Robert Howard Hodgkin (24 April 1877 – 28 June 1951) was an English historian. He taught at the Queen's College, Oxford, from 1900 to 1937 and served as its provost from 1937 until 1946. He was particularly known for his 1935 work, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, and for his 1949 book, Six Centuries of an Oxford College.
Born at the family house Benwell Dene in Newcastle upon Tyne, Hodgkin was a son of the banker and historian Thomas Hodgkin, and part of a so-called "Quaker dynasty" with many accomplished relatives. From 1896 to 1899, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honours in the Final School of Modern History. The following year, he volunteered to serve in the Northumberland Fusiliers, rejoining them during the First World War, which ultimately led to him being forced to leave the Society of Friends.
Hodgkin was appointed a lecturer of modern history at Queen's in 1900. He was made a fellow in 1904, a tutor in 1910, and, from 1928 to 1934, he held the post of university lecturer in modern history. From 1936 to 1937, he filled two terms as pro-provost when B. H. Streeter fell ill, resumed teaching in April, and retired towards the end of the year. Retirement lasted less than a week, however, for Streeter (now returned to his duties) died in a plane crash, and Hodgkin was asked to take on the role permanently. He served for nine years, all during the Second World War or its prelude.
As a teacher, Hodgkin was remembered by a student for being "suggestive rather than purely instructive", offering signposts for "the roads and tracks" but "leav[ing] his pupils to explore for themselves". As provost, he was remembered for his dedication, for shepherding the college through the wartime years, and for two important works: the reconstruction of the college's grand library, and his book on the college's history.
Early life and education
Robert Howard Hodgkin was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 24 April 1877, at the family house Benwell Dene. His mother was Lucy Hodgkin (born Lucy Anna Fox), and his father was Thomas Hodgkin, a banker and historian of Europe in the Middle Ages. Robert Hodgkin was the sixth of seven surviving children, following Violet (b. 1869), John (b. 1871, but died the year after), Edward (b. 1872), Elizabeth ("Lily," b. 1873), and Ellen ("Nelly," b. 1875), and followed by George (b. 1880). "The Hodgkins", said a friend of a relative, "are a Quaker dynasty with all that that implies". Among others, Robert Hodgkin was related to the painter Sir Howard Hodgkin, the namesake of Hodgkin's lymphoma Thomas Hodgkin, and Alan Hodgkin, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Hodgkin left Benwell Dene in 1887, aged ten, to spend the first of four years at the preparatory Seabank School, in Alnmouth, though several months of his first year were spent at home recovering from bronchitis. By all accounts, Hodgkin's first years at school were unhappy. "School at Alnmouth was not a bit a happy time", one sister later recalled; "when he was old he used to say that it did seem strange that the hardest lessons you had to learn came at the very beginning of life." Another noted that "he hated it too much to talk about it", and that when older, he stated "The one thing to be said for it was that all later miseries seemed nothing by comparison". Hodgkin's wife, meanwhile, termed him a "home lover" for whom the time at Seabank was "more or less unhappy". Hodgkin would pray for the school to burn down, and one year his prayers were answered, in a fashion, when an outbreak of scarlet fever led to all the boys being sent home. The situation improved slightly when Hodgkin's brother George, three and a half years his junior, entered Seabank, and (as his sister wrote), "Robin became resigned".
Around 1890, Hodgkin's father rented Chollerton Farmhouse in Chollerton, Northumberland, as a holiday home. The following September, Hodgkin enrolled at Repton, where he spent two terms, much of it in the school's sanatorium. The frequent ill health, one sister wrote, was possibly one reason for Hodgkin's unhappiness at school. In any event, his doctor advised that he attend a school further south. This brought Hodgkin (as well his younger brother) to the Quaker Leighton Park School, where he stayed from 1892 until 1895. In 1894, meanwhile, Hodgkin and his sisters Lily and Ellen were taken by their father to Italy and Austria, where they spent time in Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, and Vienna. Their homes, too, were changing: at the end of 1893, the family sold Benwell Dene and took a five-year lease on the keep at Bamburgh Castle, and from 1900 to 1913, resided at Barmoor Castle. Hodgkin's wife later suggested that the time spent along the Northumbrian coast while at Seabank and Bamburgh influenced Hodgkin's interest in England and English history.
In Hodgkin's first year at Bamburgh, his father became acquainted with Arthur Smith, a teacher at Balliol College at the University of Oxford who had his holiday home nearby. It was arranged for Hodgkin to live with and be coached by Smith for a term before taking the Balliol entrance exam. He attended Balliol from 1896 to 1899. His friends there included his cousins Ted Backhouse and Henry (Tommy) Hodgkin, James (Jimmy) Palmer, later the Bishop of Bombay, F. F. Urquhart, A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, a poet named Carré, and others by the names of Tawney and Beveridge. His best friend was Richard Denman, and at one point, along with two others, they worked their way on a cargo steamer to Saint Petersburg before travelling along the Volga and exploring the Caucasus, stopping in Tiflis in Georgia, and eventually leaving for home from Odesa in Ukraine. Hodgkin, Denman, and Urquhart were members of the Balliol hockey team, which Hodgkin captained. Hodgkin and another friend, Kenneth Swan, were part of the short-lived "Romance Society" at Balliol, which met once a fortnight to hear and discuss short stories written by its members; they also played hockey and tennis, and enjoyed Sunday teas at the home of the Smiths. In 1899, Hodgkin was proxime, or runner-up, for the Stanhope essay prize, behind Robert Rait, and in Trinity term obtained first-class honours in the Final School of Modern History.
Hodgkin took a free year upon leaving Balliol. During the year he wrote a biography of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, which was published in Rait's 1902 book Five Stuart Princesses. He also spent time studying German in Dresden.
Second Boer War Despite his Quaker roots, Hodgkin supported the Second Boer War, volunteering as a lieutenant with the 1st V.B. Northumberland Fusiliers from 1900 to 1906. That year, he wrote to the Quaker magazine The Friend, saying many members of the movement—known as the Society of Friends—shared his views but hid behind the Quakers' pacifist stance, "bringing on the Society the shadow of hypocrisy". His father also supported the war, rankling other Quakers, and causing John Wilhelm Rowntree to write to Rufus Jones in indignation, saying "[y]ou would hardly believe your eyes if you came over here. Thos. Hodgkin's son a Lieutenant, though still a nominal Quaker, heads a procession to burn Kruger in effigy, T. Hodgkin makes the speech and Lily [Lucy?] Hodgkin lights the faggots ... the spirit of war, stalks the land naked, unashamed & our leading Quaker gives his benediction!" Not all agreed; Caroline Stephen wrote to Robert Hodgkin's mother that there was "much of nobleness ... much that appeals to all one's best feelings" in what he had done. Hodgkin was ultimately forced to leave the Society of Friends in 1903 because of his military service in the Second Boer War. The severance was "a blow to him and to all of us", his sister later wrote, since he had been "a loyal if not an enthusiastic Friend" since his time at Leighton Park.
Career After graduating, Hodgkin competed unsuccessfully for various prize fellowships, and was considering a business career when, in 1900, Queen's College, Oxford, offered him a lectureship in modern history. On 19 May 1904, he was elected to a fellowship at the college, and, in 1910, had also become a tutor. Though second in command to Edward Armstrong as a tutor, Hodgkin was responsible for much of the history teaching. George William Rendel, a pupil of Hodgkin from 1908 to 1911, credited Hodgkin with a pedagogical approach that was "suggestive rather than purely instructive", and that would "signpost[] the roads and tracks" and then "leave his pupils to explore for themselves".
First World War Before the First World War, Hodgkin had a small number of students, and would socialise with them over meals, tennis, and walks on Shotover. After Britain declared war in August 1914, Hodgkin began volunteering at a YMCA embarkation camp in the New Forest; over Michaelmas term, he watched the college population gradually dwindle as its members were accepted for service, while awaiting the result of his own application to rejoin the Northumberland Fusiliers. Accepted on 11 December and commissioned a temporary captain in the Seventh Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers, he was posted to the battalion headquarters in Alnwick. Because Hodgkin was deemed medically unfit for foreign service, his four years of service were primarily spent in coastal defence, split nearly equally between Northumberland (1915), Herne Bay in Kent (1916–1917), and (from 1917 to 1919) the War Office in London, where he served in the General Staff for Operations. Other than the first year, he was able to spend the time with his family. Following the war, Hodgkin was a staunch supporter of the League of Nations Union.
Return to Queen's College
Demobilised in January 1919, Hodgkin returned with his family to Oxford, where he found substantially more students and consequentially more demands on his time. Norman Sykes, who joined Queen's as a student in 1920, recalled that "[t]he protracted tenure of the Provostship by Magrath meant the disappearance of hospitality from the Provost's lodgings"; he looked instead to Hodgkin for "generous and hospitable entertainment". Hodgkin's health, meanwhile, never particularly robust, also became more of an issue, with frequent colds and flu during the winters, and recurring migraines that would last for several days. For years, Hodgkin spent vacations working on a history of Anglo-Saxon England; his initial idea had been to write a life of Alfred the Great for the Heroes of the Nations series, but it quickly blossomed into something larger. In October 1927, a month after the death of his daughter, he began a sabbatical year with time spent at the British Museum and at libraries and museums in Germany and Denmark. The sabbatical "spared the ordeal", his wife later wrote, "of living for that first year of our loss in an empty house". Upon his return, in 1928 Hodgkin was appointed university lecturer in modern history, a post he held until 1934. Owing in large part to the sabbatical, Hodgkin finally finished A History of the Anglo-Saxons, his first major work, in 1933; the following two years were spent refining it and collecting illustrations, leading to the book's publication in the spring of 1935.