HISTORIAN OF WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 90, 13 October 1939, Page 5

HISTORIAN OF WAR

DR. HAROLD TEMPERLEY %

Dr. Harold W. V. Temperley, Unfe versity Professor of Modern History and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, died* recently at the age of 60. ' There was no greater historian of the war than Professor Temperley, sayi the London "Daily Telegraph." Apart \ from editing the History of the Peace Conference in six volumes, he spent (with Dr. G. P. Gooch) 15 years on the 12 volumes of "British Documents oa the Origins of the war." . * In addition he' wrote a large nun> , ber of other bookstall of them dis» , ' tinguished by his passion for exact* tude. He was the son of Ernest Temper* ley, Tutor of Queen's College, Cambridge, and he went to King's College from Sherborne. After securing a double first in the Historical Tripos he was elected a Fellow of Peterhouse. During the Great W.ar s he became a Major, serving with the Fife and i Forfar Yeomanry at the Dardanelles. Then he went to Salonika. For some time he was Assistant and Acting Attache to Serbia. Later he went to the Peace Conference, -carried out a special mission to Montenegro, and in 1921 became British representative ott the Albanian Frontiers Commission. PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE. Th«se duties certainly enabled Pro- - fessor Temperley to live up to the belief he shared with Gibbon that the historian ought to know something of practical a'ffa-irs from : experience as well as from books. His first work; written when he was 26, was a life of George Canning. His next two books yrere published during the war—"Fredxic the,, Great and Kaiser Joseph" ja 1915 and a "History ' > of Serbia" in 1917. His history of the Peace Conference -, occupied him from 1920 to 1924 and [ then he began with Dr. Gooch the ' * monumental British Documents on the Origin of the World War which was ■* completed only last year. * Professor Temperley was honoured by many countries, and in 1933 became ! president of the International Historical Congress, an office he had held for several years. He was a brother of Major-General A. C. Temperley and married in 1913 l Gladys, daughter of the late Mr. J. Bradford. She died in 1923 leaving one son, and in 1929 he married Dorothy Vazeille, daughter of the late Canon Arthur Temperley.