Asa Briggs

Asa Briggs died on 15 March, aged 94, leaving a wife and four children. What a pity that he did not live quite long enough to become the first leading historian to reach 100. But he failed at little else that mattered.

He was an historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so notable that some enthusiastic younger historians have now dubbed the long nineteenth century as ‘the age of Asa’. A stocky figure behind the noticeable glasses, during the second half of the twentieth century Briggs became one of our best-known historians, at least by name. Born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1921, the son of an engineer, he retained throughout his long life a mild Yorkshire accent, more pleasing because it was gentle and usually accompanied by a smile. Aged only 16 when he went to Cambridge, where he secured a double first, at the same time he took an external first-class degree from LSE. Amazing.
He was then conscripted into the army, soon to be seconded to Bletchley Park as a code-breaker. He wrote about his secret war-work only in old age.

In 1945 he might have stood as a Labour candidate...