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 Arthur Marwick |
Historian who saw the importance of beauty
Arthur Marwick helped found the Open University
HE loved wine, though he drank beer, he loved women, though never married, he loved his football and he loved pontificating in his typically combative Scottish way that provoked a few frights.
But most of all emeritus professor Arthur Marwick, who has died at the age of 70, loved history.
And it was as a pioneer, one who threw out humbug and pomposity in favour of facts, to make the past relevant for today, that he earned his admired reputation as a founding father, in 1969, of Harold Wilson’s brave Open University.
During all those flamboyant years he lived in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead, and was a familiar figure in the village, a pork pie sometimes stuck on top of his bearded, craggy face, to be seen in the Coffee Cup and local pubs.
But it was his books, his exciting original research into subjects where others rarely trod that made Markwick a man of worth as he delved into subjects such as The Nature of History, Britain in the Century of Total
War, Class, Image and Reality, British Society since 1945, and The Sixties.
We may have enjoyed them but they left a heavy legacy of drugs and promiscuity, soulless architecture and political correctness, he pointed out.
Then came his lavish Beauty in History and its sequel, The History of Human Beauty, which was his last published work.
He was struck by the special advantages enjoyed by beautiful people, from the Duke of Marlborough and Byron to David Beckham and Naomi Campbell.
Beauty, he insisted, was as vital as wealth and status, which have always been placed first in a world where power holds sway.
His lifting of the veils resulted in a radical new approach to the Open University courses he devised. “Students of all ages started ‘doing history’ as opposed to ‘being done’ by it,” as one of his admiring colleagues says. “His students’ interests were paramount.”
And Marwick himself, the seeker of primary truth, declared: “I am a proponent of the view that history should be based on evidence, logic and clear use of language, and, therefore, an opponent of Marxism, Postmodernism and all history based on unsubstantiated theory or comfy convention.”
Arthur Marwick was educated at George Heriot’s School, Edinburgh, at Edinburgh University and then at Balliol, Oxford.
He was assistant lecturer at Aberdeen University before returning to Edinburgh University, where he won the hearts of activist students in protest and won himself a place on TV programmes.
It was to the Open University that he then devoted himself, as its first Professor of History, retiring in 2001.
He was very much its public face as it grew in stature and where his source-based, common sense methods, alongside his commitment to history’s social purpose, played a role in the teaching of history generally.
He never married but admitted to two children from his partners, and to becoming a grandfather, during his hectic years in Hampstead.
“My great line is that beauty, natural physical beauty, is the greatest aphrodisiac of all,” he told me. And he confessed that he fancied Natasha Kaplinsky.
Gerald Isaaman |
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