Professor Frank Thistlethwaite

Frank Thistlethwaite, historian and university administrator: born Burnley, Lancashire 24 July 1915; Fellow, St John's College, Cambridge 1945-61, Honorary Fellow 1974-2003; University Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics and Politics, Cambridge University 1949-61; Chairman, British Association for American Studies 1955-59; Vice-Chancellor, University of East Anglia 1961-80, Emeritus Professor 1980-2003; CBE 1979; President, Friends of Cambridge University Library 1983-95; married 1940 Jane Hosford (died 1992; one son, three daughters, and one son deceased); died Cambridge 17 February 2003.

When in April last year my wife, Kathleen, and I went to see Frank Thistlethwaite in his last home, overlooking Jesus Green in Cambridge, he was purring with pleasure. In his hand was the newly published copy of The History of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, by Michael Sanderson. In 1961 Thistlethwaite was the founding Vice-Chancellor of the new university and his period in office had, according to Sanderson,

finished on a buoyant note according to various indicators. Students had increased from 2,358 to 4,114 over the decade. The quantity and quality of applicants to UEA rose sharply in the later years. Even the figures for UEA graduate unemployment improved from the middle to the end of the decade. The Vice-Chancellor was leaving the university in good heart. The Public Orator, Dr Randall Burke, praised the Vice-Chancellor for the alliance of tradition and innovation which had been the hallmark of the distinctive contribution Frank Thistle-thwaite made to the intellectual and academic life in this country.

Thistlethwaite considered himself extremely lucky in that Charles Wilson, then the Vice-Chancellor of Leicester (and later of Glasgow), and Chairman of the Academic Planning Board appointed by the University Grants Committee in 1960 for the establishment of the University of East Anglia, not only chose him, but backed him throughout all the complex planning stages of a new university. Particular encouragement came from Cambridge dons such as Noel Annan.

Frank Thistlethwaite was born in Burnley, Lancashire, in 1915. The town of his childhood was a large cotton manufacturing town of nearly 100,000 people, with 90 spinning and weaving mills, and print works making cotton cloth. He recalled that all those tall mill chimneys belched coal-smoke into the sky and the air was what today would be called heavily polluted: it was rare to have a clear view across the valley to Pendle Hill and on dank winter afternoons the yellow fog set in early. The waters of the Leeds and Liverpool canal and the rivers Brun and Calder, which wound their various ways through the town, were murky and brown with effluents. But, for the Thistlethwaite family, at the top of Albion Street there was always an escape to an expanse of greeny brown moor, where the air was fresh and the sky clear.

His family, who had managerial positions in the cotton industry and were Quakers, sent the young Frank away from Burnley to Bootham School in York where, he recalled,

The majority of the boys came from Quaker families: there were Rowntrees, Cadburys, Bewleys, a Wallis, a Sturge and others with famous Quaker names; and most of the rest came from comparable middle-class mercantile or professional backgrounds in the North or Scotland.

The exceptions tended to be sons of parents who admired Friends' education, like the young Branson whose father was a High Court judge (and who in turn was to father Richard, the pop/ airline tycoon) or the two Sandelsons, whose father was a prominent Jewish solicitor in Leeds (the fact that they did not resent being called Ikey and Mo reflected our complete innocence of anti-Semitism) or Kenneth Harrison, son of the Precentor of York Minster and the great authority on medieval glass.

The nonconformist spirituality was to shape many of Thistlethwaite's later attitudes at the University of East Anglia.

York had Thistlethwaite in thrall. For someone with historical imagination, but coming from industrial Burnley, to be able to walk out of the school, through Bootham Bar, into the medieval city any day of the week was a privilege. In those pre-tourist times, Thistlethwaite would wander along Petergate, Stonegate and the Shambles. Little surprise that he won an Exhibition to St John's College, Cambridge, and scored a Double First in both the History and English Tripos.

All of us may be especially fortunate in finding a mentor. Thistlethwaite told me that he could never exaggerate his personal and intellectual debt to Ernest Alfred Benians, the colonial historian, who in 1933 had become the legendary Master of John's.

After Thistlethwaite had worked as head of the press department at the British Press Service in New York (1940-41), a year in the RAF as a radar plotter at Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire and secondment to the Joint-American Secretariat of the War Cabinet, where he came into contact with American heavyweights such as the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jnr, it was Benians who snatched his pupil back to St John's to be a tutor and lecturer in history.

Thistlethwaite went on to occupy virtually every position in the college, notably Steward and Tutor, and yet found time to make many contributions to the study and teaching of American history and was secretary of the first Fulbright Conference, inaugurating the system of Fulbright students. In my second year as a Cambridge undergraduate, I attended both the lectures of the amusing, brilliant Denis Brogan and the authoritative Frank Thistlethwaite; it was worth listening to the two of them as they complemented one another.

Peter Wordie, son of J.M. Wordie, senior tutor and subsequently Master of St John's, described Thistle-thwaite as a stalwart Johnian, one of the workhorses of the college. And Wordie's fellow supervisee the late Giles Shaw, Minister of State at the Home Office and for Energy during the 1984 miners' strike, regarded Thistlethwaite as both a superb teacher and a kindly man.

Thistlethwaite was a prolific writer. His first book, The Great Experiment: an introduction to the history of the American people (1955), was translated into 14 languages. He was rewarded with the position of Visiting Professor of American Civilization in the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. He always found time to write to those whom he had taught and I remember a long letter in his beautifully neat handwriting describing the attitude on campus towards the British/French/Israeli adventure against Suez. At this time, and throughout his life until she died in 1992, he was superbly supported by his wife, Jane Hosford.

As Chairman of the British Association for American Studies in 1955-59, and as a member of the Committee of Management of the Institute of US Studies at London University, 1966-80, Thistlethwaite played a huge part in the development of the understanding of American history, which hitherto had been a Cinderella subject. He developed lifelong American contacts, in particular with the Huntington Library in California and the University of Minnesota.

His colleagues regarded him as a thoroughly persuasive and charming committee man. He served as a Marshall Aid Commemoration Commissioner from 1964 to 1980, on the Education (Fulbright) Commission, 1964-79, and on the European Advisory Council of the Salzburg Seminar on American Studies, based at Max Reinhardt's Schloss Leopoldskron, 1974-80.

Thistlethwaite gave valuable service to developing countries and in the 20 years from 1965 served on the Provisional Councils which set up the universities of Zambia, Malawi and Mauritius. His experience in Cambridge and Norwich, along with his membership from 1969 to 1974 of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Open University, proved indispensable.

Two of his books are particularly appealing: The Dorset Pilgrims (1989), in which he etched the story of West Country pilgrims who went to New England in the 17th century, following them family by family, his wife's family the Hosfords being prominent; and, written when over 80 and after the death of his wife, A Lancashire Family Inheritance (1996) – a wonderful picture of his East Lancashire boyhood.

Of notable interest and unusually for an academic, in 1985 Thistle-thwaite was admitted as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. This was particularly appropriate for the vice-chancellor of a university which had commissioned such notable figures as Sir Bernard Feilden, Sir Denys Lasdun and Sir Norman Foster before they had reached the apogee of their careers.

Baroness Boothroyd, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, told me how she had visited Thistlethwaite only a fortnight ago and found that, although he needed a mechanical contraption to get up to the first floor of his house, he enjoyed total recall. Being a nonagenarian and somewhat incapacitated did not inhibit him from worldwide travel, often to see former students. My last contact with him was a phone call before Christmas when he expressed trenchant concern about the increasing difficulties encountered by students from developing countries coming to Britain for their higher education. He never lost the gratitude of thousands of pupils and academic colleagues.

Let the last word go to Dr Ian Gibson, now MP for Norwich North and Chairman of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, who was a lecturer, senior lecturer and Dean of the School of Biological Sciences in UEA:

Frank Thistlethwaite was my first Vice-Chancellor at a time in the 1960s when the new universities were flexing their muscles. He was a champion for democracy, fair play, and our university system today would surely benefit from his vision.

Tam Dalyell