Stuart Wilson 1923 – 2003
Founding Fellow
Stuart Wilson retired 20 years ago, but he will be well remembered by the older generations of alumni, particularly those from the decades following the Second World War. Stuart was one of that stalwart band that carried the Engineering Department through the years when it was much smaller than it has since become, and much less valued in the University than it is now.
Stuart Swinford Wilson was born on 11 August 1923, the son of an electrical engineer, and educated at William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester. He won a scholarship to Brasenose, and read Engineering Science there from 1941 to 1944, leaving with a First. He then spent about sixteen months working at the Admiralty Experimental Works, Haslar, Gosport, mainly on means for sweeping up a new type of naval mine then being laid by the Germans.
But in 1946 he returned to Oxford to teach in the Department, and except for vacation periods in industry and a sabbatical in Australia, remained here until his retirement in 1984. His interests were wide, within the broad field of mechanical engineering, and with a strong practical bias. He was a sailing enthusiast, and designed for the University Yacht Club one of the first fibre-glass sailing dinghies, the 12 ft Alpha, when the wooden Fireflies which the Club had been using were showing structural distress under punishing use by undergraduates at Port Meadow. The Alpha, which was built locally by Bossoms, had some of the faults which might be expected in a pioneering design, but it was a trend-setter, and fibre-glass is now the norm in this application.
In the 1950s the University debated whether its tiny Department of Engineering Science should be abolished or enlarged. It plumped for enlargement, and the result was the Thom Building, completed in 1962/3. Stuart was responsible for the planning of the Heat Engines and Fluid Mechanics laboratories. He also took a lead in the "revolt" by the academic staff when the architect proposed to put some rather pathetic (as was thought) murals on the exterior walls of Lecture Rooms 1 and 2. The University authorities at first backed the architect, but the revolt was ultimately successful, and the murals gave way to the charcoal-coloured bricks that are there today. A few years later Stuart was influential in the founding of the joint school of Engineering and Economics. This was a forerunner of the triple school of Engineering, Economics and Management which we have today.
Stuart Wilson pedalling the "Oxtrike" in 1977
His undergraduate lectures were usually on thermodynamic cycles or heat engines, and had a practical flavour. This field inspired many of his research activities, e.g. small "Rankine-cycle power packs" using high-molecular-weight fluids such as monochloro-benzene, water-injected diesels, combined-cycle power plants and combined-heat-and-power (these last two well before their present vogue). Younger academics in this field have expressed appreciation of his practical engineering advice. He was also very active over many years in the field of "appropriate technology", believing that there were many ways in which good engineering design could significantly improve the quality of life at quite modest cost. He was a particular advocate of the proper use of pedal power in under-developed countries. His improved version of the pedalled rickshaw was frequently seen on the streets of Oxford in the 70s and early 80s. It was unfortunate that it never got into significant production.
He tutored undergraduates from Brasenose (and many other colleges) in the days when a tutor was generally expected to be able to teach two-thirds or more, sometimes all, of the syllabus. Brasenose never elected him to a tutorial fellowship, but he became one of the Founding Fellows of St. Cross, when it and another college (now Wolfson) were founded in the early 60s to tackle the problem of the numerous tenured academics who were not fellows of any college.
He and Elsie, whom he married in 1953, and with whom he spent a very happy 50 years, spent their retirement mainly in Somerset and Dorset, but he was a regular visitor back to Oxford, and a strong supporter of the SOUE. In his last years he had written the typescript of a book, "Small Expectations – a wide-ranging survey of the value of human scale". It reflects a dissatisfaction, which many of us might share, with numerous aspects of modern life arising from urbanisation and centralisation, and from, as he puts it "the separation of the thinking from the doing". It perhaps loses some force by taking on too many targets at once.
Stuart died on 6 October 2003, aged 80. He leaves his widow, Elsie, and a son and two daughters.
David Witt
Ben Pimlott 1945–2004
Honorary Fellow
Ben Pimlott established his reputation as a historian of the British Labour movements, but probably became best known for his highly-acclaimed biography of the Queen, first published in 1996.
By the time he ventured into this, for him, unusual territory, Pimlott was already considered an outstanding biographer. His Hugh Dalton (1985), a life of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Attlee's post-war government, had already won the Whitbread prize for biography, and had been followed by another substantial work, Harold Wilson, in 1992.
As a historian of the Left, and a socialist by conviction, Pimlott's decision to write about the Queen surprised some. Pimlott himself, according to one colleague was "mortified that he might be mocked by his friends".
In fact, Pimlott had a more serious purpose than most royal biographers. The pomp and circumstance, the personalities and the scandals, interested him only in so far as they touched on matters of constitutional importance; believing that the aim of a biographer was not just accuracy, but also "understanding", Pimlott's main aim was to examine the Queen's position and performance in the political process.
The book was more a history of modern monarchy than a straightforward biography of its subject, and it won widespread praise. John Grigg called it "the best all-round study of the Queen so far"; Denis Judd, a biographer of Prince Philip, wrote: "The book is based upon as good a foundation of primary material … as anyone is likely to get, short of interviewing the Queen herself".
Benjamin John Pimlott was born on July 4 1945. His father, John, was a Fabian and a senior civil servant in the Home Office who was once private secretary to Herbert Morrison and helped to establish the polytechnics. John Pimlott was also a social historian who wrote studies of the English at leisure – in 1978 his Englishman's Christmas: a Social History was updated by Ben, who included a moving memoir of his father.
At Worcester College, Oxford, to which he won a scholarship, Pimlott read PPE and took a BPhil in Politics; in 1970 he was offered a Lectureship in history at Newcastle University, where he also took a PhD. In 1975 he was in Lisbon to witness the Portuguese revolution.
At this stage in his life, Pimlott had hopes of a political career. In February 1974 he contested Arundel for Labour; and in October of that year, he stood against Leon Brittan at Cleveland and Whitby, failing to win by 1,500 votes; he stood unsuccessfully in the same constituency in 1979.
Pimlott left Newcastle in 1979 for a two-year research post at the LSE. Then in 1981, he moved to Birkbeck college, London, first as a lecturer (until 1986) and then as reader (1986–1987), before being appointed Professor of Politics and Contemporary History in 1987, a post he held until 1998. At Birkbeck he was a conscientious teacher held in great affection by his students. In 1998 Pimlott was appointed Warden of Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he successfully raised money for new projects.
Ben Pimlott was an unassuming man, noted for his kindness and courtesy. Politically he remained at the centre of the Labour Party, last year defending Tony Blair against the charge of not being sufficiently radical: "He never presented himself as someone who was going to transform society." He was a member of the Fabian Society's executive from 1987, and its chairman in 1993–1994.
He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1993 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996.
Abridged from the Daily Telegraph obituary, 13th April 2004
