Obituary

Robert Arthur Humphreys (1907-1999)

Robert Arthur (Robin) Humphreys, was the first professor of Latin American history and the founder of Latin American studies in the United Kingdom. As a scholar, teacher, and administrator, he set the standards which gained for the subject academic status and funding. He was born on 6 June 1907 in Lincoln and attended Lincoln School. From there he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1932, two years after being a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at the University of Michigan, he was appointed as assistant lecturer in American history
at University College London. He was soon regarded as a scholar of high promise and, using the concept of American history in its widest sense, began to introduce Latin America into his teaching. In 1939 he was invited to join the Foreign Office in research capacity. There he met Elisabeth Pares and they married in 1946. Her family became his, and he had a special regard for Richard Pares, whose intellectual powers he never ceased to admire.

On his return to University College after the war, he was promoted to reader and in 1948 became the first professor of Latin American history in the College, and indeed in the United Kingdom. While he was opening up new terrain in the teaching of history, he was also active in its administration as head of the Department of History in College and chairman of the Board of Studies in History in the University. In 1965, when the University of London decided to establish an Institute of Latin American Studies, he was the obvious choice as its first director. His own intellectual standing enabled him to advance Latin American studies into the mainstream of academic disciplines. He held some of the main offices in the world of learning, crowned by his period as president of the Royal Historical Society at a time when it had to take fundamental decisions about its future. It was his skill and wisdom that made possible the smooth transfer of the Society from rooms in Chelsea to its present accommodation at University College. His achievements were widely recognized. He was appointed O.B.E. in 1946, became a corresponding member of numerous learned academies in Latin America, and was awarded honorary doctorates in several universities in the United Kingdom. And on a visit to Venezuela an aircraft, not a mere taxi, was placed at his disposal.

As a historian, Robin Humphreys earned international esteem, evident not only in the many calls upon his services in research and bibliographical projects but also in a wide range of academic contacts in Europe and in the Americas, where he had a particular friendship with Lewis Hanke and a warm memory of Eugenio Pereira Salas. His writings are marked by original scholarship allied to a rare elegance of style, qualities which have made his studies on the independence of South America, on British diplomacy in Central America, and on the evolution of modern Latin American works of art as well as learning. His powers of presentation were also deployed in a number of distinguished lectures, the Creighton Lecture at the University of London, the Raleigh Lecture at the British Academy, and a series of presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society; these and other occasional papers--eventually collected under the title Tradition and Revolt in Latin America (1969)--are models of the historian's craft. His final work of history, Latin America and
the Second World War (2 vols), written and published during his retirement (1981-82), is fruit of his personal experience of public policy in the Foreign Office, his early access to the primary documentation, and his awareness of Anglo-American rivalry as well as of Latin American interests. He once published an article in the HAHR 38 (1958), with the unpromising title "Four
Bibliographical Tools Needed for Latin American History," but, as so often with Robin, it was a prime example of forward planning. He himself fashioned some of the principal tools, Latin America: A Guide to the Literature in English (1958...