College Record 2014

with the institution, and his influence there was lasting. So happy, energetic and
successful was he that his term was extended for two further years, until 1993.
Even then his career was far from over, for no scholarly ‘retirement’ could have
been more productive, yet he never fully adapted to a typewriter, let alone to a
word-processor; for him, his firm and distinctive handwriting sufficed. His many
administrative distractions had by now made editing more feasible than authorship,
and his academic interests had advanced to Edwardian Britain, where his knowledge
became encyclopaedic. He and his wife Eleanor, who had studied English at Lady
Margaret Hall and whom he had married in 1949, were now a powerful editorial
team, and they jointly published a meticulous edition of H.H.Asquith’s Letters
to Venetia Stanley in 1982. Michael as political historian had always interpreted
‘politics’ broadly, and the Brocks were the ideal editors, never obtrusive, always
on hand when needed, and erudite on a remarkable range of topics – informing
readers, for instance, that a cleek ‘corresponded roughly to the number 2 iron of
a modern golf bag’, that a ‘Collins’ is ‘a letter of thanks to a hostess’, and that in
1911 a hobble skirt ‘was liable to impede such actions as boarding a bus’. Michael
simultaneously undertook the huge task of co-editing with Dr.Mark Curthoys the
1,890 pages of volumes 6 and 7 in the History of the University of Oxford (published
in 1997 and 2000, respectively); to them he contributed three substantial chapters
as well as volume 8’s judicious concluding chapter on ‘the University since 1970’.
Not content with this, the Brock consortium moved forward to editing Margot
Asquith’s diaries, and well into his eighties Michael was often seen at a desk in
the Bodleian Library, his bird-like frame now somewhat bent and seemingly
ever slighter. His wealth of insight and learning was lightly worn and elegantly
deployed, and against all prediction, the proofs of Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary
1914-1916, edited by ‘Brock & Brock’, were in Michael’s hands shortly before he
died. O.U.P. published it in June 2014, at the same time as re-issuing the Letters to
Venetia Stanley in paperback.
Brock was one of the distinctive and well-known personalities once seemingly
prevalent in Oxford, but now rare – a part-time bureaucrat who was far from
faceless. On Hebdomadal Council from 1965 to 1976 and from 1978 to 1986, he was
a Pro Vice-Chancellor from 1980 to 1988. He was a late recruit to that small elite
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