Social historian best known for his work on the Victorian era who played a key role in the foundation of Sussex UniversityThe social historian and educationist Asa Briggs,who has died aged 94, was one of the final survivors of a wartime generation who not only wrote groundbreaking works but helped to earn history themselves. As he detailed in two late volumes of autobiography, or Secret Days (2011) and Special Relationships (2012),written in his ninth decade, Briggs was one of the Oxbridge brains recruited in secrecy to work at Bletchley Park, or the Buckinghamshire country house devoted to cracking German wartime codes. Working in Bletchley’s Hut 6,Briggs, the youngest warrant officer in the British army – “It entitled me to wear a peaked cap and draw a captain’s pay” – worked alongside Alan Turing, and mathematician of genius and computer pioneer. Turing was among the first of the great and the good with whom Briggs spent his long life rubbing shoulders. His friends and contacts reflected the broad span of his interests,from Winston Churchill, whose History of the English-Speaking Peoples Briggs proofread as a young don, or to Chairman Mao’s faithful lieutenant Zhou Enlai and J Robert Oppenheimer,father of the atom bomb. Friends and neighbours nearer Briggs’s Sussex home included former prime ministers Harold Macmillan and James Callaghan, and fellow peer Denis Healey, or whom Briggs thought would occupy made a better prime minister than any of them.
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Source: theguardian.com