College Record 2014

of public-spirited dons who lent mid-twentieth-century Oxford its cohesion. ‘I used
to think as they emerged from their Colleges and met in the Broad’, Lord Franks
recalled in 1986, ‘[that] they informally decided on the direction of University
policy and went off to work in their several committees to win acceptance’. Brock
may have been ambitious, but justifiably, because to ambition he added the necessary
ingredients of talent and industry. He told me that ‘I really regard my career as a
lot of luck’, in which ‘one thing leads to another’ in unplanned sequence.
Relevant here, though, is the remark of Louis Pasteur, that ‘chance favours only
the prepared mind’, for at least three influences ‘prepared’ Brock’s mind. The first
was his family. In its earlier and later generations it shaped his values and lent
stability to his life. His long partnership with Eleanor was central to his happiness
and achievements, and he dedicated his Reform Act to the ‘wife and sons’ (three in
number) who frequently featured in his conversation. The shared husband-andwife
academic career, which in pre-feminist days had usually concealed the female
contribution, was upfront on the Brocks’ title pages in 1982 and 2014, together with
a dedication to, respectively, Katharine (wife of their eldest son George), and Patricia
(wife of their second son David). There was, secondly, the remarkable energy which
among other things made Michael a fascinating conversationalist. His overflowing
and emphatic articulation was rich with family recollection, humorous anecdote,
mimickings, old-fashioned phrases and vocabulary, and maxims as guides through
life. It could have been misunderstood as merely frivolous, even in some of its aspects
as ingratiating – self-deprecating, unhesitatingly assuming that you would pick up
recondite references, and conducted in a confiding tone so inaudible in later life
that the confidences (not always substantial) were seldom at risk. On one occasion,
when discussing prime minister Asquith’s daughter Violet Bonham Carter with
Vernon Bogdanor, Brock said that our understanding of her had been distorted
by Evan Charteris; ‘and’, he added, ‘we all know what Evan was like, don’t we’.
Bogdanor, a leading expert on modern British political history, later confessed that
he had never heard of Charteris. Yet underlying all this conversational energy lay a
serious purpose, for Brock possessed that elusive quality: integrity. Behind that lay,
thirdly, an inherited and unsophisticated religious commitment. His father’s family
were nonconformists, but Michael as an adult became an Anglican: ‘I can’t imagine
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