College Record 2014

my life without religious influence’, he told me. Loyalty to established institutions
often accompanies conservatism, but Brock’s evangelical, Congregationalist and
professional family background ensured a very different outcome: he was a liberal
with backbone – positive in outlook and thinking the best of people, while facing up
to reality – yet also principled, and unsanctimoniously upright. His optimism, his
constructive priorities and his sheer niceness shone out within a University whose
critical faculty was if anything over-developed. The values associated with the
English Christian gentleman – a title that earlier generations might have bestowed
– were unfashionable in late-twentieth-century Oxford.
In 1981 Brock was appointed CBE, but many thought he deserved more. His career
encountered setbacks, though he never dwelt upon them. They owed something (very
unfairly) to the fact that he lacked a magisterial ‘presence’. A close colleague in later
life did not forget first hearing his authoritative voice in a seminar: ‘I couldn’t see
the body behind the voice, but I was so keen to catch a glimpse that I leant forward,
and, between the gaps, spied this sparrow-like frame. Such a powerful mind, but in
the slightest of bodies – a contrast that never left me; it actually became more acute
as he got older, and frailer.’ To those less energetic and less public-spirited than
himself, the flow of paper that Brock generated in his participatory zeal seemed
overwhelming, his verbosity tiresome, his incessant busy-ness irritating. He was
too conscientious adequately to delegate, though a sympathetic Nuffield colleague
confessed that this ‘enables the rest of us to shuffle off quite a lot on to him …
which is very agreeable – though not necessarily very good – for us.’ The rare
combination of qualities the successful administrator requires – industry, efficiency,
self-effacement, fair mindedness, discretion and (unfashionable word!) wisdom – is
at risk of neglect in a self-advertising age. The tactful after dinner speech, the
effective committee intervention, the timely memorandum, the deft use of personal
contacts, even the judicious summary from the chair are, after all, arcane aptitudes.
Academic careers like Brock’s, rarer now than they once were, facilitate scholarship
in others by providing a smooth-running and liberal context. Was Michael Brock,
then, a ‘local’ or a ‘cosmopolitan’? It would for him have been an unreal distinction.
He knew that, whether among senior or junior members, Oxford colleges are
little arenas for a self-discovery that is later applied more widely. Among its JCR
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