27 August 2025

Asa Briggs, professor of everything

The historian and educator’s achievements were as long and varied as his contacts book.

Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller

In his time, Asa Briggs was probably the world’s most famous professor. Provost and peer, founder and fellow, broadcaster and networker, chairman and trustee, he spent half his days getting out of taxis clutching papers. Known to his colleagues as the Heathrow Professor of World Travel, he also found the time to have a family and write 50 books. When I was at school, Asa Briggs wasn’t as famous as the Beatles or Cilla, but we’d heard of him all right, even though we thought ASA was not a name but a set of initials, like AJP Taylor. Even now, his influence stumbles on. The Briggsian archive covers three sites – in Oxford, Brighton and Boston, Massachusetts – and he chose Adam Sisman as his biographer years before Sisman chose him.

Yet, Briggs is not an easy man to judge. You can forget all the meetings. Four books secure his reputation – his “second city” History of Birmingham (1952), his reinvention of an era, Victorian People (1954), his word-perfect The Age of Improvement (1959) also known as “The Age of Asa”, and his innovative, comparative Victorian Cities (1963). He also wrote two groundbreaking essays, one on local forms of radicalism in Chartist Studies, and one on the language of class in Essays in Labour History. In addition, he managed to grind out a monumental five-volume history of the BBC (1961-95), but what sort of monument is hard to say, and he gave the prestigious Ford lectures at Oxford, as was his due, but took 16 years to deliver the text, which was not published. Sussex University, of which he was the early driving force and which he called “the major experience of my life”, started brilliantly but has struggled more recently – its original “New Map of Learning” redrawn or erased, its distinctive cross-disciplinary school idea lost or diminished, its reputation sullied by its failure to defend itself from orchestrated harassment.

Way back in 1958, as a member of the University Grants Committee, Briggs helped steer its “New Universities” sub-committee in the direction of Sussex, which received its royal charter in 1961, becoming the first of the “plate-glass university” generation. He knew its first vice-chancellor, John Fulton, from Oxford, where they had taught PPE together, and one day after a busy lunch and a quiet word, Fulton walked Briggs and his wife, Susan, along Brighton Station platform where he asked Asa through the carriage window if he’d like to come and be his deputy.

Briggs started his Sussex career in a Nissen hut where, as the campus by the South Downs flowered all around him, he was able to shift and shape its future. What had emerged by the time of his elevation to vice-chancellor in 1967 was beautiful, thanks to the architect Basil Spence, and different, thanks to Briggs and the cadre of young academics who had warmed to his invitations to come and do something brilliant. I got off the bus at Falmer one warm summer morning to see the long, low concrete modernist wall proclaiming this be the “universityofsussex”, whereupon someone gave me a leaflet calling out the institution’s oblique repression.

Everybody wanted to go to Sussex, even Asa, when he had the time. He liked influence, and gourmet meals, private cars, mansion houses, fast jets. And famous people were the price he paid to get it. In 1951 he went on a Middle East tour with a student, Rupert Murdoch, in the boy’s Ford Zephyr. Rupert got a good third. God knows what Asa (“Isa”) got out of it. In 1954, while at Princeton, he gave Einstein a lift home in his taxi. He knew the Rockefellers, the Astors, the Heinzes, the Sainsburys, Lord Reith and half the Labour cabinet. At a Silicon Valley symposium, Susan, camera in hand and husband at the ready, had the pleasure of telling Bill Clinton to move a little to the left. He and Susan liked a good party and rarely said no. They were friends with Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth, Peter Pears and Charlie Watts. He must have had the best address book in the land.

In between, he scrimped and scraped the time to write the books. It’s a little known fact that Briggs could write two letters at a time: one with the right hand explaining why he hadn’t written one book, and the other with the left hand agreeing to write two more. He just couldn’t help himself.

Sisman sails across this wide ocean of achievement and overachievement with skill and dexterity. He is brisk, comprehensive and scrupulous, always in a straight line. He drops a couple of bombshells over the side but doesn’t hang around to investigate.

Asa Briggs was born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, in 1921 – a town of mills and dyers, close to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in the Industrial Revolution lands. Keighley was a town of clubs and cooperatives and, as he put it, “intense and variegated loyalties”. As a boy he attended both Congregational and Methodist chapels, where he preached and prayed. His father was an engineering fitter who took over his father-in-law’s grocery. They lived spaciously above the shop. When the shop failed, they downsized to a smaller, meaner house.

In 1931, aged ten, he won a scholarship to Keighley Grammar School, winning all there was to win, including “Composition”, which also became his nickname. In 1941, aged 20, he took a first in history at Cambridge and, as an external student, a simultaneous first in economics at LSE.

But there was a war on and in 1942 he joined the Royal Signals specialising in radar, cryptography and high-speed wireless interception. From 1943 to 1945 he worked in Hut 6, Bletchley Park, decrypting the German Enigma machine, whose code was widely believed to be unbreakable. Radar and Bletchley were the keys to Britain’s survival and as a very young and very bespectacled regimental sergeant major, Briggs played his part.

Back in civvy street, from 1944 to 1955, he was a popular fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. From 1955 to 1960 he was professor of modern history at Leeds, where he enjoyed close relations with Sydney Raybould’s Department of Adult Education (which included EP Thompson and JFC Harrison). From 1960 to 1976 he drove the Sussex dream machine. After that, it was back to the port and nuts as provost of Worcester. He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1980 – a bit late, some thought – retiring in 1991 to face a mad jumble of commitments before the long slow fall into poor health, but still writing. In 2012 he and Susan took a cruise to Mumbai and Hong Kong, Briggs in a wheelchair. Increasingly dependent on his carer, the indefatigable one died in his sleep at home in Lewes on 15 March 2016.

One Sunday morning in February 1968, I noticed him in the Sussex University meeting-house chapel, near the front, hands clasped high. He’d been having a rough time. The hard left on campus were trying to make him imperialist enemy number one and though nobody (not even them) believed it, the press was having a field day painting Sussex red as a hotbed of anarchy. He wrote to Susan fearing that the great experiment in British education was in danger at the hands of unaccountable people.

These were the days when sickening scenes from the war in Vietnam were shown daily on our screens. They were also the first days of student self-righteousness, now known as woke. Briggs, along with a clutch of Tory MPs and the Indian high commissioner, was an early victim of attempted cancellation. In 1970, he was barracked and jeered by students while giving, ironically enough, a lecture to local teachers on the anniversary of the 1870 Education Reform Act. But he never flinched, always meeting his accusers face to face – on the campus, on the steps, in the Union, across the hall – where he’d roll up his sleeves to argue the toss. And here he was now, in the thick of it, down on his knees, quite alone. Anyhow, that is what I saw at the time although, as Michael Williams testifies in his memoir In the Country of the Young (2025), there were other things going on in Sussex student heads in 1968, and getting the VC was not one of them.

Not particularly political himself, Briggs hated the politicisation of everything by activists. Sussex wasn’t dreamed up in speech or a Nissen hut. The new approach to learning owed something to the traditional collegiate culture Briggs had enjoyed at Oxford and Cambridge, and something else to Bletchley Park, an intellectual democracy, and the Workers’ Education Association, where he was tutor and president (1958-76), and to his experiences with university adult education at Oxford and Leeds, and in all his later labours on behalf of the Open University and the BBC. Like the NHS, most of these institutions were open to everybody and as he strived with institutions, so he strived in his new “social history” to write the history of (almost) everyone and everything.

Along with Seebohm Rowntree, William Beveridge, John Maynard Keynes, Richard Titmuss, Alec Clegg, AH Halsey, Michael Young and others, Asa Briggs might be seen as one of the technocrats behind the weaving of British social democracy – a moral force that lasted from the onset of Churchill in 1940 until the arrival of Thatcher in 1979.

Asa Briggs was the Last Victorian. Mrs Thatcher came along declaring herself the first. Time is the avenger.

Robert Colls’s “George Orwell: Life and Legacy” will be published next year by Oxford University Press

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs
Adam Sisman
William Collins, 480pp, £30

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[See also: The wonderful world of Prince Andrew]