b. cert.

m. cert.

d. cert.

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 Archives
Christ Church Oxf., archives

Bodl. Oxf., Isaiah Berlin papers

Bodl. Oxf., Violet Bonham Carter papers

King's Lond., Liddell Hart C.

Villa I Tatti, Florence, Berenson archives

Yale U., Beinecke L., Wallace Notestein papers

Film
BBC archives

BFINA, The book programme, P. Speight (producer), BBC2, 14 Oct

1976

BFINA, current affairs footage

BFINA, documentary footage

BFINA, recorded lecture

Sound
BBC archives

BL NSA, current affairs recordings

BL NSA, documentary recordings

BL NSA, performance recordings

BL NSA, recorded talks

Likenesses
four photographs, 1950–68, Getty Images, London

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 M. Gerson, bromide semi-matt print, 1957, NPG

D. Levine, caricature, 1968, priv. coll.

G. Argent, bromide print, 1969, NPG

A. Newman, group portrait, bromide print, 1978 (regius professors),

NPG

two photographs, 1979, Photoshot, London

L. Gowing, oils, 1983, Peterhouse Cam.

C. Djanogly, bromide fibre print, 1998, NPG

J. Ward, portrait, Oriel College, Oxford

obituary photographs

photographs, repro. in Trevor-Roper, Letters from Oxford

two photographs, Camera Press, London

Wealth at Death
£1,638,119: probate, 12 Sept 2003, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

See also
Roper, Patrick Dacre Trevor- (1916–2004), ophthalmic surgeon
and author <http://oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/
9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-93651>

More on this topic

Dacre of Glanton, Baron, (Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper) (1914–26
Jan. 2003) <http://ukwhoswho.com/view/10.1093/ww/
9780199540891.001.0001/ww-9780199540884-e-12709> in Who
Was Who <http://ukwhoswho.com>

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 External resources
Bibliography of British and Irish history <http://
cpps.brepolis.net/bbih/incoming.cfm?odnb_id=88756>
National Portrait Gallery <http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/
person.asp?LinkID=mp05218>
National Archives <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
details/c/F43389>
BBC, Desert Island Discs <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/
p009mftf>
IHR, Making History <http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/
historians/trevor-roper_hugh.html>

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