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The Lord Morgan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal | |
| Assumed office 12 June 2000 Life Peerage | |
| Vice-Chancellor of theUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth | |
| In office 1989–1995 | |
| Preceded by | Gareth Owen |
| Succeeded by | Derec Llwyd Morgan |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1934-05-16)16 May 1934 (age 91) |
| Nationality | Welsh |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouses | |
| Alma mater | Oriel College, Oxford |
| Occupation | Historian |
Kenneth Owen Morgan, Baron Morgan,FRHistS FBA FLSW (born 16 May 1934) is aWelsh historian and author, known especially for his writings onmodernBritish history and politics and onWelsh history. He is a regular reviewer and broadcaster on radio and television. He has been an influential intellectual resource in theLabour Party.
He grew up in rural Wales and attended Aberdovey Council School in rural Wales,University College School in Hampstead (in London), andOriel College, Oxford. The first two appealed to him. As for Oxford he recalled, "The disagreeable nature of the undergraduates was matched by the mediocrity of the tutors. They were astonishingly poor ... All in all, Oriel seemed more like a backwoods seminary of mid-Victorian days than a modern educational institution."[1] He had better luck outside his insular college. "On the intellectual side, I attended a variety of lectures which seemed to me brilliant and what I really needed in Oxford, by people likeAsa Briggs,Christopher Hill,Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the incomparable and deeply entertainingAlan Taylor."[2] He returned to Oxford for doctoral work, specializing in the role of Wales in British politics in the late 19th century, with a focus onGladstone. He greatly enjoyed graduate work, taking his DPhil in 1958.
He taught atUniversity of Wales Swansea from 1958 to 1966 and held anACLS Fellowship atColumbia University, New York in 1962–1963, also teaching there in 1965. He was aFellow ofQueen's College, Oxford, from 1966 to 1989 and served as Vice-Chancellor of theUniversity of Wales from 1989 to 1995. In this capacity, he served as a Welsh Supernumerary Fellow ofJesus College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1992. He was principal of theUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth in the 1990s.
In 1983 he was elected Fellow of theBritish Academy and in 1992 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, and in 2002 of Oriel College. He became aDruid of theGorsedd of Bards in 2008 and in 2009 received the gold medal from theHonourable Society of Cymmrodorion for lifetime achievement. He is also a Founding Fellow of theLearned Society of Wales.[3]
Morgan is a member of theLabour Party, and on 12 June 2000 he was made alife peer asBaron Morgan, ofAberdyfi in the County ofGwynedd.[4] He has served on theLords Select Committee on the Constitution.[5]
He was married to the historian and criminologist Jane Morgan, who died in 1992; they had two children together, David and Katherine. In 2009 he married Elizabeth Gibson, senior lecturer in law at the universities ofTours andBordeaux before she became professor in British studies and law at the university of Poitiers.[6] They have five grandchildren.
Kenneth Morgan is the author of many works, such asThe People's Peace, his notable history ofpostwar Britain, and has completed biographies of many politicians, includingDavid Lloyd George,Keir Hardie,James Callaghan, andMichael Foot. He is theeditor of the best-sellingThe Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, to which he contributed the two final chapters (1914–2000 and 2000–10), and which has sold close on a million copies.
He also edited theWelsh History Review from 1961 to 2003.Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922, dealt with the enlarged franchise, the campaign fordisestablishment,Home Rule legislation (mainly with regard toIreland) and contrasting attitudes to an imminent World War.Freedom or Sacrilege dealt with contrasting stances on the issue ofWelsh churchdisestablishment but where he came down in favour of the freedom obtained under the latter.
In the 1950s to 1970s,labour history was redefined and expanded in focus by a number of historians, amongst whom the most prominent and influential figures wereE. P. Thompson andEric Hobsbawm. The motivation came from currentleft-wing politics in Britain and the United States and reached red-hot intensity. Morgan was a more traditional liberal historian who followed the new trends and explains their dynamic:
the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions’winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within theLabour Party. The new history was often strongly Marxist, which fed through the work of brilliant evangelists likeRaphael Samuel into theNew Left Review, a famous journal likePast and Present, the Society of Labour History and the work of a large number of younger scholars engaged in the field. Non-scholars likeTony Benn joined in. The new influence of Marxism upon Labour studies came to affect the study of history as a whole.[7]
Morgan sees benefits:
In many ways, this was highly beneficial: it encouraged the study of the dynamics of social history rather than a narrow formal institutional view of labour and the history of the Labour Party; it sought to place the experience of working people within a wider technical and ideological context; it encouraged a more adventurous range of sources,‘history from below’ so-called, and rescued them from what Thompson memorably called the ‘condescension of posterity’; it brought the idea of class centre-stage in the treatment of working-class history, where I had always felt it belonged; it shed new light on the poor and dispossessed for whom the source materials were far more scrappy than those for the bourgeoisie, and made original use of popular evidence like oral history, not much used before.[8]
Morgan tells of the downside as well:
But the Marxist – or sometimes Trotskyist – emphasis in Labour studies was too often doctrinaire and intolerant of non-Marxist dissent–it was also too often plain wrong, distorting the evidence within a narrow doctrinaire framework. I felt it incumbent upon me to help rescue it. But this was not always fun. I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff...when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues.[8]
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Principal, then Vice-Chancellor of theUniversity of Wales Aberystwyth 1989–1995 | Succeeded by |
| Orders of precedence in the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by | Gentlemen Baron Morgan | Followed by |
