College Record 2014

chaired the University’s committee on admissions in 1962. Brock brought to
Oxford’s admissions debate two of the administrator’s skills: a meticulous pursuit
of relevant empirical detail, and a faith that its accumulation would generate the
consensus that was so central to Brock family traditions. He detected in himself
a ‘habitual tendency to discover that everybody is quite right’: this ‘was, and is,
my temper’. He was later a founder member of the Social Democratic Party, and
was unobtrusively central to Roy Jenkins’s successful campaign in 1987 to succeed
Harold Macmillan as the University’s Chancellor. These empirical and consensual
features – accuracy, balance, perspective, lucidity, open-mindedness – were also
integral to the fine historian that he was.
Thus equipped, Brock set out to buttress useful institutions and to challenge those
that he thought redundant. Cambridge preceded Oxford in reducing language
requirements at admission, and Brock was alert to Cambridge’s competition, but
his concerns were wider: he thought his researches would tempt Oxford into
more meritocratic recruitment. Powering his reforming and researching impulse
was an intense institutional loyalty, especially to his family. Much-loved uncles
and aunts in this extended family had regularly visited his parents on Sundays:
‘I was frightfully lucky in my aunts and uncles altogether’, he told me, especially
in his headmistress aunt Dame Dorothy Brock and in his publisher uncle Percy
Hodder-Williams. Brock was also loyal to his school, his World War II regiment
(the Middlesex), his successive Oxford colleges, and his university. Convinced that
one must reform in order to preserve, he was in short a nineteenth-century British
Whig, and when Oxford momentarily lost its balance in 1985 he was unashamed
in voting for Thatcher’s honorary degree: ‘I did so rather publicly’, he recalled in
1988, ‘sitting behind the Vice-Chancellor. I’d do it again’. He was a Whig, too, in his
zeal for an extended participation which would stabilize authority by broadening
its base – not a stance then inevitable among seasoned University administrators.
At both his graduate colleges, Wolfson and Nuffield, he successfully pursued a
genuine internal democracy.
Brock was a gifted tutor, uniting his mother’s intuitive qualities with his civil-servant
father’s calm rationality and balance. In a small college like Corpus before ‘history’
and ‘politics’ were mistakenly prised apart after the 1960s, a single tutor taught
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