The British and Irish Studies Intelligencer

Executive secretary of the North American Conference on British Studies and editor of the Journal of British Studies

Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, died in Mansfield, Ohio, on April 5, 2008, his 84th birthday. Mansfield, in east-central Ohio, where his family had lived since the mid-19th century, always meant a great deal to Bentley Gilbert, and he returned there to live shortly after his retirement from UIC in 1997. He was especially proud that his great-grandfather, Brigadier General Roeliff Brinkerhoff, served in the Union Army under William Tecumseh Sherman and was in charge of the field transportation of the Army of the Ohio. Gilbert graduated from Mansfield High School in 1942 and served during World War II with the U.S. Army Air Corps 308th Airdrome Squadron in the Pacific Theater, with campaign service in New Guinea and the Philippines. His own war experience, as well as that of his father in World War I in France and his great-grandfather in the Civil War, always remained of abiding concern in Gilbert’s scholarship and teaching. This interest was especially reflected in the second volume of the Lloyd George biography and in his short book, Britain, 1914–45 (1996). By the 1990s, save for his graduate component, Gilbert was teaching mostly military history. Undergraduates would squirm with delight—or not—when Gilbert would bring to class antiquated but well-preserved family military heirlooms for their inspection.

After his discharge from the military, Gilbert received his BA (1949) at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and an MA at the University of Cincinnati (1950). He worked under Paul Knaplund in British history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received his PhD in 1954. Bentley Gilbert’s first permanent job was teaching European history at Colorado College (1954–67) and he came to what was then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in 1967. Despite its later upgrade to the University of Illinois at Chicago, Gilbert always called UIC, with great fondness, “The Circle.” From his dissertation in 1954 to his last scholarly publications in the mid-1990s, Bentley Gilbert was concerned with the intersection in early and mid-20th-century Britain of social policy and politics, with the minutia of the working out of the social plans of the New Liberalism and with the political agendas of the men— Masterman, Lloyd George, Beveridge—who implemented the grand vision. His first book, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State (1966), focused on the process of how social insurance rather than socialism became the framework for an eventual welfare state within a capitalist society. This work was followed in 1970 by British Social Policy, 1914–39, in which Gilbert discussed the development, admittedly somewhat lackadaisical, of welfare policy before the outbreak of World War II. He concluded that “This policy evolved, like the British empire, in a fit of absence of mind.” In 1973, Gilbert edited C.F.G. Masterman’s classic work of 1901, The Heart of the Empire. During the next two decades, Gilbert wrote two volumes of a study on David Lloyd George’s life before the premiership. The overall title was David Lloyd George: A Political Life, with Volume I (1987) sub-titled The Architect of Change, 1863–1912 and Volume II (1992) The Organizer of Victory, 1912–16. The second volume won the 1993 Society of Midland Authors Prize for Biography. It had been his intention to round out Lloyd George’s life by completing one volume on the last two years of the war and one on the postwar premiership and political career, but despite completing the work through 1917, it remained unfinished at his death. Gilbert published articles in Albion, the American Historical Review, The Historian, the Historical Journal, and the Journal of British Studies. Bentley Gilbert was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received three fellowships from the National Institutes of Health, and in 1973–74 a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Gilbert served as executive secretary to the North American Conference on British Studies from 1974 to 1978; as editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1978 to 1983; as president of the Midwest Conference on British Studies from 1988 to 1990; and as secretary to the newly formed American Friends of the Institute of Historical Research, London, during the early 1990s. Perhaps his most important administrative contribution to British history in the United States was his successful proposal, in 1983, at the end of his term as editor, to settle the formerly peripatetic Journal of British Studies at the University of Chicago Press, where it has remained and flourished. Bentley Gilbert was chair of the Department of History at UIC from 1988 to 1991.

Gilbert was exceedingly proud of the eight graduate students whose dissertations on 20th-century Britain he directed: Barbara Farr, Barbara Kehoe, Doris Racich, Norman Eder, Neal McCrillis, Andrew Wiest, Eugene Beiriger, and Septimus Paul. He also endowed a fellowship at UIC for PhD candidates in European history. During his years in Illinois he was a lay reader and vestryman at St. Elisabeth’s Episcopal Church in Glencoe. He is survived by four children, Bentley Junior, Margaret, Louis, and Francis, by three step-children, Ellen and Arthur Gallagher and Daisy Archie, and by four grandchildren, Jacob, Sylvia, Ethan, and Lydia Gilbert.

—James J. Sack
University of Illinois at Chicago
Katharine Stohrer

© American Historical Association
With permission from the American Historical Association
This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Perspectives
on History and in Perspectives Online at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0909/0909mem2.cfm

Bernard Semmel, a distinguished historian of modern Britain and longtime member of the North American Conference of British Studies, died on August 18, 2008. He published eleven books as well as dozens of articles and reviews in major journals in the United States, Britain, and Canada. He had few equals in the breath and depth of his knowledge of the Victorian and Edwardian intellectual milieu. His books ranged from his first, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895-1914 (1960), which remains a classic in its field, to his last, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (1994).

During his long career, he received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim foundation, and the National Humanities Center. He was the editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1969-1974 and a member of the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Semmel received his BA from the College of the City of New York and his MA. And Ph.D from Columbia University. He began his teaching career in 1956 at Park College, Parkville, Missouri. In 1960 he joined the faculty of the Long Island Center of the State University of New York at Oyster Bay, which moved to its permanent home at Stony Brook in 1962. He chaired the department from 1966-1969. After he retired, he became a Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Throughout his career, he was a dedicated and inspiring teacher and mentor. His student, Mrinalini Sinha, praised him for his intellectual integrity, his demonstration through his own work that disciplinary boundaries are historically contingent, and his success in linking his principled traditionalism to a radically liberating view of the historian.

Semmel is survived by his wife Maxine, his son Stuart and daughter-in-law Tina, and four grandchildren. His family, friends, colleagues, and students will remember him as a tough-minded, but always generous and compassionate teacher, intellectual, and human being.

Barbara Harris with help from Mrinilini Sinha.

Dear Colleagues,

As many of you already know, David Underdown passed away on 26 September.  The following is a remembrance from Mark Kishlansky.

Best wishes,
Jason M. Kelly

David Underdown, the eminent historian of early modern England died peacefully at his home in Merced California on September 26th.  He was 84 years of age.

Educated at Wells Grammar School and Exeter College, Oxford, Underdown served in the RAF during World War II after which he completed his B.A. and B. Litt.  He began a doctoral thesis under the direction of Christopher Hill but left Oxford before completing it to enroll in the Graduate School of Yale University where he received an M.A. in American history.

Underdown taught at the University of the South (1953-62) where an endowed history chair in his name commemorates his service; at the University of Virginia (1962-68); at Brown University (1968-8 6) where he was the Monro-Goodwin Wilkinson Professor of European History; and at Yale University (1986-94) from which he retired as the George Burton Adams Professor Emeritus in 1996. Among his many honors he was chosen to receive the AHA’s award for scholarly distinction in 1995, was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, delivered the Prothero Lecture to the Royal Historical Society in 1980 and gave the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 1992. He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow.

Underdown’s lifelong scholarly interests centered upon early modern Britain and were especially focused on the English Revolution, its causes and consequences.  He worked on this from a variety of perspectives from the politics of royalism (Royalist Conspiracies in England (1960) to those of the parliamentarians (Pride’s Purge, 1971; A Freeborn People (1996)); from localism (Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (1973) and Fire from Heaven (1992); to cultural beliefs and practices (Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (1985).  His work displayed two abiding qualities: a mastery of archival sources faithfully reported, and a compelling prose style that carried both story and argument.  He was a craftsman’s craftsman, a master of sources, of historiography, and of method who had few equals even among a flashy generation of generalists whose big theses dominated discussion but faded over time while his solid conclusions persevered.

He was a dedicated and attentive teacher who inspired numerous students to follow in his professional footsteps. In lecture hall and tutorial he communicated his passion for the past with quiet certitude and a wry sense of humor.  He was generous with his time and his advice and he wrote more than one doctoral dissertation in a supervisory capacity.

Though personally shy and reticent, he could be transformed by any mention of cricket, one of his life-long passions. He was a member of the Somerset cricket club and rarely missed a match when in England.  His students were instructed never to interrupt him when the BBC world service was reporting scores.  His final book, Start of Play (2000) was a scholarly account of the origins of the modern game.  Though based on solid archival study it most clearly enunciated his own passions and preferences for the amateur, the independent backbencher “agin the government”, and the free rural small holder who loved the land he lived on.

He is survived by his wife, Susan Amussen, and three sons from a previous marriage.