Peter Jupp, historian and teacher. Lecturer and Reader in Modern History 1964-1993, Professor of British History 1993-2005, Emeritus Professor 2005-6. Died 14 September 2006.
Peter Jupp: an appreciation For many people, both inside and outside the University, the name of Peter Jupp was synonymous with History at Queen’s. Peter spent almost his entire working life here. Originally appointed as a Lecturer in Modern History in 1964, he was advanced to a chair of British History in 1993, and after his retirement in 2005 was made Emeritus Professor, a distinction which gave him great pleasure. His death, on 14 September, after a short but valiant fight against a cruel illness, was a shattering loss to family and friends, to colleagues at Queen’s, and to the wider community of historians of modern Britain and Ireland, of which he was a distinguished member.
Pete, as he preferred to be called, had come to Queen’s from Reading, having taken his Ph.D. under the guidance of the formidable Arthur Aspinall, a specialist in the history of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain with a penchant for studying ‘high’ politics — courts and cabinets — and for collecting and editing historical texts. Aspinall’s interests were reflected in some of Pete’s enduring scholarly preoccupations: he was himself a scrupulous practitioner of the traditional virtues of documentary research, and followed ‘paper trails’ to country houses and record offices in the same way that Aspinall had done. Some of his most important historical writing focused on the evolution of government policy, notably his monumental biography of Lord Grenville (1985), and the closely argued British Politics on the Eve of Reform … 1828–30 (1998), which grew out of the special subject he taught to History finalists. However —influenced perhaps by the powerful personality of his first professor at Queen’s, Michael Roberts — he transcended narrower concerns and engaged with the wider political worlds of Britain and Ireland, writing extensively about parliamentary elections, and the workings of public opinion. His final book, The Governing of Britain, 1688–1848, published only last summer, was an attempt to draw together ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics. Though it was not a conscious summation of his life’s work — many other projects were lined up for what we all hoped would be a long and productive retirement — this book was in a sense an appropriate place for him to have stopped writing, since it was both deeply traditional in its focus, and at the same time innovative in methodology and in tune with current trends in the historiography of the ‘long eighteenth century’.
Probably the most persistent and endearing qualities that Pete displayed as a historian and a teacher were enthusiasm and open-mindedness. For someone who usually had strong opinions to express — on anything from politics to jazz, from cars to crime writing, from fly-fishing to the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur — he was surprisingly undogmatic, willing to listen, to be persuaded, and to take up new ideas. Students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, found this attitude stimulating. Colleagues, within and beyond Queen’s, were equally enthused, and made to feel that their particular contribution to scholarship was the most important thing that was going on at that moment. Pete was a man quite without intellectual pride, or the kind of jealousy of his own achievements that too frequently disfigures great scholars. Leaving aside a healthy disrespect for bureaucratic necessities, he was in many respects a model teacher: a lively and authoritative lecturer, a patient and conscientious tutor, with a real concern for the well-being of his students, and a research supervisor who encouraged students to stand on their own feet and gave them the confidence to do so.
Pete’s contribution to the life of this University for over forty years was truly remarkable: inside and outside the classroom. He gave unstinting support to student-organised events, leading field trips, even deejaying at History student formals; was a mainstay of the music scene at Queen’s, especially in the promotion of jazz; was a great supporter of the Bookshop; in short, he was an advocate of everything that has traditionally made up the life of a university. Above all, perhaps, he was someone who still cherished the ideal of a university as a community of scholars, and a department as a group of colleagues rather than a regiment of ‘staff’ to be line-managed. His retirement — after a final year in which he had, true to form, demanded to be ‘loaded up’ with teaching — was disappointingly low key for the host of friends and admirers who had hoped to be able to pay him their respects on a formal occasion. He refused a farewell celebration in the Great Hall, on the grounds that he did not wish to oblige people to pay to have dinner with him, but was pleased as well as embarrassed to be ambushed by colleagues at a departmental leaving party. Of course, we all assumed that he would be around for years to come, and his declared intention to play a part in the life of the School of History and Anthropology was manifest in the first, and, as it turned out, only, year of his retirement by his continued attendance at seminars and lectures, the familiar bursts of laughter in offices and corridors, the further multiplication of Jupp stories — usually told against himself. His final illness came as a sudden and savage blow. The memorial gathering that Belinda and his family had organised, was a unique event, packing the Great Hall, with those at the back standing four deep. Friends and admirers had come from far and wide, across Britain and Ireland. Memories were shared. Inevitably, there was laughter, for Pete brought a vast amount of warmth and humour into life, and it is for his personality as much as his achievements that he will be remembered by those of us who had the privilege to know him. Peter Jupp, historian and teacher. Lecturer and Reader in Modern History, QUB, 1964-93, Professor of British History 1993-2005, Emeritus Professor 2005-6. Died 14 September 2006.
A further obituary can also be found on the Daily Telegraph website by clicking here.
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