Peter Searby obituary

Peter Searby, who has died aged 93, began his working life as a school teacher and later became a lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Fitzwilliam College.

There he embarked on the 10-year effort that resulted in the publication in 1997 of A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. III, 1750-1870, a magisterial account of the university’s development during a period of unprecedented change.

I had the good fortune to be Peter’s pupil when he was head of history in the 1950s at one of the new comprehensives, Caludon Castle school, in Coventry. I was later to teach at the Liverpool Institute high school, which Peter had attended during the second world war. This created a common bond between us which, when we met again 20 years ago, led to many subsequent happy meetings.

Peter was born in Liverpool, the son of Arthur, a shipping clerk, and Elsie. Following a history degree from Liverpool University he taught in the city, and in 1959 moved to Coventry to take up his post at Caludon. Even as a young teacher, he combined a quiet authority with a genuine concern for individual pupils.

From there he went to lecture at the City of Coventry teacher training college and, in the mid-1960s, did a PhD at the recently opened Warwick University under the supervision of the leading authority on working-class history, EP Thompson. Peter himself developed a keen interest in the Coventry Chartists and became chair of the local branch of the History Association, pioneering an important series of booklets.

In 1956 he had married Norma Griffiths, and in 1968 they and their young family moved to Cambridge. There he continued his work on Victorian Coventry and started his research on the university history.

After leaving Cambridge in 1994, Peter was a visiting professor at Greenwich University, south-east London, for two years. In later life, his academic interests shifted to his parents’ era and, specifically, to the home front during the second world war. With Robert Malcolmson, whom he had met at Warwick, he edited two Mass Observation diaries, and he was the sole editor of a third, Cambridge at War: The Diary of Jack Overhill, 1939-1945 (2010).

Throughout his working life Peter would cycle to work, and family holidays were often spent under canvas.

He is survived by Norma, their children, Catherine, Shelagh and Joe, and grandsons, Ruaridh, Wilfred and Arthur.