Harold Temperley

For his son the mathematical physicist, see Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley.

Harold William Vazeille Temperley (20 April 1879 – 11 July 1939) was a British historian, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge from 1931, and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Overview

Temperley's field was modern diplomatic history, and he was heavily involved as editor in the publication of the British Government's official version of the diplomatic history of the early twentieth century. He also wrote on George Canning and Eastern European history.

He was educated at Sherborne School and latterly at first King's College, Cambridge and Peterhouse, Cambridge.[1]

In World War I he served in the British Army at Gallipoli, and was then seconded to the War Office, working on intelligence and policy in the Balkans. His History of Serbia was published in 1917.

He attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and later worked on an official history of it, on a scheme devised by George Louis Beer and Lord Eustace Percy. He was British representative on the Albanian boundary commission; and was an advisor in 1921 to Arthur Balfour at the League of Nations.

In the compilation of the British Documents on the Origins of the War he collaborated with George Peabody Gooch, (1873-1968), another diplomatic historian and a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1910. Gooch had spoken out against British policy in the Second Boer War, and was also a historian of Germany; his appointment was designed to give the project a credible independence.

In the event, Temperley and Gooch were constrained financially, and in the use of documents subject to a 'fifty year rule' limitation on their release. They had to employ tactical resignation threats, to get their own way. Lillian Margery Penson (1896-1963) was involved in this, and a later project on the Blue Books.

In 1923 Temperley founded The Cambridge Historical Journal at Cambridge U.[2]

The historian Herbert Butterfield was a student of Temperley. He commented later in life on how the ageing Temperley and Charles Webster, an equally aged historian, dominated the college Combination Room, "like booming giants, cumbersome and dangerous to crockery, bulging with warmth and good feeling, yet capable of overbearingness - terrible lions if you trod on their tales [sic]".[3]

Works

See also

Notes

  1. "Temperley, Harold William Vazeille (TMRY898HW)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  2. http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/historians/temperley_harold.html
  3. Temperley, Harold (1966). "Introduction". The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822-1827. Butterfield, Herbert. London: Frank Cass & Co. p. xiii-xiv.

References

Academic offices
Preceded by
Sir William Birdwood
Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge
1938–1939
Succeeded by
Paul Cairn Vellacott
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