Title: “Indestructible Superiority Complex”?: The Uses and Pitfalls of Official History
Subject: Diplomacy & Statecraft, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2025.2586466
Author: T. G. Otte

DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT

T. G. OTTE

Diplomacy & Statecraft

Published online: 15 Dec 2025.

ISSN: 0959-2296 (Print) 1557-301X (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/fdps20
“Indestructible Superiority Complex”?: The Uses and Pitfalls of Official History
T. G. Otte
To cite this article: T. G. Otte (2025) “Indestructible Superiority Complex”?: The Uses and Pitfalls of Official History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 36:4, 701-723, DOI: 10.1080/09592296.2025.2586466
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2025.2586466
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DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT
2025, VOL. 36, NO. 4, 701–723
https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2025.2586466
ARTICLE
“Indestructible Superiority Complex”?: The Uses and Pitfalls of Official History
T. G. Otte
University of East Anglia
ABSTRACT
A product of war and subject to competing demands of officialdom and expectations of academia, ‘official history’ in Great Britain has a conflicted past. The tension between these two was often more apparent than real. If anything, as this survey of the Official History Programme and related scholarly endeavours from c. 1906 until the 1970s shows, Whitehall shared an interest in ‘competent and honest history’. Relations between officialdom and academic historians were complex and multifaceted, but both sides benefited from official history as an exercise in policy advice. History, and especially diplomatic history, is an ‘impure’ type of scholarship in that it has practical insights to impart; and in this way official historians helped officials and their superiors to seek new, and perhaps better, perspectives and understanding of present-day problems. Equally, official history has always been a form of public engagement. It is in the public sphere that policy decisions are debated – whether in the here and now or in the future – and ultimately legitimised. And here, too, historical perspectives can be of use.
The notion of ‘official’ history frequently elicits a response that combines wariness with outright rejection. The Times, for instance, greeted the publication, in 1961, of the history of the British strategic bombing campaign in the Second World War by Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland with a magisterial rebuke, urging the government, instead, to throw open its archives to all bone fide researchers: ‘“official history” is a contradiction in terms: history is individual and objective or it is nothing’.^1 And yet the Official History programme was extensive, and its reception by officials, professional historians and even the public was more positive than leader-writers in Printing House Square suggested.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there is a certain ambiguity about the idea of official history. W.K. (later Sir Keith) Hancock, the Australian historian who supervised the Official History programme after 1941, captured some of it
CONTACT T. G. Otte T.Otte@uea.ac.uk
© 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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in his memoirs. He might be called an official historian, he reflected, because he had ‘access to official documents that would be withheld for half a century or even longer from my colleagues in the universities’. Further, and most obviously, he could be classed as an official historian in that he was ‘a full-time paid servant of His Majesty’s Government and a signatory of the paper prescribed by the Official Secrets Act’.^2 Here lies the conflict between professional scholarly standards and the expectations of, perhaps demanded by, government. One historian, in fact, concluded at the time that official history ‘cannot meet the tests of objectivity, balance, and independence of judgment. At best a bland, cautious, diluted version of the truth, official history cannot be honest’.^3 Such lingering suspicions explain, perhaps, why in more recent years a government review of the Official History programme recommended that ‘official’ be replaced with ‘public’.^4
It is also worth bearing in mind that the dictionary definition of ‘official’ suggests that it refers to a special standing derived from, or having the sanction of, persons in office, and that therefore it is ‘authorised’ or ‘authoritative’. These two, of course, are not identical, which only adds to some of the ambiguity. To add yet another layer of complexity, the word itself is derived from the Latin officium, signifying ‘duty, service or allegiance’.
That tension between dual allegiances may be more apparent than real, as Hancock argued. His superiors shared his interest in ‘competent and honest history’. In fact, he ended up writing his own instructions, which were then scrutinised by an advisory committee of academic historians.^5 The relations between officialdom and academic historians were nevertheless more complex and multifaceted than Hancock suggested.
To some extent, the Official Histories were a product of the two world wars. Although their origins predated them – at the risk of offering a Heraclitean pastiche – their seeds were firmly planted by war.
Their original institutional home was the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Its creation was largely the work of the enigmatic Edwardian Lord Esher. In September 1906, he proposed the establishment of a unit to distil relevant lessons from recent conflicts, here the Second Boer and Russo-Japanese wars. This was history with a purpose, and that purpose was ‘propagandistic’.^6 Esher wanted material to provide the necessary historical and intellectual underpinnings for the sort of maritime, ‘blue-water’ warfighting strategy he himself favoured.^7
Esher was typical of his time. The belief that the primary function of historians was that of purveyors of clear lessons for action in the present or the future was widespread. Scholars saw their work as fulfilling a national service, to train an elite and ‘to empower a generous conception of intelligent citizenship rather than to further a professional discipline’.^8 In this, they did not differ much from Whitehall officials. At the Foreign Office, Eyre Crowe encouraged the compilation of ‘“dossiers”, which would . . . become comprehensive and invaluable store-houses of intelligence’. These might then be rearranged ‘into short histories’ to inform policy-making. Was it ‘too much to hope’, he wondered, ‘that at some future time we may see a number of young University men . . . employed in our Library, charged with the duty of compiling histories of certain periods, events, or incidents of importance, not for publication, but for the information of the Secretary of State and of the Office as a whole?’^9 This was not public history – the Foreign Office archives deposited at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane were then still subject to a system of double-censorship by reading room supervisors and departmental officials. Even so, to Crowe’s mind, history might have a role in educating public opinion: ‘It is a great pity that so little original historical work is at present done in this country, and any encouragement which could be offered in this direction . . . would be a benefit to this country and to the world at large’.^10
There was little progress before 1914 with either Crowe’s scheme or the official histories.^11 As with so much else, the outbreak of the war changed this. A sub-committee was appointed to collect materials for the future history of the war, although the head of the military history branch of the CID Historical Section was not installed until 1919. This was Brigadier J.E. (later Sir James) Edmonds, not a trained historian but a sapper, who had taught fortification at Sandhurst before being transferred to the War Office’s military intelligence division, eventually to wind up as deputy engineer-in-chief on the Western front. He was intellectually gifted and had co-authored a competent history of the American Civil War and also the official manual on land warfare.^12
Edmonds became an official historian by accident. The circumstances in which this happened throw a revealing light on the expectations of officialdom and the constraints these placed on historians. The original choice for the military history of the war was the Hon. J.W. (later Sir John) Fortescue, the librarian at Windsor Castle, who had delivered the 1911 Ford Lectures and written an authoritative if overly ambitious history of the army as well as a somewhat less distinguished popular history of the current conflict.^13 The companion naval volume was to be written by Sir John Stafford Corbett, and two further monographs by Archibald Hurd (Merchant Navy) and Sir Walter Raleigh (air warfare) were commissioned in 1917 and 1918.^14 Fortescue’s credentials were impeccable, but he could not resist the temptation of pointing out the flaws in other writers’ works. In the autumn of 1919, the object of some well-aimed barbs was Field Marshal Lord French’s recent 1914. To the Cabinet this was an unconscionable act of heresy, and this was Fortescue’s undoing. The rationale of the Official History, Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary and himself a former CID Secretary, reminded him, was that it ‘should be recognised as thoroughly impartial. While expressing no opinion on the merits of the controversy [with French], they [ministers] feel that the character of your article makes it impossible for you to continue your association with the History without compromising its impartiality’.^15 That affiliation was then conferred on Edmonds.
Progress remained slow. Eventually, in the summer of 1922, this led to hostile questions by MPs who were exercised by the recent growth of the Cabinet Office apparatus. The tardiness and costs of the Official History programme served as a convenient lightning conductor for mounting hostility, especially on the ministerial backbenches, towards Lloyd George’s premiership.^16 The prime minister, as one of his colleagues recorded, ‘wipe[d] [the] floor’ with his critics,^17 but the pressure did not ease and the Commons debate had an important sequel. About a month later, Colonel Edward Yorke Daniel, the Secretary of the CID’s Historical Section (from 1914 to 1939), urged his superiors not to abandon the programme. Nor should it be left to non-official writers who might have ‘entered into personal controversies’ (- shades of Fortescue here):
It would be morally wrong to leave either the public or the services to such guidance as it is a matter of honour and common sense that the country’s unprecedented effort between 1914 and 1918 should be analysed, and its efforts made clear 	[I]t is the object of the government to place before the public an absolutely reliable and impartial account of what occurred.^18
Daniel’s intervention established a gold standard for official history, but it did not address the glacial pace at which the projected volumes appeared (or rather did not appear). Parliamentary pressure and a fierce Whitehall turf war between Hankey and Warren Fisher, the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and Head of the Civil Service, forced the Cabinet to appoint a committee under the President of the Board of Education, H.A.L. Fisher, to investigate the work of the Official History programme.^19 The minister, a historian of note himself and something of a public intellectual, ‘[i]nspected the Historical work at 2 Cavendish Sq[uare] with Commander Moore, the Secretary of the Cabinet C[ommit]tee’.^20 He clearly liked what he saw but also recommended, as a precaution, that a permanent subcommittee be established, chaired by the education minister, to supervise the progress of history. Fisher left office with the fall of the Lloyd George coalition, but his recommendations were enough to forestall the attempts by Warren Fisher to have the Official Histories ‘transferred elsewhere, e.g. to the British Museum or some kindred body’.^21 (One cannot help but reflect that this Fisher could have done with a better grasp of history a decade-and-a-half later when he advised Neville Chamberlain on foreign affairs.)
Until 1939 the Control of Official Histories (COH) committee of the CID met once a year to monitor the, invariably slow, progress of the volumes commissioned. Altogether, sixty-two monographs on the 1914–18 war appeared, the last one, written by Edmonds himself, in 1949.^22 The preface of the very first volume, on the operations in France and Belgium, offers an impression of the overall purpose of the series. It was ‘to provide an authoritative account, suitable for general readers and for students at military schools of the operations of the British Army . . . in 1914–1918’.^23
Later, military historians have challenged various aspects of Edmonds’ work and some of its underlying assumptions. Without doubt, he increasingly lacked critical distance. But whatever his blind spots, he combined British materials with those of erstwhile allies and foes alike, a method which he did not invent but which he refined (he also established liaison with his German counterpart). Edmonds nevertheless did not trust the written records alone and so sought to complement official documents with oral or written witness testimonies. He did not have the necessary sophistication rigorously to interrogate that material. Worse, his determination ‘to tap every available source of information . . . [laid] him open to pressure to doctor his conclusions to suit the wishes of his informants’.^24 A related enterprise in official history, the British Documents series on the origins of the war, compiled by G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, ran into problems of a different kind. The inspiration behind the project was official, the catalyst being the earlier decision by the German government to publish selections from Wilhelmstrasse’s pre-war despatches. But it was not the desire of officials to suppress evidence that nearly derailed the British Documents. Rather, it was Temperley’s temper tantrums that caused problems. Both editors were ready to resign, he declared, if the Foreign Office blocked the inclusion of certain documents: ‘and I personally should publish my reasons to the world. Personally I do not think that there is anything anyone can object to, and I think the whole thing is going through’.^25
So it did, but in later years Gooch admitted that his co-editor – ‘not an easy colleague to work with, though, of course, we fully agreed on the principle of unfettered independence’ – had been somewhat belligerent in his dealings with officials:
The ‘tensions’ . . . were never with the FO, which played up splendidly. We had trouble with (i) the Italians about the Dodecanese documents, (ii) Holland about the fortification of the Scheldt, (iii) France about a document in regard to which Austen Chamberlain intervened for us at Paris, (iv) the India Office about pertinence of the Curzon despatch of 1899, (v) the Colonial Office about a document relating to the Kühlmann convention re the Portuguese colonies. Needless to say, we got our way in every case, for we sh[oul]d have resigned if we had not won.^26
In the words of Herbert Butterfield, Temperley’s protégé, the BD volumes marked ‘the intermediate stage in the development of modern official history’.^27 There is some truth in this, but it captures only part of the picture. Of equal importance for any understanding of official history was the work by historians behind the scenes in Whitehall. Whatever societal transformations the war had wrought, it had also changed relations between academia and government. A number of historians – many of whom were to become senior figures in the profession afterwards – were drafted into various branches of intelligence, military and naval but also political and commercial. Others were co-opted on to committees, such as the one chaired by the lawyer Sir Walter Phillimore to advise on League of Nations schemes.^28
At the Foreign Office, while Gooch and Temperley were sifting documents, J.W. (later Sir James) Headlam-Morley, the department’s chief historian, urged his political masters to appreciate historical perspectives on contemporary problems. There were certain parallels between the situations after 1815 and 1919, he wrote to Lord Curzon’s private secretary: ‘We must never forget that France was brought into the European system three years after the conclusion of the war’. The implication was obvious: ‘I can see no hope of a peaceful settlement so long as . . . Germany [is] . . . ostracised [I]t is a matter of political calculation. In this matter a comparison [with 1815] cannot be favourable to the present day, and unless some change can be brought about, the ultimate results must be disastrous’.^29
Headlam’s submissions helped to frame Austen Chamberlain’s Locarno diplomacy, as did Webster’s study of Castlereagh’s peace-making. The Foreign Secretary pretended otherwise. He had come to office, he claimed, ‘with clear ideas of what must be done & the confidence that I knew how & how only it could be done. A little later Webster’s “Castlereagh’s foreign policy” was published & I found that I had been talking Castlereagh (adapted to the XXth century) without knowing it’.^30
Whatever the degree of Headlam’s influence on official policy, some senior scholars, such as Temperley, grew more sceptical of the uses of history, official or otherwise. His own wartime experience as a military intelligence officer had sharpened his understanding that ‘there is a department of specialised knowledge which is essential to the full understanding of the significance and trend of military events. [. . .] The political side of strategy requires a knowledge which cannot be improvised and is based on the study of history and a considerable acquaintance with contemporary politics, economics and diplomacy’.^31 This had informed his editorship of the BD and also of the semiofficial history of the Paris peace conference, which appeared under the aegis of Chatham House and which took a pronounced pro-League stance. He encouraged the contributors to this six-volume work to ‘aim at the international point of view, [and] to adopt a Geneva perspective’.^32
That was during the bright new dawn of Geneva. By the early 1930s, Temperley had come to have misgivings about the official patronage of history-writing as much as about the burgeoning types of popular history.^33 Frustrated career ambitions played a role, too. His hope to succeed J.B. Bury as Regius Professor at Cambridge had been quashed by G.M. Trevelyan’s preferment, and this meant ‘good-bye to the day dreams of enthroning Modern and Diplomatic History in the Regius Chair’.^34 Trevelyan’s appointment reflected an apparent shift in the prevailing historiographical trend away from the specialised ‘technical’ history advocated by Temperley back towards a more leisurely, perhaps even slightly amateurish and at any rate more literary type epitomised by the new Regius professor.^35 As another scholar who had honed his analytical skills in wartime intelligence, L.B. (later Sir Lewis) Namier, observed a few years later: ‘Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft’.^36
Not that Namier and Temperley were immune to the lure of Downing Street. The latter’s tutorials all too often ended in lengthy reminiscences of Lloyd George and the Paris peace conference. By the end of the 1930s, by now Master of Peterhouse, he bestirred himself from his sickbed to encourage Neville Chamberlain in his appeasement diplomacy. He saw in it a return to the Canning tradition in foreign policy.^37 Chamberlain subsequently read Temperley’s 1925 study of Canning’s foreign policy, which he ‘found . . . so fascinating that I preferred it to any novel or detective story even after a day on the moors’. He had not been ‘brought up not as a politician but as a business man [sic], and until quite recently I had no notion that I should ever have any special responsibility for foreign affairs. My history has therefore been somewhat neglected . . .’. Temperley’s monograph had given him ‘great encouragement & fortification to find how closely the views & principles at which I had empirically arrived resembled those enunciated by Canning’.^38 (This seems to have been something of a Chamberlain family trait.)
Temperley encouraged the premier to emulate Canning. Convalescing in a nursing home, he confessed to be
Thrilled to hear of your going to meet Hitler and of your intentions to return. Your position seems to me exactly like Canning’s over Portugal [in 1823] when he sent troops to uphold her territorial integrity in accordance with our old treaties and thereby upheld not only Portugal but the sanctity of treaties. This was the occasion of his famous Speech about calling the New World into existence. You are now in the same position. The support of the whole country is with you. May you have the same dazzling success! God be with you in these days!^39
Fortunately for him, Temperley did not live to see that the Führer was no latter-day Simón Bolívar.
What would have been a rude awakening for the late Master of Peterhouse also shook previously held assumptions about world affairs. ‘We are getting surfeited with horrors’, reported R.W. Seton-Watson during the early months of the war, ‘but it is necessary to keep a little saeva indignatio in reserve! Personally, I note with a certain wicked joy the temperature of some of my doctrinaire Liberal friends rising as the war proceeds’.^40
Intellectual shipwrecks are always rich feeding ground for academic schadenfreude. Nonetheless, renewed conflict once more affected relations between government and academia. Experiences of wartime government service were mixed, however. E.L. (later Sir Llewellyn) Woodward, a distinguished diplomatic historian who was on secondment to the Foreign Office, where he had briefly served already in 1918–9, noted wistfully:
It is a queer thing that, in the last war when we were young, we saw the ablest and best of our contemporaries killed as junior officers when they should have been singled out for high military responsibilities, and, in this war, when we have behind us years of experience, and of the exercise of judgment and authority, we cannot get into the key positions controlling policy and executive action within the sphere of our special 41 competence.
For the younger generation, by contrast, this seemed
Very much a don’s war . . . - on the whole, it does not seem to me to be too badly run by our profession, which seems to have destroyed its reputation for sturdy-eyed incompetence once and for all. Nobody is so fiercely bureaucratic, or so stern with soldiers and regular civil servants, as the don disguised as temporary government official with an indestructible superiority complex.^42
Established scholars, such as Woodward but also Webster, once more placed their expertise and services at the government’s disposal. The latter, when not being mistaken for ‘a tramp’, headed the American section of the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS), a Foreign Office adjunct, before becoming involved in the ‘fantastic experiment’ of the San Francisco conference that produced the United Nations charter.^43 Woodward was drafted into the resurrected Political Intelligence Department, and spent the first eighteen months of the war in the repurposed Riding School at Woburn Abbey, the Duke of Bedford’s country seat, surrounded by the aged peer’s herd of zebras and pursuing mostly ‘routine work – a weekly digest of information which . . . pleases some people and displeases others’.^44 His spell there, he later reflected, had been ‘a waste of time. [. . .] I still cannot imagine why the Foreign Office allowed such an absurdity to exist’.^45
Elsewhere, Edmonds once more played a crucial role in the early stages of what was to become the Official History of the war. He requested that all departments of state should be required to keep materials for future historical use.^46 As a consequence, Edward (later Sir Edward) Bridges, Hankey’s successor since 1938, and now Churchill’s chief civilian staff officer, issued instructions for departments to keep ‘a simple diary of the most important events’. This, it was hoped, ‘would alone go a long way to providing the groundwork of an Official History’.^47 There was nothing methodologically innovative about this. Compiling daily digests of events and news had been standard practice in the political intelligence sections during the previous war, a habit then adopted by Chatham House researchers.^48 Wartime exigencies, departmental reorganisations and personnel shortages slowed down progress on official histories, but in the summer of 1941, a consensus of its objectives emerged:
(a)		to record the course of the War as completely as possible for the benefit of posterity;
(b)		to record the organisation set up and found necessary (or unnecessary) for the various aspects of the War effort;
(c)		to educate public opinion in the meaning and conduct of the War.
Further, ‘[t]o interest and educate statesmen, and the public, certain volumes in broad outline are essential’. To that end, it was necessary to widen the essentially, though not exclusively, military focus of 1914–18 histories and include civilian aspects of the war effort as well as ‘Unified Histories’ covering medical services, transport, or wireless communications and similar matters.^49 R.A. Butler, who as President of the Board of Education chaired the COH committee, was particularly keen to see societal developments ‘that had arisen in the country due to the War’ included in the histories.^50
Advice was sought from the eighteenth-century economic historian Richard Pares, then on secondment at the Board of Trade, and also from Woodward at the Foreign Office. In addition, an advisory committee of historians was established, chaired by E.A. Benians, the imperial historian and, since 1938, Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and just then Vice-chancellor of the university.^51 Its members included G.M. Trevelyan, F.M. Powicke and R.H. Tawney. How effective their advice was may well be doubted. As one junior researcher recalled, ‘the learned professors were [not] especially well equipped to deal with the administrative and economic questions of the twentieth century’ - and only one was a modernist in any meaningful sense.^52
Crucially, Keith Hanock was made head of the official history programme. Originally, a historian of the risorgimento, by the 1930s, now at the University of Birmingham, he had produced Chatham House surveys of Commonwealth affairs.^53 His appointment was a felicitous one, for Hancock proved energetic, adaptable, and rigorous, and determined to protect his and his researchers’ independence. Still, it was something of an establishment fix. As so often in the twentieth century, All Souls proved a convenient conduit. ‘[T]hat disastrous dinner-table’ may have played a baleful role in the politics of the previous decade,^54 but on this occasion, a more wholesome dish was served up there. Hancock, himself a quondam of the college, was approached in June 1941 by D.H.F. (later Sir Denis) Rickett, a Cabinet Office official, and later Attlee’s private secretary, and a future vice-president of the World Bank. ‘[M]ight [he] be the man for the job?’, he speculated. Not only could he make himself useful in the short term, he also ought to ‘think in the long term of the continuity of the State and the advantage of funding our war-time experience for future use’ – a phrase that Hancock used many times in his reports and prefaces.^55 Whether or not Rickett was aware of it, his interlocutor was more than ready for government work. ‘I will leave my post here [Birmingham]’, he informed Isaiah Berlin in late 1940, ‘for work of “vital national importance”’. He had been approached about joining the Australian mission to the United States but had declined, nor was he interested in other war work in America or India.^56
Supervising the official history programme was an altogether different proposition, and Hancock accepted with alacrity. He set out a plan for the official histories in terms that bear repeating (and that perhaps has lost little of their relevance for historical research in general):
[I]t is obvious that the historian will have to do most of his work in more generalised material - the periodical surveys of different kinds. He must begin his investigation at a high level, diving down from time to time into the complex individual detail as he feels the need. If he were to begin at a low level in the Ministry, he would never come to the surface, and never understand the organisation of the Ministry as a whole.^57
Hancock and the Cabinet Secretary were well matched. Both regarded history as a practical and reformist discipline that might serve ‘to fund experience for government use’.^58 By early 1942, he had recruited fifteen researchers for the various departmental and ‘unified’ histories, including some who were to rise to prominence in academia later, such as M.M. (later Sir Michael) Postan and Margaret Gowing, W.N. Medlicott and Richard Titmuss.^59 Hancock was a shrewd operator. ‘[B]rilliant, quizzical, kindly, pipe-smoking’, this clergyman’s son considered himself the ‘pastor’ of his historical ‘parish’ or ‘diocese’.^60 In that role, he ensured that his researchers were paid what he considered the average lecturer’s salary of between £600 and £800. This was in line with the salary paid to academics ‘engaged in war service at Chatham House’, which acted as ‘an outside auxiliary intelligence office’ for the Foreign Office.^61 It was considerably less, incidentally, than what Lucy Sutherland, the eighteenth-century economic historian, earned as a temporary acting Assistant Secretary at the Board of Trade.^62 (According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, the salary secured by Hancock for his researchers was equivalent to between £28,384 and just under £38,000 at today’s value (October 2024), roughly what the wealthier colleges pay for a junior research fellowship, inviting the melancholy reflection that, as a profession, history does not seem to have made much progress.)^63
This is not the place for a detailed account of Hancock’s efforts. It is worth stressing, however, that he thought that the volumes produced were meant to illustrate wartime problems and that they might prove useful in the event of future conflicts but also in the transition from war to peace.^64 Some of the volumes produced, especially in the civil series, were consulted as the country settled down into post-war austerity and reconstruction. That any of its insights had any practical value for domestic policymaking, say, fifteen or twenty years after the end of the war, may well be doubted. Betty Behrens, for one, a Cambridge graduate who had joined Hancock’s team towards the end of the war, grew wary of her chief’s ‘scissors-and-paste history’.^65 Even Hancock was filled with a certain ‘unconscious disgust’, three years on, at the ‘pedantry and drabness’ of the work, while history was actually made by those seeing active service.^66 The early drive and energy was gone. His memoranda and other papers of 1944–5 testified. They were little more than recycled and redrafted earlier plans, schemes and timetables. This was partly his own fault, as he admitted to Bridges in June 1944: ‘I have not a blue-print mind; all my original plans are hypotheses to be tested by experiment; the definitive plans emerge out of this experiment’. The various volumes, especially the civilian histories, were interrelated, he now realised. They could ‘only be defined in relation to some other projects that have not themselves been defined’.^67
Hancock’s waning zeal, exacerbated by his election, in that same year, to the Chichele chair of economic history, was one thing (why he did not bow out at this point is puzzling). Clearly, the endless drudgery of sifting through the papers produced by war-related departments that had mushroomed around Whitehall was wearying to some of the researchers. ‘Munia’ Postan, for instance, sought transfer back to the Ministry of Economic Warfare, from where he had been recruited by Hancock. He did so ‘chiefly because at the present moment it offers the easiest way of coping with existence. What I shall do later, if Blitzkrieg does not kill me, I don’t yet know’.^68
Others sedated their ennui by other means. Woodward began to study the Foreign Office’s Confidential Print during the long winter nights of his Woburn exile, ‘something which had at least an indirect bearing on my Intelligence business’. It was also something that planted the seeds of the postwar Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, the interwar complement to the Gooch and Temperley collection.^69 He also escaped official drudgery by writing a historiographical essay and a slim volume of autobiography. He was evidently suffering from a surfeit of diplomacy. Of his research he noted:
(a) it is exact, hard, and exciting work while I am doing it, but I don’t have to think about it when I am not doing it. This detailed archival work in diplomatic history has most interesting problems, but I doesn’t fill your mind all the time. [. . .] I just write plain, diplomatic history, res gestae. The result is that, when not writing this history, my mind wanders all over the place. (b) I can’t even read my notes on official papers in the train, because, notwithstanding the larger elbow-room in a 1st class carriage . . . my neighbour might take a squint at my pages. [. . .] So last winter I began to write a few scraps.^70
Another retarding influence was a marked reluctance on the part of Bridges and his successor after 1947, Norman (later Sir Norman) Brook, to let war histories touch matters of ‘high policy’. After three years of supervising the work, Hancock was convinced of the need for a ‘central volume’ that held all the others together. Benians and Trevelyan supported ‘the proposed General History of the War’, but it remained to be seen whether the Cabinet Office ‘will encourage us to proceed’.^71 It did not. Bridges and Brook, ‘those watchful guardians of the public interest’, politely demurred and made it plain that the professor had strayed beyond his remit.^72
If Hancock’s histories had to steer clear of the summit of policy-making, they nevertheless had one benefit, as Denys Hay, one of the junior researchers, reflected a quarter of a century later, by which time he was a distinguished mediaevalist and early Renaissance scholar at Edinburgh University: ‘[T]he official history offered training of a very high order in honest history and sensible techniques of research’.^73 The words were Hay’s, but they might easily have been Temperley’s five decades earlier.
As for the likely consumers of the histories, Hancock’s target audience were officials and academics but also that inevitably small section of the public, which ‘grade of reader attracted by The Economist’.^74 Yet he knew that there were suspicions that they were ‘the kind of history that pliant historians will write to please strong-minded bureaucrats’.^75 The less deferential 1950s or 1960s were more prone to such suspicions than the interwar years; and, as Hancock himself admitted much later, British governments wanted to ‘show the flag’. Emphasising Britain’s role in winning the war might just help to maintain the country’s great power standing after 1945.^76 Nor were historians themselves immune to the twitch of patriotism. Visiting America in 1946, Woodward found himself ‘continually engaged in discussions about the position of Great Britain. Even among our friends there is too much of the attitude of sorrow over the corpse of a dear departed friend’.^77 The passage of time did not diminish that twitch; if anything it strengthened it, especially so after the trauma of Suez. Woodward, who had been engaged in a multi-volume history of wartime foreign policy, offered to produce a condensed, single-volume edition. ‘I am not very keen on it’, he confessed to a friend, ‘but I am sure that it is to our political interest in the U.S. that it sh[ou]ld be done. So many judgments about British policy go by default in the U.S	, that it seems to me most important to put out any accurate account of wartime aims and policy from . . . an impersonal and national standpoint’.^78
Woodward’s diplomatic history of the war nevertheless throws into sharper relief the divergent interests of scholars and government with respect to official secrets. Inevitably, such concerns were stronger in the field of foreign and military affairs than in the domestic sphere. As editor of the interwar Documents on British Foreign Policy and even more so in his work on the history of British foreign policy during the Second World War Woodward was constrained by the government’s refusal to allow even the slightest hint of Britain’s decryption prowess to appear in print. To some extent, it may be argued that this was ‘the last deception operation of the Second World War’ to cover any tracks of Signal Intelligence and of deception itself.^79 And yet, at the Foreign Office, there was a clear appreciation of the role a reliable account, produced by ‘an independent historian’, might play ‘before the mould of opinion about the war has become set’.^80
Appreciation was easily expressed in the abstract; applying it in practice was different. Woodward had produced a short pamphlet on the immediate origins of the war at the request of the Ministry of Information in 1940, but in the depth of his Woburn misery he soon embarked on ‘a much bolder project’ of a lengthy study of wartime foreign policy.^81 He demanded access to ‘all material’, and that he should be ‘free to write as I please’. Whitehall had the final say on whether to publish, but if permission was given, the manuscript was to remain untouched. The one constraint concerned ‘revealing Cabinet discussions and differences of opinion, while the people concerned are alive & active’.^82 Removed to the Elysian fields of Princeton by the early 1950s, he ‘just g[o]t on with the work’.^83
It was an enormous undertaking, and he chafed under the various constraints placed upon him. He had trained himself, he explained to Lord Strang, the former Permanent Under-secretary, ‘into a particular mood of detachment . . . in spending a very long time writing a book which may never appear in my lifetime’.^84 This assertion of scholarly fortitude had a hollow ring to it nonetheless. It was ‘stupid of the authorities’, he complained to a friend, ‘not to allow its publication, though I understand their reasons. I suspect they will publish it after Churchill’s death, unless they then forget all about it’.^85 The wartime leader, in fact, now took an interest in Woodward’s study. By the autumn of 1957, Woodward had finished ‘my potted version of the vast history’, and Churchill sent in a list of queries to the Cabinet Office, which caused further delays. In the end, it was Brook who ‘went to stay with Churchill and . . . persuaded him to agree to the publication of my book’.^86 It was almost a case of belated redemption, for it was the Cabinet Secretary and the Foreign Office who had held up production of the volume in the first place by suggesting that he ‘modify what I have said about de Gaulle. [. . .] It really is absurd of the F.O. to think that while de G[aulle] has been free to write what he likes about us, we must bowdlerise our account of our dealings with him’.^87
But bowdlerise he did, and his ‘potted version’ eventually appeared in early 1962. Deliberately or not, he let slip in the preface to it that there was a ‘larger work written for official reference’.^88 In a curious reversal of the events of 1922, the admission led to questions in Parliament. The often fiercely independent Irene (later Baroness) Ward (Cons., Tynemouth, 1950–74) demanded that historians be given access to this larger work, its continued embargo being illogical now that American records were available.^89
Whitehall still held out against the force of logic, and it took a change of government before, in 1967, Harold Wilson decided in favour of releasing Woodward’s ‘larger unpublished history’. Its author was glad that Whitehall had relented in the end, and ‘that it sh[ou]ld be published without omission of Cabinet & F.O. material, though I think it will need a good deal of knocking about to make it readable’.^90 He sent off the manuscript in the spring of 1968, but the mills of H.M. Stationery Office ground exceedingly slowly: ‘I keep on 
saying that I am an old man in a hurry, but nothing moves these stolid, stupid little minor bureaucrats’.^91 By the time the first volume appeared, in the middle of 1970, the thirty-year rule governing the release of government papers had been introduced (in 1967) and a new series of peace-time official histories had been commissioned. Combined, they made Woodward’s work appear rather dull and old-fashioned.^92
It may well be that it was the sensitivities surrounding intelligence materials, and the likely distortion of historical ‘truth’ in consequence, that caused Herbert Butterfield’s caustic observations about official history. No government in Europe ‘wants the public to know all the truth’, he asserted, and therefore ‘governments try to press upon the historian the key to all the drawers but one, and are anxious to spread the belief that this single one contains no secret of importance’.^93 Perhaps, being a diligent student of German history he had before his mind’s eye the case of Heinrich von Sybel, to whom Bismarck had thrown open the Prussian state archives (selected files only) and who then proceeded to compose a monumental Bismarck legend in seven volumes (the chancellor very likely corrected the manuscript personally).^94
As so often, Butterfield was a little of the mark. Woodward – who, incidentally, had coined the phrase of the ‘key’ to the past^95—dismissed his criticism crisply. Honesty was the best editorial policy, he reminded his Petrean critic, and that for entirely pragmatic reasons: ‘The thing is that all the archives will be open some time or other, and any omission etc w[ou]ld be disclosed to students & c[ou]ld therefore reflect v[ery] badly on the honesty of the editors, & for this reason alone – apart from my own habits & training – I am likely to be careful’. He and his editorial staff had ‘access to everything . . . - including the private files of the Sec[retary] of State wh[ich] contain, mostly, personal letters 	We had to argue at first . . . – the question was whether they did or did not count as FO archives. We said they did, & we had our way’. Of the two foreign secretaries with whom he had dealings so far, ‘Eden was v[ery] g[oo]d about it – in insisting that there must be no “monkeying”’. Bevin left him alone, ‘tho[ugh] I’m told that he is in fact interested in it’. There were only few excisions made, and in each case ‘we have put a footnote to this effect’. No foreign governments had objected to references to any documents emanating from them:
This is the question on which Temperley had his great row and my opinion - from reading these and other papers of T’s exchanges with the FO [-] is that T went about the whole thing the wrong way 	He was ridiculously bad-tempered, and the FO found him very trying.
Tales of Temperley’s temperament were scarcely news to his quondam protégé, but Woodward then laid his criticism of Butterfield’s paper on with an oversized trowel. His colleague had failed to distinguish between ‘(a) stuff 
emanating from the M[inistry] of I[nformation] during the war, (b) official histories, (c) publication of documents such as my collection. (a) may be anything – and never claims to be objective history [;] (b) has very different problems from (c)’.^96
Woodward had laid his finger on the weak spot in Butterfield’s critique. Its vehemence could not disguise its conceptual confusion and the dubious premisses on which it rested. Indeed, one may well wonder whether at the root of the vituperations of this ‘mostly analytic dry-biscuit historian’ was not a secret worry as to what exactly SIS knew about his advocacy of a negotiated peace in 1940 and his wartime visits to the German embassy in Dublin!^97 In a moment of self-reflective candour around this time, Butterfield confessed to ‘feeling so severe about things published by those in high places in recent time, that some time ago I decided to check myself, for I got the fear that I must be a case of the ineffectual man ridden by a professional jealousy of those who at least do something’.^98 He did not check himself, as his outburst against official history two years later showed. He eventually came to repent his hostility to diplomatic history as a form: ‘in and after 1914 . . . we made too complete a break with diplomatic tradition, and in general I would like to join up with that tradition again, making our development from that basis instead of changing the basis so completely’.^99 His recantation, perhaps typically, did not appear in print and was made in an indirect and impersonal form: ‘The past was deplored as presenting a vast panorama of power-politics; and instead of studying the demon, this enemy [,] for the purpose of mastering it, you turned your back on it – you wouldn’t take part in the game of “power-politics” as though by closing your eyes to the fact, you could somehow conjure the bog[e]y away.’
It is worth noting here that it was not always officials who exercised a constraining influence. When writing the history of the strategic bombing campaign, Charles Webster contacted the scientific director of the British Bombing Survey Unit, Sir Solly Zuckerman, to seek clarification on certain scientific questions. His lack of scientific training, in fact, had made Webster hesitate about taking on the task. ‘When I write about diplomacy’, he told the government’s chief military historian, J.R.M. (later Sir James) Butler, ‘I at least know something about it at first hand’. Would he be able to master any of the technical intricacies of aviation, he wondered?^101 Clearly, he did not. But it did not prevent him from accepting the offer. The end result was a series of heated sub-C.P. Snow-esque ‘Two Cultures’ exchanges between the two knights of the realm, in which Zuckerman threw various obstacles in Webster’s way – he also called him an ‘ass’^102—and afterwards went out of his way to suggest that the Webster-Frankland volume was not ‘Holy Writ’ and that its authors invariably confused what was ‘tactical’ and what was ‘strategic’.^103
When approaching official history, a degree of wariness is called for. The flaws of Butterfield’s critique notwithstanding, his warning ‘never [to] lose sight of the separate interests of officialdom . . . and academic historians, never [to] allow the distinction to be blurred or the tension and conflict to be quietened’ was not wholly fanciful.^104 Governments have sought to establish both guidance for policy-making and an authorised version of the past that suited their understanding of the national interest. For the historian, as Max Beloff once suggested, the effect ‘of immersion in the official atmosphere with its built-in . . . restraints is likely to be a long-lasting one, and to mark an individual after he has resumed his role as an independent intellectual’.^105 Indeed, wartime government employment, whether on official histories or in some intelligence or other capacity, affected the way in which historians approached the study of the past, as Denys Hay’s reflections underlined. It also influenced the way in which they wrote – contrast and compare, for instance, the pre-war works of Temperley and Webster with their writings after 1919.^106
Pitfalls there are. Woodward, for one, had become sceptical about the efficacy of his own official history work. He had taken it on out of a sense of patriotic citizenship. And yet,
My own experience—in the last war and this war—has shewn me that it would be much wiser to appoint you [F.M. Powicke] and me and G.N. Clark and Hancock and R[ichard] Pares and others to really high posts, not just ‘devil-ing’ on the military < intelligence > side than to fill those posts with professional soldiers. I have seen enough of the kind of questions which have to be answered to know that we could answer them more quickly 	[W]e could set these questions in their context, and given them much sharper focus.^107
Tempting though it might be to dismiss Woodward’s lament as another sign of that ‘indestructible superiority complex’ which perhaps affects all academic minds eventually, that would be facile. Woodward himself, in fact, still believed that ‘properly directed research into the cause or rather causes of war leads to valuable results. [. . .] Until an inquiry of this kind has been made, we are in the dark about the value of any kind of political arrangements which we may make for security’.^108
Nor is there any reason to withdraw into a sort superior Butterfieldian sulk or to treat ministers and officials as if they were a hostile power, as Temperley did. Both sides, in fact, can benefit from official history as an exercise in policy advice. History, and perhaps especially diplomatic history, is an ‘impure science’; it is a form of ‘disaster studies’.^109 But it has insights to impart. As one wartime permanent under-secretary told Hancock: ‘Your work will be worth while . . . if you can help us to see our work in perspective’.^110
A sense of perspective is no small achievement, something that no judge-led enquiry can produce and something that is even more important now that information overflow hampers rather than furthers informed public debate and evidence-based decision-making.^111 It seems almost symptomatic in this context that the Cabinet Office’s Official History Unit went into abeyance (if not formally closed) in 2019 as Brexit overwhelmed the civil service.
Finally, to return to the etymological roots of ‘official’, there is also the verb ‘officiare’, which means to hinder, impede or stand in the way. Officials sometimes sought to hinder; and perhaps sometimes historians stood in their way. But in doing so, they helped officials and their superiors to seek new, and perhaps better, perspectives – and that was never a bad thing. Equally, official history has always been a form of public engagement. It is in the public sphere that policy decisions are debated – whether in the here and now or twenty (or more) years later – and ultimately legitimised. And here, too, historical perspective can be of use.
Notes
1.		“Official History,” The Times, September 7, 1961.
2.		W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London: Faber, 1954), 197.
3.		M. Blumenson, “Can Official History be Honest History?,” Military Affairs xxvi, no. 4 (1962): 152.
4.		J. Pilling, The Review of the Government’s Official History Programme: Report (2011), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a79a123e5274a684690af21/future-plans -government.pdf
5.		Hancock, Country and Calling, 198.
6.		D. French, “Sir James Edmonds and the Official History: France and Belgium,” in B. Bond ed., The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 71.
7.		“Our requirements are bound to be essentially different, for it is now realised that England has no “Military History” apart from “Naval History”, and that in the future, if she has any Military History at all, it must not only be inextricably woven with Naval, but with Colonial, History’. Memo. Esher, ‘An Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence’, 6 September 1906, CAB 4/2/90B, The National Archives (hereafter TNA). For some of the background, see N. d’Ombrain, War Machinery and High Politics: Defence Administration in Peacetime Britain, 1902–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 216–7; and P. Fraser, Lord Esher: A Political Biography (London: Hart-Davis, 1973), 122–47.
8.		R. Soffer, The University, History and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 34.
9.		Memo. Crowe, January 5, 1905, T 1/10369/4450, TNA.
10.		Memo. Crowe, 17 November 1908, FO 370/16/40126, TNA. For the double-censorship, see First Report of the Royal Commission on Public Records, appointed to inquire into and report on the state of the public records and local records of a public nature in England and Wales: Minutes of Evidence, part III, (C. 6396), qq. 2190–2200; and also T.G. Otte, ‘“More Liberal Facilities for the Purposes of Historical Research”: Whitehall and Public Records in the Early Twentieth Century’, Archives xxxiii, no. 119 (2008), here 162–63.
11.		The first volumes of the South African and Russo-Japanese series had begun to appear, however; see F. Maurice and M.H. Grant, War in South Africa, 1899–1902 (4 vols., London: Hurst & Blackett, 1906–19) and anon., Russo-Japanese War (5 vols., London: HMSO, 1909–19).
12.		W.B. Woods and J.E. Edmonds, A History of the Civil War in the United States, 1861–1865 (London: Methuen, 1905), and L.F.L. Oppenheim and J.E. Edmonds, Land Warfare: An Exposition of the Laws and Usages of war on land, for Guidance of Officers of His Majesty’s Army (London: HMSO, 1912).
13.		J.W. Fortescue, British Statesmen of the Great War, 1793–1814 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912). His army history was initially conceived as a single volume but eventually spiralled out of control, id., History of the British Army (13 vols, London: Macmillan, 1899–1930).
14.		S.S. Wilson, The Cabinet Office to 1945 (London: HMSO, 1975), 124.
15.		Hankey to Fortescue, 28 October 1919, CAB 103/83, TNA (my emphasis). Fortescue had, however, intimated that he wished to leave the programme already in August 1919, see J.F. Naylor, A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Custody of Cabinet Secrecy (Cambridge: CUP, 1984), 349, n. 27.
16.		Official Report, House of Commons, 13 June 1922, cols. 213–87; for the background see K.O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 255–356.
17.		H.A.L. Fisher diary, 13 June 1922, MS Fisher 18, Fisher MSS, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
18.		Memo. Daniel, ‘Historical Section of the CID’, 12 July 1922, CAB 103/82, TNA (my emphasis).
19.		The establishment and the deliberations of the OHW committee can be followed in CAB 27/212, TNA.
20.		. Fisher diary, 1 August 1922, MS Fisher 18, FISHER MSS; D. Ogg, Herbert Fisher: A Short Biography (London: Edward Arnold, 1947), 89–115.
21.		Memo. Fisher, ‘Secretarial Work for the Cabinet’, 7 November 1922, CAB 63/33, TNA; see S. Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, ii, 1919–1931 (London: Collins, 1972), 304–29.
22.		The COH committee’s proceedings can be followed in CAB 16/52 and 53. Not all of the volumes were published by HMSO; for a list of the Official Histories see Wilson, Cabinet Office, annex 10.
23.		J.E. Edmonds ed., Official History of the Great War: Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1914 (London: Macmillan, rev. ed. 1933 [1st 1922]), vii [my emphasis].
24.		French, “James Edmonds,” 79.
25.		Temperley to Seton-Watson, 4 March 1926, BUTT/311, Butterfield MSS, Cambridge University Library; see G.P. Gooch and H.W.V. Temperley eds., British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914 (11 vols., London: HMSO, 1926–38), and for the background; K. A. Hamilton, “The Pursuit of “Enlightened Patriotism”: The British Foreign Office and Historical Researchers during the Great War and Its Aftermath,” Historical Research lxi, no. 3 (1988): 316–44.
26.		Gooch to Butterfield (private), 19 February 1947, BUTT/312, Butterfield MSS; for Gooch’s role see F. Eyck, G.P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London: Macmillan, 1982), 359–405.
27.		H. Butterfield, ‘Official History: Its Pitfalls and Criteria’, id., History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), 186; for a discussion of Butterfield’s two versions of this lecture see P. Salmon, The Control of the Past: Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History (London: UCL Press, 2021), 1–44 et passim.
28.		Mins. of 1st meeting, 31 January 1918, MS 860/12/10, Pollard MSS, Senate House Library, London, and final report, 3 July 1918, MS Zimmern 82, Zimmern MSS, Bodleian Library. For further insights, E. Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
29.		Min. Headlam-Morley for Lampson, 24 February 1923, HDLM Acc. 688/2, Headlam- Morley MSS, Churchill College Archive Centre (CCAC), Cambridge. This yielded Curzon’s speech at the Aldwych Club on 27 February, The Times, 28 February 1923.
30.		Chamberlain to sisters Hilda and Ivy, 28 November 1925, AC 5/1/370, Chamberlain MSS, Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham.
31.		Temperley ‘War notes: Montenegro – Strategy’, c. 1915–6, Temperley MSS.
32.		H.W.V. Temperley, ‘Suggestions to Contributors’, n.d. [1919], Webster 1/3/30, Webster MSS, London School of Economics Archives; and id. (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (6 vols., London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press and Hodder & Stoughton, 1920–4).
33.		H.W.V. Temperley, Research and Modern History: Inaugural Lecture, delivered at Cambridge, November 19th, 1930 (London: Macmillan, 1930), and ‘Professor Temperley on Research’, The Times, 20 November 1930.
34.		Temperley to Webster, 20 July 1937, Webster 1/9/43, Webster MSS.
35.		D. Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: Penguin, 1993 (pb)), 16 et passim.
36.		Namier to Churchill, 14 February 1934, CHAR 8/484A-B, Chartwell MSS, CCAC; see also D.W. Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 239.
37.		Temperley to The Times, 28 July 1938; see id., The Foreign Policy of George Canning, 1822–1827: England, the Neo-Holy Alliance, and the New World (London: Macmillan, 1925). Temperley, in fact, was certain that nothing would come of the incipient Czech crisis: ‘Hitler knows well enough that the Czechs will fight’, to Seton-Watson, 28 March 1938, SEW/17/28/4, Seton-Watson MSS, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London.
38.		Chamberlain to Temperley, 11 September 1938, Temperley MSS.
39.		Temperley to Chamberlain, 20 September 1938, NC 7/11/31/268, Chamberlain MSS, Birmingham University Library; also in J.D. Fair, Harold Temperley: A Scholar and Romantic in the Public Realm (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 285.
40.		Seton-Watson to Zimmern, 21 December 1939, MS Zimmern 45, Zimmern MSS.
41.		Woodward to Webster, 8 August 1942, Webster 1/23/1, Webster MSS.
42.		Berlin to Grundy, 23 November 1944, H. Hardy ed., Flourishing: Isaiah Berlin Letters, 1928–1946 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 501–2. G.B. Grundy, a classicist at Corpus Christi College, had been seconded to the War Office and then the Board of Agriculture during the First World War, id., Fifty Five Years at Oxford: An Unconventional Autobiography (London: Methuen, 2nd ed., 1946), 130–36. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin was attached to the British embassy in Washington during the war, where he found ‘one week’s work . . . less of a strain than one day’s teaching at Oxford’, R. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban Publishers, 2nd ed. 2007), 15.
43.		Webster to Toynbee (most personal and confidential), 10 June 1945, MS 13,967/86, Toynbee MSS, Bodleian Library; further P.A. Reynolds and E.J. Hughes eds., The Historian as Diplomat: Charles Kingsley Webster and the United Nations, 1939–1946 (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1976). For the ‘tramp’ episode, see Berlin to parents, 26 October 1941, Hardy ed., Flourishing, 383.
44.		Woodward to Faber, 22 January (cont. 2 Feb.) 1940, PDR/108/2/4, Woodward MSS, Worcester College Archives, Oxford,; R. Butler, ‘Sir Llewellyn Woodward, 1890–1971’, Proceedings of the British Academy lvii (1972), 506.
45.		E.L. Woodward, ‘Autobiography’, typescript, n.d. [1961/1], PDR/108/2/9, section III, fol. 6, Woodward MSS.
46.		Min. Bridges, 14 September 1939, CAB 103/59, TNA. Curiously, Churchill criticised Bridges’ minutes as ‘far too lengthy’ and ‘a most imperfect and misleading record’, min. Churchill, 29 April 1941, CAB 21/2865, TNA; see further I. Beesley, The Office of the Cabinet Secretary (London: Routledge, 2017), 3–5.
47.		Bridges circular, 21 September 1939, ibid.; see also D. Hay, ‘British Historians and the Beginnings of the Civil History of the second World War’, M.R.D. Foot ed., War and Society: Historical Essays in Honour and Memory of J.R. Western, 1928–1971 (London: Paul Elek, 1973), 41–2.
48.		See, e.g., G.N. (later Sir George) Clark’s compilations, ‘1940 Diary (Institute of International Affairs and Other War Work – Anglo-Netherlands)’, MS Clark 247, Clark MSS, Bodleian Library. ‘Jamie’ Clark spent the 1914–18 war as a prisoner of war in Belgium but was allowed periodic leave to visit his sister in the Netherlands, see Murray to Clark, 19 May 1918, MS Clark 213, folder 4, ibid.
49.		Memo. Bridges, 29 July 1941, CAB 98/7, TNA.
50.		Mins. of 1st meeting of advisory committee COH (U), 9 December 1941, CAB 98/13, TNA; see further J. Harris, ‘Thucydides Amongst the Mandarins: Hancock and the World War II Histories’, D.A. Low ed., Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian (Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 122–48.
51.		R. Linehan, ‘The Twentieth Century’, id. ed., St. John’s College Cambridge: A History (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), 513–7 and 546–55; also R. Hyam, ‘The Study of Imperial and Commonwealth History at Cambridge: Founding Fathers and Pioneers’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History xxxix, no. 1 (2001), 76–79.
52.		Hay, ‘Civil History’, 48. The other members of the committee were G.N. Clark, Harold Butler, John Maud (the modernist), E.H. Carr, C.T. Flower (Deputy Keeper of Public Records), Lindsay Kerr (representing Northern Ireland) and J.D. Mackie (representing Scotland); the papers of the committee are in CAB 98/13–16, TNA.
53.		For an appreciation of his Ricasoli and the Risorgimento in Tuscany (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1926) see D. Mack Smith, ‘Italian Ventures: Hancock on the Risorgimento’, Low ed., Hancock, 15–21; also W.K. Hancock, Survey of Commonwealth Affairs (2 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1937–40).
54.		Bob Boothby’s withering verdict as quoted in A.L. Rowse, All Souls and Appeasement: A Contribution to Contemporary History (London: Macmillan, 1961), 1; for Hancock’s association with All Souls, see J. Davidson, ‘Have Brain, Will Travel: W.K. Hancock and the Idea of Public Service’, S.J.D. Green and P. Hordern, eds., All Souls and the Wider World: Statesmen, Scholars, and Adventurers, c. 1850–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135–54.
55.		Hancock, Country and Calling, 196.
56.		Hancock to Berlin, 4 December 1940, MS Berlin 107, Berlin MSS, Bodleian Library.
57.		Memo. Hancock, ‘Tentative Plan for the Civil Histories’, 14 November 1941, CAB 98/13, for 2nd meeting of COH (U).
58.		. W.K. Hancock, The History of Our Times: The Webb Memorial Lecture delivered on 21 November 1950 (London: Athlone Press, 1951), 12.
59.		Memo. Hancock, ‘The Present War: Progress of the Histories’, 18 February 1942, CAB 98/9, TNA; for some of the researchers employed see Harris, ‘Thucydides’, 127–28.
60.		A. Oakley, Man and Wife: Richard and Kay Titmuss. My Parents’ Early Life (London: Flamingo, 1997), 147; Hancock, Country and Calling, 200.
61.		Toynbee to Clark (private and confidential), 30 January 1939 and 26 September 1938, MS Clark 213, folder 3, Clark MSS.
62.		She earned between £1,000 and £1,200 p.a., min. Dalton, 8 September 1944, MS 12,214/5, folder 1, Sutherland MSS, Bodleian Library. Sutherland left the BoT on 31 August 1945 to resume her academic career, having been offered – and having accepted – the post of Principal of Mady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Woodward to Sutherland, 16 May 1945, ibid.; see also L.S. Sutherland, ‘The Board of Trade’, unpublished lecture MS, MS 12,214/15, ibid.
63.		See https:///www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.
64.		Hancock, Country and Calling, 198–9.
65.		Behrens to Hancock, 16 August 1947, CAB 102/86, TNA. The History Faculty had repeatedly refused to release Behrens for work at Chatham House, Toynbee to Behrens (confidential), 28 July and 8 August 1941, BEHR/ADD/14, Behrens MSS, CCAC.
66.		Hancock, Country and Calling, 190; see also B. Behrens, lecture notes on the official history, n.d., BEHR 16, Behrens MSS.
67.		Hancock to Bridges, 23 June 1944, CAB 102/86, TNA. Domestic constraints, especially his wife’s fragile health, may well have played a role here, too, see Harris, ‘Thucydides’, 131.
68.		Postan to Powicke, 24 August [1944], MS 12,384/11, Powicke MSS, Bodleian Library. Postan’s wife, the distinguished mediaevalist Eileen Power, had died in 1940, which perhaps made his continued involvement in the official histories even more irksome.
69.		Woodward, ‘Autobiography’, PDR/108/2/9, section III, fol. 29, Woodward MSS. Woodward had initially gathered and microfilmed some 2,000 papers for shipping to North America in the event of a German invasion, ibid., section IV, fols. 1 and 8.
70.		Woodward to Powicke, 19 September 1942, MS 12,384/15/1, Powicke MSS, Bod. The resulting scraps were Short Journey (London: Faber & Faber, 1942) and British Historians (London: Collins, 1943).
71.		Benians to Powicke, 4 June 1943, MS 12,384/2, Powicke MSS, Bod.
72.		Harris, ‘Thucydides’, 132; see memo. Hancock, ‘Civil Histories: Rough draft for a central volume’, n.d., CAB 102/86; min. Bridges, 11 August 1944, and Brooke to Hancock, 18 May 1948, CAB 103/22, TNA. Government secrecy was a particular concern for Brooke, see Beesley, Cabinet Secretaries, 27–29.
73.		Hay, ‘Civil History’, 54. Hay had worked on the volume The Design and Development of Weapons (London: HMSO, 1964); ‘Obituary: Professor Denys Hay’, The Independent, 20 June 1994.
74.		Mins. of Cabinet meeting, 3 April 1945, CAB 65/70/CM (45) 39, TNA.
75.		Hancock, History of Our Times, 13.
76.		Id., ‘British Civil Histories of the Second World War’, R. Higham ed., Official Histories: Essays and Bibliographies from Around the World (Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University Library, 1970), 521.
77.		Woodward to Zimmern, 3 November 1946, MS Zimmern 51, Zimmern MSS.
78.		Woodward to Faber, 19 January 1957, PDR/108/2/4, Woodward MSS. Sir Geoffrey Faber (1889–1961), the publisher and academic, had been a contemporary of Woodwards at university and also a fellow of All Souls.
79.		R. Aldrich, “Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence since 1945,” English Historical Review cxix, no. 483 (2004): 926–7.
80.		Strang to Bevin, 11 December 1950, FO 370/2160/LS7/5, TNA; for a detailed account of Woodward’s work see P.J. Beck, ‘Locked in a Dusty Cupboard, neither Accessible on the Policy-makers’ Desks nor Cleared for Early Publication: Llewellyn Woodward’s Official Diplomatic History of the Second World War’, English Historical Review cxxvii, no. 529 (2012): 1435–70.
81.		Woodward, ‘Autobiography’, PDR/108/2/9, section IV, fol. 9, Woodward MSS. For the role of the Ministry of Information, see Woodward’s reminder to Strang, 29 February 1944, PDR/108/2/4, ibid.; see The Origins of the War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940); he was also a frequent letter writer to The Times and commentator in The Spectator, see Richard Davenport-Hines, Conservative Thinkers from All Souls College Oxford (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2022).
82.		Woodward to Butterfield, 1 August 1949, BUTT/130/4, Butterfield MSS.
83.		Woodward to Berlin, 1 February 1955, MS Berlin 140, Berlin MSS. He spent half the year in Princeton.
84.		Woodward to Strang, 5 January 1956, PDR/108/2/5, Woodward MSS.
85.		Woodward to Faber, 19 January 1957, PDR/108/2/4, ibid; he made a similar, though more sotto voce, complain to Strang, 20 August 1951, 2/5, ibid.
86.		Woodward to Strang, 16 March 1958, 8 July [1959] and 11 September 1960, PDR/108/2/ 5, ibid (quotes from first and last).
87.		Woodward to Strang, 14 March 1959, ibid.; for the exchanges with Brooke, see Beck, “Locked in a Dusty Cupboard,” 1454–5.
88.		E.L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1962), v.
89.		Official Report, House of Commons, 26 March 1962, cols. 834–4.
90.		Woodward to Strang, 17 March 1967, PDR/108/2/5, Woodward MSS; for Wilson’s role see Avon to Woodward, 19 January 1967, 2/3, ibid.
91.		Woodward to Strang, 15 August 1970, 2/5, ibid. For the delays see same to same, 18 December 1968, 21 December 1969 and 14 July 1970, ibid.
92.		. E.L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (5 vols., London: HMSO, 1970–6); and also J.D. Cantwell, The Public Record Office, 1858–1969 (Richmond: HMSO, 2000), 83 and 94–5.
93.		Butterfield, ‘Official History’, 186.
94.		H. von Sybel, Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I., vornehmlich nach den preussischen Staatsacten (7 vols., Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1889–94). Bismarck had a low opinion of his ‘historischem Knecht’ (historian serf), F. Heer, Das Wagnis der schöpferischen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977), 232.
95.		History ‘has a bunch of master keys with which to open the secrets of all changes’, id., The Twelve-Winded Sky (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), 75.
96.		Woodward to Butterfield, 28 August 1949, BUTT/130/4, Butterfield MSS; for the context and also Butterfield’s ‘convoluted and bordering on the obsequious’ reply see Salmon, Control of the Past, 26–28.
97.		V. Mehta, Fly and Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London: Pelican, 1965), 191. For Butterfield’s favouring peace talks, Butterfield to Behrens, 25 September 1940, BEHR/ADD/14, Behrens MSS; for his Irish contacts and visits, M. Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147–76.
98.		Butterfield to Clark, 23 April 1947, MS Clark 58, folder 7, Clark MSS.
99.		Butterfield to Powicke, 27 October 1951, MS 12,384/2, Powicke MSS.
100.		Butterfield, “In Defence of Diplomatic History,” unpublished lecture, n.d., BUTT/426, Butterfield MSS (original emphasis). Alas, Bentley has nothing to offer on Butterfield’s recantation, id., Herbert Butterfield, 321–23.
101.		Webster to Butler, 21 May 1950, CAB 140/103, TNA. Curiously, Butler considered himself ‘completely bogus as a historian’, to Toynbee, 12 September 1947, MS 13,967/ 39, Toynbee MSS. For Webster’s appointment see also the reflections of his co-author Nobel Frankland, id., History at War: The Campaigns of an Historian (London: Giles de la Mare, 1998), 50–53.
102.		Zuckerman to Pelly (private and confidential), 3 November 1958, SZ/BBSU/4/125, Zuckerman MSS, University of East Anglia Archives; also Zuckerman to Webster, 7 November and reply 20 November 1958,/127 and 130, ibid.
103.		S. Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords: The Autobiography (1904–1946) of Solly Zuckerman (London: Penguin, 1988), 339. Frankland retaliated in kind by suggesting that Zuckerman, ‘though clever enough, . . . was too much of a courtier to be a sound advisor’, Frankland, History at War, 75.
104.		Butterfield, “Official History,” 191.
105.		M. Beloff, “The Intellectual in Politics,” id., The Intellectual in Politics and Other Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), 16–7.
106.		For some of this, see my “’The Light of History’: Scholarship and Officialdom in the Era of the First World War,” Diplomacy & Statecraft xxx, no. 2 (2019): 253–87.
107.		Woodward to Powicke, 24 August [1942?], MS 12,384/15/1, Powicke MSS.
108.		E.L. Woodward, Some Political Consequences of the Atomic Bomb: A Public Lecture delivered in the University of Oxford (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1945), 10. Woodward thought the sum of £30,000 sufficient to assemble a team of historians, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists for the purpose. He was ‘continually depressed ab[ou]t the damned bomn’. Intriguingly, the Clarendon Press refused to publish the lecture, Woodward to Clark, 3 Nov. 1945, MS. Clark 212, folder 1, Clark MSS.
109.		D.C. Watt, What About the People?: Abstraction and Reality in History and the Social Sciences (London: London School of Economics, 1983), 4.
110.		Hancock, Country and Calling, 199.
111.		T. Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); D. Coyle, ‘How to provide evidence in turbulent times’, Financial Times, 11 Feb. 2025; and also P. Burke, Ignorance: A Global History (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2023), 1–18 et passim.
Disclosure statement
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Notes on contributor
T.G. Otte is Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia. His latest book is Leuthen (OUP, 2024).