Professor Victor Kiernan

Published on Thursday 19 February 2009 21:03

Historian

Born: 4 September, 1913, in Lancashire.

Died: 17 February, 2009, in Stow, Borders, aged 95.

VICTOR Gordon Kiernan, Edinburgh University's most distinguished Marxist historian, will be remembered by his Edinburgh students and colleagues as a devoted scholar, a kindly teacher, an austere lecturer, an inspirational companion and a passionate anti-imperialist.

He came to the University of Edinburgh in 1948 and became a quiet but firm guide aiming to emancipate Scotland from its own imperial nostalgia while constantly working for the conservation of human memories.

He collaborated with his history department's film The Spanish Civil War – starring in it, somewhat to his surprise – and, chiefly by his own friendships across the globe, helped show the place of the war in the revolt against empire. Thanks to him reminiscences of Scots in the International Brigade such as Councillor Don Renton, John Dunlop and George Watters were preserved on tape and film.

He was born into a Lancashire congregational family and took affectionate amusement from its worship of empire embodied in his own names – Edward, after Edward VII (recently dead when he was born, and a name he dropped), Victor, after the old queen, and Gordon, after the great imperial martyr Gordon of Khartoum.

He studied at Manchester Grammar School, then at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1921-38, when, as a junior fellow, he went to India and taught there at a Sikh school and at Aitchison College in Lahore.

Kiernan had joined the Communist Party in 1934 and left it in 1959, chiefly in disgust at the suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, after which, he said: "I waited in hopes the party might improve. It didn't."

But as his colleague and fellow enthusiast for the peoples under colonial rule, George Shepperson, said on his death, Kiernan's love of literature – he could recite the whole of Paradise Lost – lifted him above the run of Marxist intellectuals, however eminent.

His clear exposure of imperial self-delusion was strengthened by his appreciation of authorial intent in its strengths as well as its limitations. At the age of 80 he produced Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen, which W W Robson, the then (very non-Marxist) Edinburgh professor of English literature, considered the best book on Shakespeare of his time. A second volume, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, followed in 1996.

Kiernan delighted in showing the historical value of literary texts, such as in a seminal essay on 16th and 17th-century mercenaries remarking that Hamlet's uncle was but one of many to call for his Swiss guards at moments of personal danger.

He showed the variety of perspectives needed to understand the mind of ruling elites by works on The Duel in European History (1988) and A History of Tobacco (1991). Perhaps his greatest scholarly impact on a large audience was made in The Lords of Human Kind – European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (1969), the title lifted appropriately from the poem The Traveller (1765) by an Edinburgh University student, Oliver Goldsmith.

Kiernan was always one to encourage Edinburgh student scholarship, and gave the longest, deepest and most instructive of all reviews of the student-published Red Paper on Scotland, edited by one of his department's most remarkable doctoral students, Gordon Brown, who went on to become Prime Minister.

He was most interested in religion while retaining the scepticism of his youth, and admitted to pride in holding the surname of a saint – at whose grave in Ireland he insisted he was photographed – but his distaste for bullying and acrimony was an example from which other Marxists, and saints, had a great deaI to learn.

His ideological origins in the 1930s could not anchor him in an Old Left: he was always ready to learn from and delighted to talk with scholars from any age and he spoke to everybody as to a fellow-scholar.

His learning flowed far beyond what any obituary could capture, from his first translations of poetry from Urdu; from his first book, British Diplomacy in China 1880-1885 (1939); from his The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (1966); from his America: the New Imperialism (1978), and anyone who might have expected that last book to be a predictable Marxist indictment would be rudely awakened by its fascinating discussion of the historical significance of the interplanetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan celebrity.

As a Marxist he was exceptional in rejection of jargon; his English, like his history, was classical in manner and his perspective was Asian as well as Scottish (insisting his English colleagues never write "English" where they should have said "British", a necessary corrective in the 1950s).

He was married twice, to the Indian dancer Shanta Gandhi from 1938-46, and to the Canadian scholar Heather Massey from 1984 until his death.

OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS