On returning to Oxford from
holiday, I was very saddened indeed to receive an email from Lincoln College stating that Paul Langford, former rector and my undergraduate tutor had died.
Paul Langford was a highly distinguished historian of eighteenth-century
England, a Fellow of Lincoln College from 1969, and a Fellow of the British
Academy, well known in particular for his book A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (which I was
spectacularly impressed, as a student, to find in paperback in airport
bookshops).
I first met
Paul Langford on an exceptionally bitter winter evening in 1994, in his room in
Lincoln College, for my undergraduate admissions interview. There was a ticking
clock, an extraordinary panelled Oxford interior, and four imposing figures
seated in a row, one of them smartly dressed, serious but friendly, whose leg
tapped away in rhythm to my answers. I completely lost my thread half-way
through one answer, and was seized with terror that all hopes of an Oxford place
had gone. Paul Langford then smiled and said: ‘To be honest, I can’t remember
my question either’, and the entire situation seemed much more human, and
retrievable.
There were
many tutorials in that panelled room, with that same intimidating clock,
reading out essays on eighteenth-century Europe. Paul Langford was a quiet but
intense presence in a room: a tutor who was not afraid of silences in which you
were made to sit and think. He was genuinely kind to
his undergraduates: tactfully helping us to arrange entertainment in college
for speakers we’d invited down from Westminster, treating us to a splendid
post-Finals lunch at his home in Berkshire. Towards the end of my degree, Paul
Langford talked about my plans to do research. I explained that I was
interested in working on Polish-English ties in the 18C, or (more tentatively)
on Renaissance Poland. He gave me then some of the best advice I’ve
had, which I now often repeat to my own students: study what you are absolutely
most passionate about. He seemed sure that, even at the very earliest stages of
research planning, everyone knew deep down what that really was.
I shall
very much miss seeing Professor Langford walking through the streets of Oxford,
carrying off his distinctive mixture of gravity and joviality, immaculately
attired, often looking (to my mind) just a little bit like the
eighteenth-century squires he wrote about. I shall miss the knowledge, which I
and his fellow students had for so many years after leaving Lincoln, that
whenever we walked down Turl Street, he was somewhere behind those walls, such
an intrinsic part of the college’s life and identity. Paul Langford, like
Vivian Green (also former History tutor and former rector), is a scholar who
made a profound mark on both Lincoln College and on his own historical field. And,
like a true Oxford tutor, Paul Langford touched the lives of generations of
students in so many ways, that even the ablest historian would struggle
adequately to record them.
