Robin Clifton: a Memoir

We learned this week of the sad death of our former colleague Robin Clifton, one of the founding members of Warwick’s History Department in 1965. Robin was a dedicated teacher, a fine historian, an excellent colleague. and a valued friend. He had a huge appetite for life and lived it to the full, with a phenomenally wide range of interests and expertise. He will be fondly remembered and deeply missed by everyone who knew him.

A proud New Zealander, who didn’t take kindly to anyone labelling him Australian, Robin had earned an MA from Wellington in modern Russian history before coming to England in 1962. At Oxford he worked on a DPhil (with Christopher Hill, at Balliol) on popular anti-Catholicism in Elizabethan and early/mid seventeenth-century England. He later published an article drawn from it in Past and Present, which almost forty years later my students still preferred to anything published subsequently. When Warwick opened its doors to History students in 1965 Robin was part of the tiny group of Founding Fathers, alongside John Hale, E.P. Thompson, Alastair Hennessy, Bill Dusinberre, Michael Mallett and Austin Gough (a modern French historian). Valda Reid, our first secretary, ran the History Office singlehanded, with a multitude of responsibilities that included typing up everyone’s reading lists! The whole University was initially based on the East Site. Year 1’s syllabus was modern history, which Robin was happy to teach, with Thompson teasing him as ‘our young Russian historian’. He then launched a module on ‘English Social History, 1500-1700’, the first such course anywhere in the UK, and a special subject on ‘Radicalism in the English Revolution’. Both proved highly popular, and both ran for decades. For several years he and I ran special subject seminars together, and I had the opportunity to see in action Robin’s huge skill and commitment as an undergraduate teacher. He also designed and taught an advanced option on Local History, and when his interests swung back to the modern period he developed a popular course on ‘War and History’ which was probably his favourite. It focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, with a close study of the Vietnam war. Students appreciated Robin’s demonstrations with old weapons to enliven his lectures, though the police took a different view when they spotted him one day carrying an old firearm onto campus.

Robin’s range as a teacher reflected the breadth of his wider interests. He was knowledgeable on both the Rolling Stones and Richard Wagner, on both biblical history and 20^th century international politics. He loved good food, drink, company and conversation, and was a very generous host. In his younger days he was a keen rugger player and always remained a fan. In 1984 Robin published a valuable monograph, The Last Popular Rebellion (on Monmouth and his rebels in 1685), and later co-edited a collection entitled War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942-62, a tribute to his late friend and Warwick colleague Callum MacDonald. But his real love was always undergraduate teaching, sharing his enthusiasm and inspiring the young. He also enjoyed making three videos for Jack Scarisbrick’s ‘Warwick History Videos’ project in the 1980s, aimed primarily at A-Level students. They included one on the English civil war and another on World War II, another reflection of his versatility. They are still available, as DVDs, in the University Library. I have a vivid memory of one scene in which Robin is holding forth to the camera while standing with his head and hands protruding through a pillory. He always loved reading widely, exploring new fields that ranged from ancient history to the contemporary world, and spanned the globe. A combination of ill-health and the pressure to produce regular publications for RAEs and REFs persuaded him to take early retirement in 2000. He and his wife Vivien, who had earlier worked for some years in the History Office, then moved to a lovely and remote spot in mid-Wales. There he enjoyed the leisure to read still more widely, and was also able to pay a lengthy return visit with Vivien to New Zealand.

Today’s universities are a much less welcoming home for academics who are primarily scholars and teachers. Robin Clifton’s life and huge contribution remind us how much they could have to offer.

Bernard Capp

Robin Clifton from Bill and Juliet Dusinberre

Robin was a founder member of the History Department at Warwick, set up by Professor John Hale. In September 1965 everyone finally met at the East Site, on Gibbet Hill, where the whole of the first year of the new university was conducted.

The History Department consisted of six members besides John Hale: Edward Thompson, Alastair Hennessy, Austin Gough, Michael Mallet, Robin Clifton and Bill Dusinberre. A central figure was Edward Thompson, and he and Dorothy made their Lansdowne Crescent house in Leamington Spa a special place for everyone to get to know each other. But that was not difficult. In October when the students arrived there were 400 undergraduates and a hundred graduates; the whole body was probably about 600 people. Everyone was on Christian names in an era which still had a certain formality; everything was swinging – a time for the Beatles and for six new universities in Britain.

Robin, Austin, and Bill were all from overseas. Everyone was married except Bill, and by the end of the year he was married too. The Best Man at his wedding was Robin Clifton, a very special memory for Bill, stranded in among a lot of very English people. There’s a picture of the two of them framed in Robin and Vivien’s sitting room.

Robin was an enthusiast. He loved teaching and did everything he could to make the seventeenth century come alive to his students. The lecturers were a good deal younger than at older universities. Robin was probably 27, and had finished his DPhil at Oxford under Christopher Hill.

On the East Site there was a bookshop, and a temporary cafeteria, metamorphosed into a proper dining hall by the time the students arrived in October. Where the university now is, in August 1965 the farmers were harvesting corn. The university was the stuff dreams are made of. It was full of new ideas. Edward Thompson was the leading light with his emphasis on Social History. Robin and Bill were entranced by it.

The loss of Robin leaves only Bill from that original batch of seven. The History Department has grown and flourished and developed and is now one of the leading history departments in the country. But it was always from the start a wonderful department, and Robin was a key member of it. We are all so saddened by his loss.

Juliet and Bill Dusinberre, December 2022

Tribute from Chris Read

Talking to people about Robin, the first thing many mention is his laugh – warm, understanding, genuine, completely free of malice - much like Robin himself. As has already been pointed out, Robin was a man of great passions, enthusiasm, emotion, empathy and energy all combined with great intelligence, deep insights and vast knowledge. He lived life with gusto. These qualities made Robin a valued friend, companion and colleague. One aspect of Robin’s life which brought him closer to Françoise and myself and our daughters, as an Anglo-French family was Robin’s enthusiastic Francophilia. He loved the country. He loved visiting. He loved the cuisine. He loved the wine. He would often stick his head round my office door to let me know the local Tesco had a decent Chablis or Burgundy at a reasonable price. He was not in the least snobbish about wine and food preferences. He just showed a simple appreciation of uncomplicated quality. We never actually met up in France on our frequent visits but we did work out once in the early 80s that we were probably only a few hundred yards apart on a vast beach in the Vendée. We did not know this at the time which is perhaps just as well since, although it was not compulsory, this was a beach with a priority for naturists. It could have made for an extraordinarily disconcerting encounter.

Robin had great presence. It was always evident when he was around. He moved with bustle, determination, drive and, when necessary, intense firepower, sometimes reminiscent of the T34 tank, a model of which he had on his bookshelf. (I know because I bought it for him in Leningrad) Not everyone would turn up in a lecture holding a musket. Nothing seemed able to slow him down. When he had severe back problems he led seminars with his usual panache while lying flat out on the office table, face up to the ceiling. Eventually, he became too big for a university increasingly run by Whitehall bean counters, micro-managers and increasingly hostile HR procedures.

I was rather disappointed personally when he took early retirement and moved to mid-Wales on the purely selfish grounds that I would see less of him and Vivien. It was, of course, a brilliant move for them and it provided a high point to Robin’s life. On the occasions when we met it was clear he was having the time of his life. The pandemic closed down even these all-too-infrequent direct contacts and, for reasons I don’t understand, my determination to visit Robin and Vivien this year was not fulfilled, something I will always regret. However, one of the few positives of lockdown is that we have all become expert in video conferencing – I say all, but rather more Vivien than Robin in this case – and Robin became an integral member of a small group of five former colleagues who zoomed once a month for the last year or so. We called the meeting ‘Roger’s Room’ in honour of another colleague, Roger Magraw, whose office had been the point zero for intense social, political and cultural discussion. There was no problem left unsolved in that room. Our online revival was a life-affirming return to that tradition. The present, seemingly limitless, insanity of the world left us no shortage of burning issues (though we were sufficiently tactful to keep away from the recent less-than-stellar performances of the All Blacks). Robin made an immense contribution to our discussions with deeply thoughtful considerations on the climate crisis and, when we turned gloomy, pointing us to the mirthful topic that keeps on giving – the plight of the Tory Party. He was particularly helpful to our discussions because of his understanding of war – which, he had always insisted, was a brutal and savage process no matter who prosecutes it. I remember vividly his lectures and Warwick History Video on the English Civil War, for example, which is often romanticised into a picturesque conflict between Roundheads vs Cavaliers but which, Robin convincingly insisted, was an ugly, brutal, inhuman episode. Robin was always deeply committed to the control and abolition of nuclear weapons and we were present at numerous demonstrations in the 70s and 80s but, even so, he re-assured us that army leaders tended to be very cautious in preserving their men and materials and that there was only the remotest possibility of them being used in the current ghastly and surreal war in Ukraine. His interventions, right to the most recent, were always personal, original, very stimulating and much sought after by the rest of us. I would like to imagine that he and Roger and Gwynne Lewis and David Washbrook and others will already be going at it hammer and tongues in the celestial branch of Roger’s Room.

Robin was a great friend, a prime life force. I am going to miss him enormously.