John McManners, 89, churchman and historian who studied death in 18th c. France
Charlene
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 08/11/2006
[The Telegraph]
The Reverend Professor John McManners, who died on Saturday aged 89,
was from 1972 to 1984 Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at
Oxford University.
His distinction as an historian of Church and religious life in
18th-century France was recognised almost as much in the
French-speaking world as in the English. But before reaching the Oxford
chair he had held three professorships of general history, and he took
a broader view of his subject than the designation "ecclesiastical
historian" might suggest.
After retiring from the Regius chair, McManners became chaplain and a
fellow of All Souls College, and continued work on his major study of
the French church in the pre-Revolutionary period.
This eminence was reached from a most unexpected and unpromising
background. John McManners ("Jack" to his family and friends) was born
on Christmas Day 1916 at Ferryhill, Co Durham, the son of a collier and
a schoolmistress.
His mother was an Anglican, but his father, Joe, was then a Labour
activist and a determined unbeliever. When Jack was growing up,
however, his father experienced a conversion and trained for the
priesthood. Joe McManners became curate and then vicar of his own
village, and eventually a canon of Durham Cathedral.
Jack attended council schools and then the local grammar school at
Spennymoor. A Wearside lilt remained with him as a reminder of a
background to be proud of in the mining community of Co Durham. He won
an exhibition to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1936, developed rapidly in
that small but congenial society, and took a First in Modern History in
1939.
No sooner had he started a piece of 17th-century doctoral research than
the war broke out, and he was commissioned in the Northumberland
Fusiliers. He served with the Eighth Army in the Western Desert, took
part in the siege of Tobruk, and rose by the end of 1943 to be adjutant
of the 1st Battalion, the Northumberlands.
He was transferred as a major to the Greek Mission, based in
Alexandria, with a liaison role of preparing Greece for the restoration
of constitutional government. In 1948 he was awarded the Order of King
George I of the Hellenes for his services during the war.
The war left a deep impression on McManners. Early in his military
service he had decided to seek ordination, and pursued this in
peacetime by studying Theology at Durham University. His only parochial
ministry, as a curate of Leeds parish church, lasted barely a year, as
his old college called him back to be its chaplain and a lecturer in
History.
He was at St Edmund Hall, where he was soon appointed a tutor and
fellow, from 1948 to 1956, and was one of the generation of dons who
did so much to improve the academic standing of a traditionally
"hearty" college.
Not least through his sporting interests (he had become a highly
accomplished tennis player) and as the college Dean (nicknamed
"McHappy"), McManners was a well-liked Hall figure, apparently with a
lifetime's Oxford career ahead of him. But in 1956, seeking a fresh
challenge, and perhaps stimulated by memories of the Australian
colleagues he had fought alongside at Tobruk, he emigrated with his
wife and young family to take up the chair of History at the University
of Tasmania.
His four years in Hobart were troubled by a prolonged administrative
dispute, and he felt that he had not succeeded in building up a
department as he had wished. By 1960 he had transferred to Sydney
where, still remote from his research sources but with much potential
for improving a large department, he enjoyed great success.
Soon after his move to Sydney, McManners's first major book appeared,
after various well-received essays on the 18th-century nobility. French
Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Regime: A Study of Angers in
the 18th Century (1960) was detailed in its documentary research and
attractive in its literary style; above all it was broad in human
sympathy for the provincial clergy it described, and it was very
favourably received, in France as well as in Britain.
In 1967 - after a year as a senior visiting fellow of All Souls -
he returned to England and took up a professorship at Leicester
University. There he developed the European coverage of the
undergraduate courses, and produced two books, The French Revolution
and the Church (1969) and Church and State in France 1870-1914 (1972),
drawing on his own lectures.
In 1972, much to the pleasure of both the Theology and the Modern
History faculties at Oxford, he was appointed to the Regius chair of
Ecclesiastical History, recently reprieved from a formal concentration
on the early Church. The professorship was attached to a canonry at
Christ Church, and this mixture of college, chapter and university
cannot have been without interest to the historian of ancien-régime
ecclesiastical life.
McManners's quietly forceful cathedral sermons were much admired, and
he gave much time to the administration of his two faculties. He took a
relaxed but efficient approach to university administration. "They
worked quite hard in their fatuous way, like Oxford dons," he once
remarked in the course of a lecture about 18th-century French cathedral
chapters.
Death and the Enlightenment (1981) was the major publication of his
Christ Church years. The subject of death had become modish among
French social historians, but McManners brought novelty and penetration
to a study of the 18th-century French experience of dying. Deathbeds,
funerals, graveyards, suicides and public executions were all brought
together in a book which won the Wolfson Literary Award for History in
1982.
On his retirement in 1984, McManners was invited to take up the
chaplaincy of All Souls, becoming also a fellow of the college from
1986. He relished the society of this distinctive institution, and
enjoyed his more limited duties, which gave him the opportunity to
continue his research.
McManners was general editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of
Christianity, which was published in 1990. It was a best-seller, and
the quietly reflective tone of its introduction provides rare insights
into McManners's own religious and ecclesiastical outlook.
This collaborative volume was, however, a diversion from the major
scholarly enterprise of his years at All Souls: Church and Society in
18th Century France, which was eventually published in 1998. This work
was on a scale that might have daunted a much younger scholar. Two
volumes, with more than 1,600 pages of text, fulfilled his aim "to
appreciate the beliefs, aspirations, hopes and fears of four
generations" of the people of pre-revolutionary France. He wrote
sympathetically, "adopting the approach of the portrait painter rather
than that of the clinical diagnostician, aiming for friendly realism
rather than morbid analysis".
When this work was finished, he turned back to his wartime experiences,
refreshing his memory from regimental diaries to write Fusilier:
recollections and reflections 1939-1945, a lively account of his war
service, published in 2002. With that, and a short but spirited account
of an All Souls scandal of the early 19th century, he brought an end to
a productive retirement.
McManners gave many endowed lectures, including the Birkbeck (1976) and
Trevelyan (1989) series at Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the
British Academy in 1978, and received the Ordre des Palmes Academiques
in 1991. Within the Church of England he was a member of the Doctrinal
Commission from 1978 to 1982. He much enjoyed his time as a trustee of
the National Portrait Gallery from 1970 to 1978.
He was appointed CBE in 2000.
Jack McManners had a natural modesty which forbade any trumpeting of
his achievements, and a diffidence which gave special force to his
quietly stated opinions. His sharp glance and sly humour readily lit up
his face, but he bore no malice and his appreciation of human foibles
was well developed.
He was throughout his adult life a keen tennis player, playing a deft
game until he was well into his eighties.
He married, in 1951, Sarah Errington. They had two sons and two
daughters.