In 1942 Geoffrey Best won a school prize. Asked which book he would like, the 13-year-old chose the first volume of Winston Churchill’s war speeches. Almost 60 years later he delivered his magnum opus, an impressive and magisterial biography of the leader. Churchill: A Study in Greatness was no hagiography, but in the words of one reviewer, “a masterly summation of the present arguments for and against Winston Churchill” — although the historian Vernon Bogdanor dissented, accusing Best of turning Churchill “into a Boy’s Own Paper hero”.
The book’s subtitle was perhaps an answer to Robert Rhodes James’s 1970 book Churchill: A Study in Failure. Best’s aim was not only to satisfy his own curiosity, but also, as he wrote in the introduction, to satisfy the curiosity of a generation “too young to have been aware of the living Churchill, but old enough to be interested to find out why he has been called with justification the greatest Englishman of the 20th century”. It was a beautifully written book, reflecting how Best’s views of Churchill had changed since he had heard the prime minister’s radio speeches as a boy in 1940. Although it won the International Churchill Society’s Emery Reves prize, the book had the misfortune to be published only five months before Roy Jenkins’s juggernaut rival. Nevertheless, one critic wrote that Best’s work was half the length and twice as good.
While the depth and breadth of Churchill: A Study in Greatness brought Best to a wide audience, it was unusual in coming only after he had retired from an academic career, which itself had been unorthodox in progression and had fallen into three parts: British social and religious history; war and society; and international studies.
Geoffrey Francis Andrew Best was born in Osterley, Middlesex, in 1928, the youngest of four children of Frederick Best, a middle-grade civil servant at the Ministry of Pensions who died when his son was 12, and his wife, Katie (née Bultz), a post office clerk who, having been left without a widow’s pension, took in lodgers. An elder sister died aged four, before he was born, and Geoffrey would be taken to lay flowers on her grave. René, the family’s maid, taught him to ride a bike.
He was educated at St Paul’s School in London, which for part of the war was evacuated to Berkshire. Here his best friend was Tony Jay (obituary, August 25, 2016), the co-author of Yes Minister, with whom he enjoyed listening to the Goons on the wireless. Best recalled how at the time Churchill “was for me Pitt the Elder, Horatio Nelson and Benjamin Disraeli rolled into one”. An accomplished fencer, Best reached the finals of the public schools fencing championship.
His National Service was with the Royal Army Educational Corps at Buchanan Castle near Loch Lomond, teaching illiterate Scottish squaddies to read and write. Serving with him was Edward Greenfield, a fine pianist and later a distinguished music critic. Together they would perform modest concerts of Victorian songs, with Best singing in his finest tenor voice.
After being demobbed, he read history with George Kitson Clark, the Victorian-era historian, at Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he was stimulated by lectures given by German émigrés such as Nikolaus Pevsner on architecture. He stayed on for his doctorate, along the way editing The Cambridge Review, which brought the privilege of a telephone in his rooms. In 1954 he was invited to become a fellow of Trinity Hall, taking up the position after a year at Harvard in the US.
He married Marigold (née Davies), a languages student, in 1955. They had met at a musical event in Cambridge. News of their engagement dismayed some of his bachelor colleagues, including Kitson Clark, who wrote: “Dear Best, I knew this would happen sooner or later and frankly I am sorry it is not later.” Marigold survives him along with their three children: Simon, an entrepreneur and visiting professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh; Edward, who works at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht; and Rosamund, an artist and designer.
Before long Best was tiring of Fenland formalities, particularly the irksome ritual of high table. He joined the University of Edinburgh in 1961, soon becoming professor of history, while Marigold became head of Spanish at St George’s School for Girls. His family recall going on tours of the city’s Victorian areas to help in the preparation of his book, Mid-Victorian Britain (1970), which is still in print.
Sundays were sacrosanct. In the mornings they worshipped at St Columba’s by the castle, followed by a shared breakfast with the congregation. Afternoons involved a bracing walk up Arthur’s Seat or in the Pentlands, although inclement weather would lead them instead to a gallery. His favourite painting was Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.
Best, who liked to wear brightly coloured clothing, had a great appreciation of the absurd, especially the films of Federico Fellini and the Marx Brothers. He enjoyed exploring foreign cuisine, trying out new restaurants — Italian, Chinese, Indian — whenever they opened in Edinburgh. After Idi Amin expelled thousands of south Asians from Uganda in 1972 the family provided refuge for two young Muslims, who instructed the family in their culinary traditions. Every month the Bests hosted a large gathering of students and colleagues that was full of stimulating discussion.
He moved on again in 1974, this time drawn by Asa Briggs (obituary, March 17, 2016) to the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. Although one colleague cautioned that it “would be regarded as a downward move”, Best was by now enthusiastically engaged in the European movement and excited by the prospect of “a university only 20 minutes’ drive away from the Newhaven-Dieppe ferries”. To save money he camped in his office overnight for the first two terms, showering only at weekends.
Best was now studying war and the pursuit of peace, issues that were reflected at home. He and Marigold had long been members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and twice took part in the Aldermaston marches. While he was on sabbatical at the Wilson Center in Washington in 1978-79, Marigold joined a Quaker-organised trip to Cuba. On the journey she had a Damascene conversion to socialism, later subscribing to the magazine Soviet Woman. Back in Britain she began working for the Society of Friends.
Meanwhile, Best had met Pierre Boissier, the leading light of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). This led to Humanity in Warfare (1980), a book that proved equally useful to historians, students of war and international lawyers. The Red Cross became all the more important to him when, in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s cuts to academia made his position at Sussex redundant. The couple moved to London, where he found refuge as an unpaid academic visitor at the London School of Economics, but these were unhappy years marred by ill health.
Respite came from colleagues at the international relations department at Oxford, who entrusted him with the MPhil course on “the politics of the UN and its agencies” based at St Antony’s College. The Bests moved to the city in 1988. He spent the next decade teaching and produced War and Law since 1945 (1994), a significant treatise on international relations that shared the ICRC’s Paul Reuter prize. In 1999 he delivered the Cyril Foster lecture, Oxford’s principal annual guest lecture in international relations, marking the centenary of the Hague peace conference, and four years later he was elected a fellow of the British Academy.
Best’s biography of Churchill was followed in 2005 by Churchill and War, a portrait of the statesman as warrior in which he was not afraid to ask questions about the strategic bombing of Germany. Yet Churchill admirers did not appreciate any questioning of their hero and he recalled how, while speaking at the Churchill Society UK’s annual meeting, “it became clear to me, as my address proceeded, that I was not giving them the sort of thing they wanted; they didn’t want to hear of faults or failures”. He left Blenheim “determined to keep away from the Churchill fan club in future”.
Geoffrey Best, professor of history, was born on November 20, 1928. He died on January 14, 2018, aged 89
