William Keith Hancock KBE MA (1898 - 1988)

Born 26 Jun 1898 in Fitzroy, Victoria (Australia)

Husband of Theaden Nancie (Brocklebank) Hancock — married 6 Mar 1925 in London, England, United Kingdom

Husband of Marjorie (Eyre) Hancock — married 22 May 1961 in Reid, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Died 13 Aug 1988 at age 90 in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

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Biography

Keith Hancock KBE MA is Notable.

Sir (William) Keith Hancock KBE MA FBA OMNI (26 June 1898 – 13 August 1988), also known as W K Hancock, was a prominent Australian historian and academic. He was an devoted Anglican and a keen admirer of the British Empire.

Formative years

William Keith Hancock was born on 26th June 1898 in Fitzroy, Victoria (Australia). Keith, as he as known so as to differentiate from his similarly-named father, was the youngest of five children of Reverend (later Archdeacon) William Hancock and Elizabeth McCrae. ^[1] The family settled in Bairnsdale when Keith was two years of age; returning to Melbourne eight years later. The town, and rural Australia, made an enduring impression on Keith.

At the age of nine, Keith won the Royal Humane Society's Bronze Medal for rescuing another child from drowning in the Mitchell River.

He was educated at Melbourne's Church of England Grammar School and later the University of Melbourne, where he was resident at Trinity College from 1917, winning the Perry Scholarship, Trinity's most prestigious award. ^[2] Although he had commenced studying for his Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in classics, he switched to history and gained his BA with Honours in 1920. Soon after he took up a temporary lectureship at the University of Western Australia, Perth, where Edward Shann helped to develop his interest in economic history.

As the Australia-at-large Rhodes Scholar for 1921, Keith went to Balliol College, Oxford in 1922. He graduated in 1924 with a BA with first class honours in Modern History. In 1923, he was the first Australian to gain a Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford.

Keith married Theaden Brocklebank on 6th March 1925 in Eccleston Square Congregational Church, London. ^[3]

Academic career

Keith went to Tuscany, Italy, on a walking tour in 1923. Entranced by the landscape, and in particular by the way it had come to absorb a human imprint over many centuries, he chose Italian history for the subject of his first book: Ricasoli and the Risorgimento in Tuscany (1926), which resulted from pondering the authoritarian antecedents to Mussolini. The book was held in high regard when it appeared but was never translated into Italian.

Keith was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Adelaide in 1924, taking up the appointment in 1926. Just 25 years of age when appointed, he was the youngest professor in the British Commonwealth. He retained the appointment until 1933.

He earned his Master of Arts (MA) from Oxford in 1930, having studied by correspondence.

In 1930, Keith published Australia, a book which was well received and highly influential, particularly in criticism of the Australian institutions tariff protection, state socialism and the White Australia policy—which he saw as together working for stagnation. The book is still frequently quoted today.

From 1934 to 1944 Keith was the Professor of History at University of Birmingham. During the Second World War he was also appointed to the War Cabinet Offices. His Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs was published in three volumes from 1937 to 1942. In 1941 he was appointed Supervisor of the United Kingdom Civil Series of the History of the Second World War and was thereafter editor of the series. In 1943, he published Argument of Empire, defending the British Empire. ^[4] During the war Keith also played a role in the Home Guard, serving as a civil defence firewatcher.

Between 1944 and 1949, he returned to Oxford, becoming Chichele Professor of Economic History. In 1949, with Margaret Gowing, Keith wrote The British War Economy, the introductory volume to that series.

In 1949 he left Oxford, taking up an appointment as the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He served as the Professor of British Commonwealth Affairs at the University of London until 1956. During this period he was sent as a government expert to examine constitutional questions in Uganda in 1954, at the height of the Kabaka crisis. At this time he began work on his authoritative biography of the South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, which appeared in two volumes in 1962 and 1968.

Keith was created Knight Bachelor in 1953, partially for his services in writing and editing the histories.

He wrote an auto-biography, Country and Calling in 1954.

Keith returned to Australia in 1957 to take up an appointment as Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU), a position he held until 1961. He was Professor of History at the Institute of Advanced Studies, ANU until his retirement in 1965.

Retirement!

In 1968 Keith was made Emeritus Professor and created the first University Fellow of the ANU. In his honour, a library of science resources at ANU was named after Keith.

He co-founded the Australian Dictionary of Biography in 1958 and was Chairman of the Editorial Board from 1959 to 1965. He was also the inaugural President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 1969 to 1971.

Following Theaden's death in 1960, Keith married again on 22nd May 1961 in the Church of St John the Baptist, Reid, Canberra, to Marjorie Eyre, his secretary and research assistant for the previous fifteen years.

In 1961 he was appointed to the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

In the New Year Honours 1965 Keith was created Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). ^[5]

He published Discovering Monaro in 1972. The book also marked a return to the environmental issues foreshadowed in Australia, and these were to dominate the last years of his life. He actively supported the Botany Bay Project, a study of environmental impact in the Sydney region, and in 1973-75 was a tireless publicist for an unsuccessful campaign to prevent the Postmaster-General’s Department from building a telecommunications tower on Black Mountain, Canberra.

He published a set of autobiographical essays, Professing History, in 1976.

Aged ninety years, he passed away on 13th August 1988 and is buried in Woden Cemetery. He was survived by Marjorie.

Australia's most distinguished historian, nine universities awarded Keith honorary doctorates. Portraits by June Mendoza (1971) and Frances Philip (1972) are held by the ANU; a bust by Alan Jarvis (1952) is at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London.

Sources

1. ↑ Victoria Birth Index #18715/1898; registered at Fitzroy South
2. ↑ Trinity College Scholarships, The Argus, 17 Dec 1916, p5
3. ↑ UK FreeBMD Marriage Index Mar qtr 1925, vol 1a, page 713; registered at St George Hanover Square
4. ↑ Elkins, Caroline. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. Knopf Doubleday, 2022, pp 323-4. ISBN 978-0-593-32008-2
5. ↑ Australian Honours: KBE; accessed 30 Oct 2023

See also

• Davidson, Jim. Hancock, Sir William Keith (1898–1988). Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2007; accessed online 30 Oct 2023.
• Davidson, Jim. A Three-cornered Life: The Historian W.K.Hancock. University of New South Wales Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-74223-126-6.
• Low, D A (ed). Keith Hancock; the Legacies of a Historian. Melbourne University Press, 2001.
• Wikipedia: Keith Hancock; accessed 30 Oct 2023.