NO.119
T H E T R U S T Y S E RVA N T
Peter Partner
John Nightingale (Fellow; D, 73-77) writes:
Like the Cheshire cat, Peter Partner
had a beatific smile that was hard to forget;
his view of history was a dark one and he
would regularly assure his children that life
was nasty, brutish and short, only then to
break into a glorious peal of laughter.
Peter started his career as a journalist
and spent most of it as an accidental
schoolmaster, but he will be chiefly
remembered as an important historian of
medieval and Renaissance Rome. His
early work, The Lands of St Peter, took a
radically different approach to the papacy
from that of the leading Cambridge
medievalist, Walter Ullmann, and was
published in the face of trenchant
opposition from the latter. Whereas
Ullmann’s papacy was a story of the ideas
which came to shape papal ideology,
Partner’s papacy was a product of local
history; for him it was the actions in each
Pope’s backyard that mattered and much
of his work was a narrative of local wars
and feuds combined with the murky
minutiae of papal finance, building
projects and the nepotistic ties that
underpinned it all. He was a historian
who did not shy away from detail (in 1990
he published The Pope’s Men, a detailed
statistical analysis of the papal
bureaucracy) but he knew how to
generalise for a wider audience; his
Renaissance Rome 1500-1559 (1976)
vividly evoked the feel of the city which
he had lived and breathed for much of his
life. He was happy to range across the
widest of canvases as in his 1982 study of
the myths that were constructed around
the Templars, The Murdered Magicians,
and his 1999 history of Christianity, Two
Thousand Years.
He came from a family of publicans
and policemen but it became clear from
an early age that he would go in a
different direction. As a schoolboy during
the Blitz he would help his mother run
the family cafe in Barnet but then set off
on his bicycle to Charing Cross Road to
buy books on Rome, only stopping on the
way back to watch London burning.
After war service on mine sweepers
he went to Oxford to read law but quickly
switched to history. His marriage to Leila
May Fadil (niece of the historian Albert
Hourani, the founder of Middle East
Studies in the UK) opened his eyes to
contemporary politics in the Middle East
and he was soon combining his historical
research with work as a journalist for The
Observer in Rome and the Middle East.
His leading article on the Arab nations in
early September 1956 presciently
described how any attempt by the West to
humiliate Nasser would turn the tide of
sympathy for Egypt, carrying all Arab
governments with it, and his reporting
helped shape the paper’s stance on the
Suez crisis, culminating in its famous
condemnation of Eden.
Throughout his career he alternated
writing about Christianity and Rome with
3
works on the Middle East and
his books included A Short
Political Guide to the Arab World,
published in 1960, and Arab
Voices, the BBC Arabic Service
1938-88, published to mark its
first 50 years. One of his last
books, God of Battles (1997)
traced the shared experience of
holy war in Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. His
intent was to attack the
contrasts drawn between the
West and Islam with all their
attendant simplifications and
prejudices. Although he was
writing before the watershed
events of 2001, his underlying
thesis that extremist
movements in modern Islam are far from
all-pervading and should be traced to the
political and economic contexts of the
twentieth century (not least a feeling of
hopeless exclusion from the economic
gains of the post-war era) remains as
relevant as ever.
A term as a temporary don at Win
Coll in 1955 led to him staying here for
thirty years. At first his snappy Italian
suits and ties marked him out in a world
where tweed jackets with leather patches
were de rigueur, but as time went on it was
his academic work that gained him the
respect of colleagues and pupils. That he
was able to continue the tradition of
scholar-schoolteacher when it was
marginalized elsewhere was all the more
striking in that he hardly excelled in
many of the attributes expected of
schoolmasters. Indeed his ten years as
Housemaster of Kenny’s, which colleagues
quickly renamed Liberty Hall, could be
seen as an experiment in what could
happen in a vacuum of authority, though
it was one that oddly confounded
expectations. He tapped away unceasingly