Geoffrey Warner

We have learned, with sadness, of the death of Professor Geoffrey Warner, who taught History at Leicester from 1977 to 1982.

Geoffrey Warner was born in Swanley, London in 1937. After the war his family moved to Buckinghamshire where he studied at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe and gained an open scholarship to Cambridge that enabled him to join Sydney Sussex College when he was just 17. After graduating, he studied for a PhD, initially at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris and later back in Cambridge.

His first job was at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (aka Chatham House) in London, and his first teaching position was Lecturer in Politics at Reading University. His career then took him to Canberra for three years before he was appointed Professor of History at Hull. In October 1977 he came to Leicester as Professor of Modern History, a chair made vacant by the retirement of Jack Simmons. Two years later he was appointed Head of the History Department, succeeding Geoffrey Martin who had been raised to the post of Pro-Vice-Chancellor.

In October 1978 Professor Warner delivered his inaugural lecture ‘Uneasy Allies: "Collusion" and the Suez Crisis of 1956’, as Andrew Hanham recalls: “I certainly remember attending Geoffrey's inaugural lecture on the Suez Crisis to a packed audience in Attenborough 1 at the start of my second year in October 1978.  Much later, I used to see him quite often at the Institute of Historical Research when I was working on the History of Parliament project, and we occasionally had lunch at the Tropical Disease place across the road.  Not least, he was interested in the fact that I lived at Primrose Hill next door to Keith Kyle who was working at the time on his major work on Suez. I'm not sure that their views on the crisis were very much in accord, but was still rather surprised to see that Geoffrey's name wasn't mentioned anywhere in Keith's book, especially as they were both regulars of Chatham House.”

Professor Warner left Leicester in 1982 for the Open University in Milton Keynes where, as Chair in European Humanities Studies, he was able to develop new initiatives in History. From the OU he progressed to Brasenose College, Oxford and he remained there as Supernumerary Fellow in Modern History till his retirement in 2002. Outside of academia, he had a great fondness for jazz.

Among his 15 books were Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France (1968), Iraq and Syria, 1941 (1974), The Pelican History of England, Vol.9: England in the Twentieth Century 1914-1979 (1981, with David Thomson) and the edited diaries of Labour politician Kenneth Younger (2005). His final book, published in 2011 when Professor Warner was in his seventies, was a study of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Geoffrey Warner spent his final years at a care home in Leek, Staffordshire. In June 2025 he donated some of his books to the town library. He is survived by his daughter Chris and other family members, to whom we extend our condolences.