Memories of an S.O.E. Historian by M. R. D. Foot

Author:M. R. D. Foot [Foot, M. R. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, General, Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9781783460724
Google: 22LNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2009-04-29T00:30:07+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Ructions

At the end of the 1950s my marriage to Pip broke up. I remained passionately interested in having children; she turned out not to be able to have any. Feeling a fearsome cad, I walked out on her, necessarily in those days walking out also on my Oxford appointments and career. I supposed I could move easily from Oxford to a teaching job at LSE, but was wrong. An acquaintance, with an Oxford first, put in for it, so there was no point in my even applying.

My second wife, Elizabeth King, much younger than I, also came from a broken home – her father went away to the war in 1939, rose to be a captain Royal Engineers, survived, but never returned to his wife. Elizabeth’s mother Aileen divorced him and made a career for herself in the world of home economics, running two domestic science colleges in turn, serving as an inspector of schools and retiring (like Lindsey) with a CBE. We were married in 1960, and had a daughter next year and a son eighteen months later, but the marriage did not turn out the success we had hoped it would be.

We found a flat off Russell Square, within five minutes’ walk of the British Museum reading room where I was hard at work on Mr Gladstone. Much of the early work on his diary was, like so much scholarship, merely clerical, and I soon got the hang of identifying most of his schoolboy and university friends (as Namier once remarked, a great many profound secrets are already in print if you know where to look for them). As he moved forward into parliament, and began his long official career, the work grew more complicated. By this time I had been allotted a shelf in the BM’s North Library, thus joining an informal group of scholars who were getting on with the real work of imparting knowledge in printed sources, out of which the academic world could later teach.

A total stranger once came up to me there – an elderly lady. She understood I could read Mr Gladstone’s handwriting? I could. Would I please come with her? We went through, silent, to the manuscript room. She confronted me with a passage Mr G had written in the autumn of 1894, with his eyes shut, because his cataract was so bad. Luckily I could spot that he was writing in Latin, and was quoting Horace. I gave her a word or two, referred her to the Lexicon totius Latinitatis which was on the open shelves in the great round reading room, and went back to my own work.

Various Oxford scholars, much my senior, took an interest in the diaries project. Alan Bullock allowed St Catherine’s College’s name to be used as a formal academic base, and sat on an informal committee, chaired by Kenneth Wheare, and including Robert Blake, Pat Thompson and the librarian at Lambeth, who interviewed me from time to time about how I was getting along.

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