John Patrick William Ehrman,
FBA (17 March 1920 – 15 June 2011) was a British historian, most notable for his three-volume biography of
William Pitt the Younger
William Pitt the Younger (28 May 175923 January 1806) was a British statesman, the youngest and last prime minister of Great Britain (before the Acts of Union 1800) and then first prime minister of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ire ...
.
[John Ehrman]
, ''The Daily Telegraph'' (17 June 2011), Retrieved 5 January 2020. He wrote two volumes of the official British ''
History of the Second World War
The ''History of the Second World War'' is the official history of the British contribution to the Second World War and was published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO). The immense project was sub-divided into areas to ease publication, ...
''; "Grand Strategy" Volumes V and VI.
The son of Albert Ehrman, John was educated at
Charterhouse School
(God having given, I gave)
, established =
, closed =
, type = Public school Independent day and boarding school
, religion = Church of England
, president ...
and
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...
, when the outbreak of war in 1939 interrupted his studies. Ehrman served in the
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against F ...
in the Middle East and the Atlantic. He returned to Trinity College after the war and his work gained him the admiration of
G. M. Trevelyan
George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962) was a British historian and academic. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1898 to 1903. He then spent more than twenty years as a full-time author. He returned to the ...
and
George Clark. He was elected to a Fellowship in 1947.
In 1948, Ehrman married a daughter of
Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake and together, they had four sons.
J. R. M. Butler
Sir James Ramsay Montagu Butler, (20 July 1889 – 1 March 1975) was a British politician and academic. He was a member of parliament for Cambridge University from 1922 to 1923. He was Regius Professor of Modern History (Cambridge), Regius Prof ...
, who had been Ehrman's tutor and was the leading spirit behind Britain's official ''History of the Second World War'', chose Ehrman to write the fifth and sixth volumes on Grand Strategy for the series. These were published in 1956 and were well received.
Ehrman also wrote ''The Atomic Bomb'' (1953), where he explained Britain's involvement in the making and use of the atomic weapon. Due to the classified information that it contained, the book was not published until the early 1990s.
In 1957 he delivered the
Lees Knowles Lectures at Cambridge.
From 1960 until 1977, he was Treasurer of the
Friends of the National Libraries Friends of the National Libraries (FNL) is a British registered charity founded in 1931 that supports the British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It i ...
, where he oversaw its growth from a small group to a national institution. From 1971 until 1965, he was a trustee of the
National Portrait Gallery and he served on the Committee on the Export of Works of Art from 1970 until 1976. He was also a member of the
Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts
The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (widely known as the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and abbreviated as the HMC to distinguish it from the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England), was a United Kingdom Royal Com ...
from 1976 until 1994, and he ran the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust from 1989 to 1994. He was also twice vice-president of the
Navy Records Society
The Navy Records Society was established in 1893 as a scholarly text publication society to publish historical documents relating to the history of the Royal Navy. Professor Sir John Knox Laughton and Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge were the key lea ...
.
In 1970, he was elected a Fellow of the
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars span ...
.
His three volume biography of Pitt the Younger is a huge scholarly work, amounting to around 300,000 words of text and 150,000 words of footnotes.
Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead, (11 November 1920 – 5 January 2003) was a British politician who served as President of the European Commission from 1977 to 1981. At various times a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Lab ...
estimated that it took Ehrman about 40 years to complete but that it was "thoroughness rather than the flickers of alternative temptation which made him slow".
Boyd Hilton
Andrew John Boyd Hilton, FBA (born 1944) is a British historian and a professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He specialises in modern British history, from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.
Hilton was educated at Willi ...
has claimed that "Pitt dominated the politics of his time and John Ehrman's three-volumes...dominate the historiography. It is hardly a biography, and indeed it is not clear that Pitt had an inner life to biographize, but it ''is'' a consummate account of the political 'life and times'. The author's determination to deal with every episode in detail sometimes blurs the perspective, but readers can be assured that each topic has been thoroughly researched and that Ehrman's analysis is invariably judicious".
[Boyd Hilton, ''A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783-1846'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 705.]
Works
*''The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–1697'' (Cambridge University Press, 1953).
*''Grand Strategy, Volume V: August 1942–September 1943'' (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1956).
*''Grand Strategy, Volume VI: October 1944–August 1945'' (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1956).
*''Cabinet Government and War, 1890–1940'' (Cambridge University Press, 1958).
*''The British Government and Commercial Negotiations with Europe 1783–1793'' (Cambridge University Press, 1962).
*''The Younger Pitt''
**''The Years of Acclaim'' (Constable, 1969).
**''The Reluctant Transition'' (Constable, 1983).
**''The Consuming Struggle'' (Constable, 1996).
*''A Half-Century of Controversy: The Alger Hiss Case'', published on the CIA website
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ehrman, John
1920 births
2011 deaths
People educated at Charterhouse School
Royal Navy personnel of World War II
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
Fellows of the British Academy
20th-century British historians