July 1999

The death at 66 of Sir Robert Rhodes James, one of Britain’s great historians has deprived readers everywhere of the fruits of an Indian summer of writing which would have undoubtedly followed with so prolific and accomplished an author.

In addition to more than a dozen volumes of biography, parliamentary and military history, he edited the massive collection of Churchill’s complete speeches. The historian and prodigious reviewer, A.J.P. Taylor, described Robert Rhodes James’ biography of Albert: Prince Consort (1983) as the finest biography he had ever read. His book on Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’, Churchill: a Study in Failure, 1900-1939 (1970) the only one of his books with which I am familiar, shows a fine sense of discrimination in assessing the reasons for these failures; it is non-polemical, measured in judgement, and written in crystal-clear prose.

Only a variegated man of talent could have the diverse forms of influence Rhodes James exhibited. The British House of Commons – he was the Conservative MP for Cambridge from 1976 to 1992, as well as at one time, Principal Parliamentary Secretary to the Foreign Office - enjoyed the forensic challenge of a first-rate, historically trained mind. The United Nations, where he was the British representative on its sub-committee on racial discrimination during the early 1970s, drew on his expertise in the field of minorities, a province he made his own by dint of his encyclopaedic knowledge of European history. A list of his publications might not indicate it, but Rhodes James had a comprehension of Europe that did not stop at the Elbe.

He had, too, a personal connection to Australia, having been once an associate of the History Department at Melbourne University as well as the author of a highly regarded study of Gallipoli (1965). Extraordinarily, to the best of my knowledge, he had no obituary in the Australian papers.

His death occurred close to the 50th anniversary of Israel’s admission to the United Nations, a country and an organisation to which he devoted much of his energies. As he told a meeting of AIJAC only three months ago during his last visit to Australia, being a Conservative Friend of Israel (he had just completed a term as president of that organisation the previous year) was relatively easy in Britain. What in Britain was harder, and in his view more courageous, was to be a Labour Friend of Israel, an organisation that had been ideologically besieged since the passing of Harold Wilson’s ascendancy in the party. Even in the Blair era, that ostracism has yet to dissipate; a reminder of the special conditions and fortunes that have smiled upon Israel’s cause in Australian Labor politics. He enjoyed reading The Review which, he said, more than any other Australian publication, had kept him reliably informed of developments in the Hanson phenomenon.

I wish I could say I knew him well, but I only ever met him once, exactly three weeks before his death. If Alan Watkins in the Spectator is to be believed – and he was in a position to know - Rhodes James was an accomplished drinker and inveterate smoker. I only saw him sip white wine in moderation with lunch although he did fill my car with cigarette smoke on what happened to be a glorious Melbourne autumn afternoon. His dialectical powers were rapier sharp, his sense of humour both pungent and engaging.

His views on the Kosovo crisis were characteristically conservative and sceptical – it was an ill-conceived operation without sound objectives and ultimately an internal Yugoslav affair – and Clinton and Blair were to be watched closely. What he would have thought at the surprising success of sorts which has since attended NATO’s venture is moot. He agreed that if Margaret Thatcher had been heeded seven years ago, none of the Balkan troubles might have flared as they have. Knowing better than most the detail of Chilean history, he was amazed at the British government’s ineptitude in allowing General Pinochet to go to trial. On the other hand, as he told me on the road to our meeting, he had little time for the triumphalism of unfettered free market economics and its proponents.

Although suffering from the illness that claimed him a few weeks later, he was remarkably buoyant. He had taken the trip to Australia because he wanted to do so; his book on Gallipoli was being re-launched and his doctor thought it would do him no harm. There was a gratifying ease and informal graciousness to Rhodes James.

I am pleased I had a glimpse of him, an instant of familiarity, with the earlier Oxbridge world of erudition and politics that he represented.

Copyright © AIJAC 1999
Last Updated 5 November, 2001