George Harrison

We have learned, with sadness, of the passing of George Anthony Harrison, who lectured in history from the 1960s to the 1990s and remained a familiar figure on campus for many years afterwards. George passed away on 22 January 2025, aged 87.

This is the text of an address delivered at George’s funeral on 26 March 2025 by Dr Ian Harris:

We knew George because we encountered him at Leicester. He had held a research post with the History of Parliament Trust from 1963 to 1964 and had been an Assistant in Modern History at the University of Glasgow from 1964 to 1967, before joining the University here as a lecturer in the latter year, teaching in the Department of History and retiring from it in 1994. He bade farewell to his colleagues with an hilariously witty speech. By then arthritis and tinnitus had been troubling George for some time, so an early retirement was not unnatural. Retirement, however, was by no means the end of his habitual connection with the University. For he walked across Victoria Park to take his lunch in the Senior Common Room almost every day, Monday to Friday, for the next thirty years. He was, naturally, regarded with some fondness by colleagues in catering services. Indeed, many other colleagues, though they may not have known his name, would have recognised his tall frame, military bearing and distinctive hat as he made his way to the various outlets on campus.  In recent years, increasing infirmity led him to live at Alston House; there he was gently nursed by the staff and was regarded fondly by them too. 

The Harrisons, early in the last century, were respectable but not rich, and lived first at Consett and then at West Auckland, both in County Durham. George Harrison senior, our George’s father, received both of his degrees and later a diploma from Bede College. He duly became a schoolmaster, teaching at King James I Grammar School, Bishop Auckland. Having met Stella Johnson of nearby Hunwick, he married her on 24 December 1936. The newly-weds, who had courted for some years, now lost no time and our George was born on 4 October 1937. The family – enlarged by Wendy, born five years after George - moved to Keighley in 1945 and in 1950 to Halifax, where George senior became Headmaster of Holy Trinity Church of England School. His son, having been at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School, now attended Heath Grammar School in Halifax, and would retain fond memories of both school and town. His prize books suggest that his preferred history in those days was nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. If so, that changed at his university, where Gerald Aylmer, Donald Pennington and Penry Williams, devoted alike to early modern England, were then all teaching. For George studied at Manchester University for both his BA (1956-59), in which he obtained a First, and his MA (submitted 1960, awarded 1961). He then worked for his PhD at Royal Holloway, London under the supervision of Robert Latham, not yet of Pepys fame, submitted his thesis in 1962 and received the degree in March 1963.

George’s early research opened up important aspects of the English Civil War (as it was then known). Most historians were then preoccupied with the parliamentary side of the conflict and few wrote systematically about the localities, preferring the national scene. Both George’s MA thesis on Royalist Organisation in Gloucestershire and Bristol, 1642-45, and his PhD on Royalist Organisation in Wiltshire, 1642-46, have been widely cited. The most original feature of his PhD was the first proper account of the Clubmen. These were the local men who formed paramilitary groups, originally royalist in aim but in effect ‘neutral in character’, as George put it, in order to resist the depredations of soldiers, royalist and parliamentarian alike, no matter what their pretensions to godliness or righteousness. One feels that George was in sympathy with the Clubmen.

George believed that historical analysis not only did ’possess a strong polemical dimension’ but also that it should. He thought that ‘a self-assertive contrariness, profoundly subjective and deep rooted in the human psyche, has proved of the greatest benefit in producing seminal work that a mere attention to the rules of scholarly objectivity could rarely emulate’. Donald Pennington, along with Christopher Hill, examined George’s MA, and very probably supervised it too. Pennington and another historian had made a local study of parliamentarian organisation; but the young George studied royalist organisation in the localities. Again, George, encountering in the later 1970s and 1980s a comprehensive reappraisal of parliamentary history in the early Stuart period, tested its ‘pertinence and veracity’. He concluded that it failed to take into account procedure and so overlooked the basic character of Parliament’s aims and functions. He also wrote about James II, whose exercise of the royal prerogative he characterised as revolutionary.

George himself did not have a revolutionary temperament. Friends and colleagues from the University, who could not be here today, give us a picture of the man in his prime during the nineteen-eighties. Stuart Ball remembers ‘his equable temperament and his impish sense of humour - how he would say something and then give a kind of half-smile and sideways glance, always with a twinkle in his eye.’ Keith Snell speaks of ‘a courteous, witty and charming companion’. Alison Yarrington, who knew him through the Haldane Society, has a pervading memory of ‘his unfailing kindness and consideration’. To which, I think, we should add something else that Alison recollects: that ‘he always seemed quite shy and self-contained’.

George’s life resembled a series of concentric circles. To the outermost and widest circle, his readership, he remained behind initials as GA Harrison or perhaps George A Harrison, but only once George Harrison; at the university and to almost all hereabouts he was George; in the North of England and at home he was Tony, in distinction to his father. Home, of course, was the innermost circle. Tony or George was particularly attached to Wendy. They holidayed together and he often visited Hunwick after she had retired there. Wendy preceded him, dying in 2019, and this separation distressed George greatly. But now they are reunited. For his ashes now lie beside hers in the Johnson plot of the churchyard at St. Paul’s, Hunwick. 

The Senior Common Room was not George’s sole source of sustenance in retirement. He continued to feed on History. His research multiplied, as extensive abstracts of evidence, numerous photocopies and continued book-buying attest. During the last few years of his life, he returned to modern European History, and also developed a new interest in Medieval History (as well as detective novels). But we may be sure that it will not be as a reader George Harrison will be remembered longest locally; rather as a figure in the SCR quietly eating his lunch, drinking his tea and reading The Times.

(This address owes much to others, including the friends and colleagues named in the text. The account of George’s early life, in particular, rests on the work of others. One of these, through a scrapbook of family material, was his sister Wendy. Others are archival staff at Durham University, the University of Manchester and Royal Holloway College, University of London. It should be added that George would have wished to acknowledge a much more important debt: to Dr Paula Dobrowolski, who helped him far more than any other person during his last few years. )