Higher educationObituaryLord Bullock of Leafield
A prolific and public-spirited historian, he founded an Oxford college and defined the nature of tyranny and evil in the 20th centuryThe historian Alan Bullock, who has died aged 89, was one of the most versatile and engaging public figures produced by Britain in the second half of the 20th century. "Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature," he liked to say of himself. He was a powerfully built man, and some people found him domineering. Others, especially those who worked with him to found St Catherine's College, Oxford, thought him little short of a hero.
Bullock first caught the public's attention in 1952, with his biography Hitler, A Study In Tyranny, which, in its revised edition (1964), remains both a standard work and an absorbing piece of modern historical writing. The book on which his reputation as a historian rests, it played to his strengths as a biographer who had the knack of penetrating the minds of others. He went on to become, in 1960, founding master of St Catherine's, the only new college for both undergraduates and graduates built in Oxford in the 20th century, and also the first to be divided equally between students of science and the arts.
People who worked with Bullock came away convinced that he loved committees. He enhanced his reputation by chairing high-profile inquiries into the teaching of English (1972-74) and industrial democracy (1976). Although, at times, he could seem wilful and overbearing, his closest friends and colleagues saw him as, at heart, a man of consensus. He was a popular chairman of the Tate gallery (1973-80) and other public bodies, and a favourite among journalists at the Observer, joining it as a trustee (1957-69) after the 1956 Suez operation, which both he and the paper opposed; from 1977 to 1981, he was a director of the paper.
He was Oxford's first full-time vice-chancellor (1969-73), serving during a difficult period of student unrest. His build, strong voice and irrepressible Yorkshire accent gave him an air of strength that was quite undonnish. This served him well when it came to keeping unruly undergraduates within limits.
Accent notwithstanding, Bullock was born in Wiltshire, the only child of parents who were in service near Bath, as a gardener and a maid; his father, Frank Bullock, was also a famous Unitarian preacher. The family soon moved to Bradford, where young Alan came under the influence of the city's well-known Liberalism. The Bullocks were poor but high-minded, and spent what money they could on buying books and going to concerts. Father and son were close; by the time Alan was 16, they were talking together in Latin.
He went on to Bradford grammar school, sharing a desk with a girl called Hilda Yates. The romantic, poetry-writing teenager fell in love with his neighbour and later married her. Friends thought this the best decision he ever made. Lady Bullock - known to everyone as Nibby - was a supportive wife and, possessing a mind as acute as her husband's, a lifelong intellectual companion. Her part in his achievements was recognised when St Catherine's made her an honorary fellow.
Bullock won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied for five years to win a rare double first in classics (1936) and modern history (1938). Asthma disqualified him from military service, but he spent a satisfying second world war at the BBC Overseas Service, where he learned, and enjoyed, the arts of black propaganda.
Afterwards, he went back to Oxford as a modern history fellow at New College (1945-52). He believed the university underrated his chosen speciality, but he contributed powerfully to its recognition when, using the abundant transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, he wrote his Hitler biography.
Almost 40 years later, Bullock returned to the subject with his thousand-page tome Hitler And Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991, revised 1998). His definition of evil was "the corruption of people to behave in an inhuman way". His Hitler is ready to destroy anyone and anything in pursuit of abstract ideas. Stalin, Bullock argued, frightens us both because he justified his bloody methods as the only way to modernise a backward society and because of his extreme paranoia.
Friends warned Bullock against attempting this double biography, fearing it would flop. Some doubted the two lives were, in any meaningful sense, parallel; a handful felt Stalin was beyond the grasp of this very English Englishman. His colleague Norman Stone said Bullock's Stalin came out "like a Sheffield city councillor running amuck, and beheading the aldermen".
This was unfair, for Bullock had grasped that Stalin's personal malice marked him out from Hitler, who was astonishingly tolerant of inadequate colleagues. Asked the frivolous question as to which of the dictators he would have preferred spending a weekend with, Bullock replied promptly, "Hitler, because although it would have been boring in the extreme, you would have have had a greater certainty in coming back alive." The book was generally a critical success, and indisputably a commercial one, not least because of the clear English that was the hallmark of its writing.
Bullock began work on another book in the 1950s, a three-volume biography (1960, 1967 and 1983) of Ernest Bevin, the postwar Labour foreign secretary and a Bullock hero, whose character, in some respects, was remarkably like his own. He also made a stir as a teacher of history who seemed in touch with the outside world, and won a reputation in the lecture halls equal to that other Oxford star AJP Taylor. Bullock's lecture on Gladstone, delivered in a compulsive boom and packed with moral passion, is still remembered by those who heard it decades ago.
Also in the 1950s, he began the work of converting the moribund St Catherine's Society (designed for students too poor to join a proper university college) into a full-blown Oxford foundation. The time was auspicious. Industry had money to invest in education, and there was a boom in the population of student age. People had become aware of the importance of science to social and economic progress, and of the way in which Oxford, like most universities, was biased against it.
Brandishing his novel idea of a college with as many scientists as students of the arts, Bullock almost singlehandedly persuaded companies to stump up the £2m he needed. World-famous names like Esso and Lockheed funded both buildings and scholarships. Bullock trod on many toes in the process (some of then belonging to his own fellows) and he caused horror among traditionalists by choosing the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen to put up the buildings on a fine riverside site.
Jacobsen insisted on designing everything - from the cutlery, and tables and chairs, to the buildings them selves. Critics said, and still say, that the generous use of glass robs the undergraduate rooms of privacy, and causes summertime overheating. Others find the college elegant, though, curiously, the office occupied by Bullock until his death was unappealing, and almost a rebuke to modern achitecture.
His committee skills were brought to bear chairing the inquiry into reading and other uses of English, and its report, A Language For Life (1975), made a great impact. Bullock once vowed to write a book on the art of chairmanship because democracy, he liked to say, "is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work."
Bullock certainly needed all his skills when investigating industrial democracy. He himself approved the idea of workers taking part in the management of their companies, but he faced entrenched opposition from employers. When the committee began its work, he was optimistic he could bring the two sides together; traditionalists and progressives in education, he recalled, were much further apart when the teaching of English inquiry had begun.
Bullock thought worker participation was an idea whose time had come - and was as inevitable as the passing of the first Reform bill of 1832 - but not even his skilful manipulation could persuade his members to produce a united report in 1977. To his lasting regret, industrial democracy vanished from Britain's public agenda.
He was made a life peer in the year of that inquiry, 1976. In 1981, he joined the Social Democratic party, and he continued giving lectures till 1997. His last books were a biography of his father, Building Jerusalem (2000) and a single-volume biography of Ernest Bevin (2002).
This successful public figure was nowhere more successful than in his private life. Nothing horrified him more about Hitler and Stalin than the barrenness of their lives at home, indeed the absence of real home lives at all. He was a singularly happy family man, and is survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter; another daughter predeceased him.
· Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock of Leafield, historian, born December 13 1914; died February 2 2004
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