An Interview with R. A. Humphreys

Professor R. A. Humphreys—Robin Humphreys to his friends and colleagues over the years—is undoubtedly the key figure in the story of the growth and development of Latin American studies in Great Britain, as well as being one of the most distinguished English historians ever to have interested himself in Latin American themes. He was a Scholar of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and after postgraduate work both at Cambridge and at the University of Michigan, took up a teaching post at University College, London, in 1932. His association with the College continued until his retirement in 1974. (He is now Professor Emeritus of the University of London). In 1948, Robin Humphreys became the holder of the first Chair in Latin American History ever established in a British university. Thanks to his work thereafter, University College, London, became the principal focus of work on Latin American history in the country. In 1965, Professor Humphreys was appointed Director of the newly established Institute of Latin American Studies in the University of London—the most important of the five centres or institutes whose creation had lately been recommended by the “Parry Committee.” In addition to his directorship of the Institute, Professor Humphreys served as a Governor of the School of Oriental and African Studies, which elected him an Honorary Fellow in 1981, Vice-Chairman of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and Chairman of the committee of management of the Institute of Archaeology—all of the University of London, to whose life Professor Humphreys has made a considerable contribution. He also played a notable official role in the development of the library resources of the University.

Honours and distinctions which have been awarded Professor Humphreys include the following: O.B.E., 1946; Commander of the Order of Rio Branco, Brazil, 1972; the Machado de Assis Medal of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, 1974; and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1966), Nottingham (1972), Liverpool (1972), and Essex (1973). He is a Corresponding Member of the Academia Argentina de la Historia; Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro; Academia Chilena de Historia; Sociedad Chilena de Historia y Geografía; Instituto Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales; Sociedad Peruana de Historia; Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay; Academia Nacional de la Historia, Venezuela.

Professor Humphreys served as President of the Royal Historical Society between 1964 and 1968. He is the author of numerous publications in the field of Latin American history and also in other fields. (See Bibliography.) The elegance and precision of his pen, unrivalled among his contemporaries in the field, his distinguished record as a director of graduate studies, and his unremitting labours in the promotion of Latin American studies in Great Britain have given him a unique place in the affections of the younger generations of Latin Americanists.

This interview was conducted at Professor Humphreys’s home in Canonbury, London, on July 14, 1981.

SIMON COLLIER: I wonder if we could begin, Professor Humphreys, with something about your family background?

R. A. HUMPHREYS: Well now, you know a good deal about my background, I think. I should perhaps tell you that I’m half Welsh—Welsh on my father’s side, English on my mother’s. My paternal grandparents were both Welsh, though my father was born at Chester. He came to Lincoln—where I was brought up—after leaving college, and was appointed headmaster of a Wesleyan school at a very early age. He remained headmaster for the rest of his life, and was Sheriff of Lincoln in 1944–45. My mother’s family, on the other hand, were all Lincolnshire and Suffolk folk. There is a legend (I think it is only a legend) that they were of Huguenot descent.

SC: Could you say a word or two here about any hobbies you have enjoyed during your life, and also about your main extraacademic avocations over the years?

RAH: Of course. My principal hobbies have been music and gardening. As a young man I played the piano, and learned the organ and cello till academic work got in the way. And that was about the end of that. For long I have been a listener, not a performer. As for gardening, well, it’s getting a bit late for that now. I suppose my main interest outside purely academic work has been in libraries, first in building up the history libraries at University College, London, and at the Institute of Historical Research, then as Chairman of the University Library Committee, and finally as Chairman of a new Committee which the University set up to investigate the library provisions of the University and of the London area generally. The result of that was a Library Co-ordinating Committee, which has become one of the most influential bodies within the University. It always gives me great pleasure to remember it, and the fact that I was its first Chairman.

Another of my chief interests was the Royal Historical Society, which I served as a member of Council, as Honorary Secretary, and finally as President, and whose centenary history I had the pleasure of writing. Yet a third was the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where my main concern was its Research Committee, of which I was a member for nearly twenty years, and was there able to promote the Institute’s series of monographs on various Latin American countries, many of which are still useful—at least I think they are. And the Royal Institute was one way of trying to generate an interest in the serious study of Latin America.

I perhaps ought to mention also my interest in the colonial universities in special relation with the University of London. That took me to Jamaica in 1959, and later, in 1962, to Uganda and Kenya. And I remember thinking, in both countries, that I could discern very strong resemblances to the state of Latin America a hundred and fifty years earlier, and that they were destined to pass through much the same kind of experience. And of Uganda that, I think, has certainly been true.

SC: You don’t mention your membership of the Committee on Latin American Studies set up by the University Grants Committee. But that, I suppose, was just as much an academic as an extraacademic activity?

RAH: Of course, just as my membership of the Research Committee at the Royal Institute was both an academic and an extraacademic activity. But the Committee on Latin American Studies which was set up in 1962 under the chairmanship of John Parry, who was then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales, was much more important. Our Report was made in 1964 and published in 1965. It resulted in the foundation of five Centres or Institutes of Latin American Studies, in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, and Glasgow—while the University of Essex, which was founded at much the same time, established Latin American studies as an integral part of its curriculum. I’ve described all this in my essay on Latin American Studies in Great Britain. It was the greatest step forward ever taken in this country to establish Latin American studies on a firm foundation, and it was our aim not to do too much too quickly, but to hasten slowly, as it were, and to ensure that scholarly standards were strictly maintained.

Perhaps I should add that, the Committee’s Report completed, I then became a member of another University Grants Committee, a special advisory subcommittee, established in 1965 to advise the U.G.C. on the implementation of the Parry Report and to monitor the progress of the Centres or Institutes of Latin American Studies generally. It was also empowered to make a number of modest travel grants to enable appropriate persons to visit Latin America. It continued in existence till 1971.

SC: Did you ever consider a career other than history?

RAH: Well, not other than history, but certainly other than Latin American history. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, Latin American history, so far as the history school was concerned, did not exist. Nor did it exist in any other history school. I don’t forget F. A. Kirkpatrick, who was Reader in Spanish at Cambridge till 1933, but I think that Kirkpatrick’s historical work was never properly recognized in this country. I don’t know whether you feel that too. It certainly is my opinion. He had nothing to do with the history school, and it was only later that I met him, when he was retired and was, I think, living in Ireland.

I always wanted to be a historian if I could, and my first interest, when I became a research student, was in the American Revolution. There was to be a natural transition later to the Latin American revolutions. A Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1930 took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the William L. Clements Library, and I owe a profound debt to the Fund, to the Clements Library, and to Professor Verner W. Crane, with whom I worked at Michigan. As I look back, I am sure that no two years were ever happier than those which I spent in America, working in its great libraries, and in Canada as well, and travelling by car from coast to coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. I’ve always felt as much at home in the States as in England.

SC: At one or two points in your “autobiographical fragment” you show a definite affection for one particular part of the United States—the Middle West. Are there any reasons for this?

RAH: Well, yes there are. First of all, I lived there for two years, and those two years had a profound effect on me. Second, I think that the people I met there had an air of being interested in ideas, in new ideas. They had no undue respect for ivory towers on the East Coast or for ivory towers in other countries. I liked that independence of thought. And it strikes me that many of the most important ideas in America have come out of the Middle West. One need only mention, among historians for instance, Frederick Jackson Turner, but there are many others. I remember feeling very distinctly that at Ann Arbor there was a sense of freedom and liberation, as well, of course, as a friendliness which I can never forget.

SC: How did your historical interests develop and change after your time at Michigan?

RAH: If I go on to think about my career as a historian of Latin America, well, it was really American history I was interested in in those early days, and when I came back to England in 1932 it was to teach American history at University College, London. I continued to do this, except of course during the war, for sixteen years. But Professor H. Hale Bellot, who was the Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History, and whose promotion of the study of American history in this country tends nowadays, I fear, to be overlooked, thought that just as the College had been a pioneer in American history teaching, so it ought to take account of Latin American history. We were agreed on this, and while I taught American history I also began to be interested in the Latin American revolutions. We had no books at all, as far as I can remember. I could find only ten in the College library relating to Latin America or Latin American history. But I started to build up a library at the College and at the Institute of Historical Research, and I made bibliographical and research journeys to the United States, which brought me into contact with the great pioneers such as W. S. Robertson, James Alexander Robertson, C. H. Haring, H. E. Bolton, H. I. Priestley, Percy Alvin Martin, and, among the younger scholars, Lewis Hanke, so beginning a life-long friendship. A. P. Whitaker, Charles Griffin, and Howard Cline I was to meet later.

I also paid a brief visit to Mexico, and thought how different American history looked from Mexico City than from Boston and New York. I remember with affection Pablo Martínez del Río, who showered kindnesses upon me, and G. R. G. Conway, who gave me for the Institute of Historical Research a collection of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century state papers, which Michael Costeloe has recently edited. Silvio Zavala I met later, but long before he was Ambassador in Paris, and we have always kept in touch.

At home there was one severe blow, and that was the death of Pelham Box, whose Origins of the Paraguayan War is a classic, and who was one of the most stimulating conversationalists I have ever known and one of my closest friends. He died in 1937 at the early age of 39, and I think he was a great loss to Latin American studies and their future development in this country. I was still not teaching Latin American history—nor, for that matter, was Box—but I did start work about this time on my collection of British Consular Reports on the Trade and Politics of Latin America. Fortunately, all the editorial work, and the notes, had been completed when the war began in September 1939.

SC: Were there any particular experiences at this period which in your own opinion were important in shaping your career as a Latin Americanist?

RAH: Yes, there were. It was my experience in the war which confirmed me in my move away from American history and to Latin American history—though American history still has a strong fascination for me. As you will know, civilians were directed into particular activities, and I was asked by Arnold Toynbee to take over the direction of the Latin American section of the Foreign Research and Press Service which the Royal Institute of International Affairs set up at the request of the Foreign Office, and which became in fact the Research Department of the Foreign Office itself. I remained with it, first at Balliol College, Oxford, and then in Whitehall, till 1945, and was a consultant to it even after that. It was while I was a member of this that I wrote a little pamphlet in the Oxford series of Pamphlets on World Affairs, and also my book The Evolution of Modern Latin America. I was then living in Chelsea, and most of the book was written late at night when the air-raid warnings had sounded, but when I was not on duty as a fire-watcher at Whitehall. The book began as a series of lectures which the Foreign Office allowed me to give at Cambridge, at the invitation of Kirkpatrick’s successor, J. B. Trend— almost the first lectures on Latin American history I ever delivered.

There was another experience, too. When the war was over, Michigan, in the generosity of its heart, invited my wife and myself to spend the summer of 1947 there, when I taught Latin American history to one of the most stimulating classes of graduate students—all veterans—it has ever been my good fortune to enjoy. And in 1949, thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, we made our first visit to South America, to Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. This brought me into touch with José Honório Rodrigues, Emilio Ravignani, Ricardo Levene, Eugenio Pereira Salas, Ricardo Donoso, and many others. Thanks to the Astor Foundation, and to the Brazilian government, there were to be further journeys in the future, though I could no longer go to high altitudes—to Peru and Venezuela, when I had the pleasure of meeting Víctor Belaúnde, Jorge Basadre, Pedro Grases, and other historians. And on several occasions I went back to the United States, through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Library of Congress.

SC: Were there any particular journeys in South America which you now remember as having enjoyed the most?

RAH: I enjoyed all of them, but the South American experiences which stand out above all others are the journey by train from Mendoza across the Andes to Chile, a visit to Manaus and the junction of the Negro and the Amazon, and another to Ciudad Bolívar and down the Orinoco in Venezuela.

SC: Let us turn to the subject of your various writings. You said on one occasion, Professor Humphreys, that of all the books you have written, Liberation in South America was the one you personally liked the best. Could you say why? Is it still true?

RAH: Well, the answer is partly because of the range it covers, partly because the hero (if there is a hero) amused me, partly because I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and partly because the illustrations are so attractive. But the volume which I really prefer now is the collection of essays, published both in England and America, under the title of Tradition and Revolt in Latin America and Other Essays. Historians and historical writing have always fascinated me, and this volume includes studies of two of the great early pioneers of American history, Robertson and Prescott. Again, I’ve always been interested in the economic aspects of the wars of independence, and also in Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America, and these too are here, as well as the essay which gives the title to the volume. It covers almost all the problems which have most attracted me, so that it is, in a sense, something of a personal record. I could wish that a further essay, on Southey, written after I had retired, could have been included in it, to make a trilogy of historians, but that came too late.

SC: Nobody who has read your works can fail to be struck by the admirable prose style which they display. Is it possible for you to reflect a little on the way in which you achieved this?

RAH: It’s very kind of you to say so. History in my view is a branch of literature, and historians ought to try to write good English. On the whole, I think historians do write well, even if the professional historian does not produce the kind of simple narrative which the nonhistorian likes best. So far as I’m concerned, the truth is, I suppose, that I was brought up to write Latin prose (an admirable discipline) as well as English essays, and also to read widely in English literature. I still read the works of my favorite author every year—and that is Jane Austen. And if you could find any resemblance (which I don’t think you will) between the gentle irony, the rhythm, the precision of her writing and my own efforts, I should be flattered indeed. History to me is an extremely complicated subject, and its writing is both a pain and a pleasure. Fortunately, the pleasure predominates, but I write slowly and with perpetual revision.

SC: How important is style for the historian? Which of the great past masters of our craft have you most enjoyed reading?

RAH: As I’ve said, I think history is a branch of literature, and style is simply a matter of writing well—good, clear, precise English. As for the great past masters of our craft, I think those who have given me the greatest pleasure have been Acton, Maitland, Gibbon, and Macaulay (I mean his essays), and if I think of American historians (and I’ll only speak of American historians no longer living), let me say how greatly I admired (and still do) Carl Becker. Unfortunately, I only met him very briefly.

SC: What historical projects are you pursuing at the moment?

RAH: When I retired in 1974, I thought that I should never again feel able to attempt a major piece of historical writing, but the study which I did undertake, Latin America and the Second World War, of which the first, not very long, volume is now in the press, and the second, somewhat longer, nearly finished, has turned out, I fancy, to be my most ambitious enterprise, apart from the documentary publications which I have edited or coedited. But I doubt whether there will be any more books, though there might be an occasional essay. I couldn’t really begin writing this present book before I retired from the Directorship of the Institute of Latin American Studies, but of course a lot of work had been done, in the way of research, before that happened. I have divided it, for personal reasons, into two parts: the first volume ends with the Rio de Janeiro Conference of 1942, that is to say it goes from 1939 to 1942, and the second covers the years from 1942 to 1945. And I have written it not, I hope, from an American point of view or an English point of view, but as much as possible from a Latin American point of view. I might add that I suspect that no one, North American, British, or Latin American, will like it!

SC: What do you consider to have been your greatest single satisfaction as a historian?

RAH: I won’t speak of a single satisfaction. I think the answer is threefold. First, there are the graduate students I have had the privilege of teaching and who have gone on to hold academic posts in this country and America. Second, is the foundation of the London Institute of Latin American Studies, and the part I played in it as first Director. And third, perhaps most important, is the establishment during my lifetime of Latin American history, with its now several distinguished practitioners, as a properly recognized field of academic study in this country. Conditions now are utterly different from when I first became a university teacher or, indeed, when I took up a subject which was then barely respectable. I can only hope that the present unfavourable financial situation in our universities is not going to have disastrous repercussions.

SC: You have mentioned your graduate students. What about your undergraduates?

RAH: I’m afraid I’ve not followed the careers of my undergraduate students so closely as my graduate ones. And I haven’t kept so closely in touch with them. But they have become teachers, civil servants, and journalists; some of them have gone into the B.B.C., and some into the British Council; and there are, of course, other careers which they have followed, but these were the main ones. And I hope they have taken some account of Latin American history with them.

SC: Do you feel that you have had notably greater success with one group than with the other?

RAH: I find that very difficult to answer, largely because it’s the graduate students that I have been in closer contact with since they ceased to be graduate students, and I think probably—or I hope—that it is with them that I have really had the greater success. I must say it was an enormous pleasure when one of them, Dr. John Lynch, succeeded me in the Chair of Latin American History at University College and later as Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies; that another, Harold Blakemore, was my right hand in establishing the Institute of Latin American Studies; and that a third (if it isn’t invidious to carry on naming people), Leslie Bethell, is continuing the work I did at University College.

SC: Would you care to reveal to us what was your philosophy in selecting and training your graduate students?

RAH: I had only one philosophy in selecting and training graduate students, and that was to select the best. But I’ve always given the warning that in choosing Latin American history they were taking a risk—the prospects of academic posts were so precarious—but that a man or a woman should do what he or she really wanted to do so long as he or she counted the consequences.

SC: I wonder if I could ask you, finally, for a general comment on the present state of the field. Do you have any suggestions as to how you would like to see the field develop, or any feelings about the directions it seems to be taking at present?

RAH: I am glad to see a greater concentration taking place in this country on postcolonial history, despite the interest which I have always had in the late colonial period. It seems to me that the neglected century is still the nineteenth century, and the need is for the integration of social and economic history with diplomatic, political, and constitutional history. But I must say that I get very weary of the sociological and economic jargon so prevalent today and the efforts to explain extremely diverse phenomena by reference to theoretical systems. History, as I have said, is an extremely complicated discipline, and the more we know, the more complicated it becomes. Each generation is going to find its own explanations and interpretations in the light of its own experience, and we have to add one to another. But history cannot be compressed into any external or theoretical framework. The historian reflects its own, and his own, inner compulsions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (in chronological order)

Author notes