College Record 2014

history in two schools: Modern History and PPE. Brock’s tutorials brimmed with
enthusiasm and encouragement, and in his nineties grateful pupils funded in his
honour Corpus’s M.G. Brock Junior Research Fellowship in modern British history.
Clever undergraduates affectionately and delightedly mimicked Brock’s emphatic
way of speaking, which at times verged on self parody. His lectures in the late
1950s on parliamentary reform sounded authoritative and incisive, and attracted
a large following. In Corpus hall his strong Oxford Union-trained carrying voice
needed no microphone. In seminars his pupils were an orchestra whose conductor
brought out the best in his performers by honing their intellects with timely and
arresting interjections, by varying his mood from serious to ironic to hilarious,
and by never depreciating their contributions; like Maynard Keynes, Brock always
elicited something constructive from the most callow remark.
Why, then, did he forsake teaching for administration in 1966? The decision to
become Vice-President and Bursar of the newly-founded Wolfson College surprised
many, but Brock was now in his mid-forties, and felt that his teaching career had
reached a plateau; tuition was, he thought, ‘to some extent a young man’s job’.
Besides, his administrative talents were by then well-known, and as early as 1956-
7 they had been advertised beyond Corpus when he was Junior Proctor. Soon a
mainstay of university committees, which never bored him, he became a well known
Oxford figure, often glimpsed scurrying (rather late) between commitments. In
running his second college, Wolfson, his administrative partnership with its
President, Isaiah Berlin, was as close as his earlier partnership with Corpus’s Frank
Hardie. It was an alliance based on mutual respect and affection, and Brock kept
this ‘natural anarchist’ (Brock’s phrase) administratively on the rails. Together they
carried the College through the difficult period of erecting buildings, establishing
a role within the University and neutralizing student radicalism through timely
concession. Once described as ‘a monster of integrity’, Brock for Berlin possessed
‘a kind of moral charm ... behind the unassuming exterior’. Tactful, honest,
assiduous, judicious, yet unyielding when necessary, he combined reason with a
humane sympathy. In 1973 he somehow also found the time to publish his one
book-length scholarly publication, The Great Reform Act, which predictably showed
a special interest in the ‘waverers’ during the crisis, and immediately became the
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