Trevor Burridge obituary

My friend Trevor Burridge, who has died aged 91, taught British history at the Université de Montréal in Canada for many years, and wrote three books, What Happened in Education (1970), British Labour and Hitler’s War (1976) and Clement Attlee: A Political Biography (1986).

Born in Cardiff, Trevor was the eldest of the five children of Margaret (nee James), a housewife, and David, an aeronautical engineer. Educated at Canton school in the city, he did national service with the RAF in Iraq, followed by teacher training in London.

In 1958 Trevor moved to Montreal, where he studied for a degree in history from the Sir George Williams University. His PhD, awarded by McGill University in Montreal, concerned the defence strategy of the Labour party between the 1920s and the 40s, with Labour becoming the primary focus of his research and publications.

Teaching in schools in Montreal led him on one occasion to join a school trip to Cuba – before the missile crisis – and an encounter with Che Guevara, who stormed into the classroom and then just as quickly left, on deciding Trevor was not with the CIA.

A few years later, at a game of bridge, Trevor met Sandra Moulton, whom he married in 1966. In the same year he began teaching the history of education at McGill University, where he remained until 1970 when he returned to the UK to spend two years based at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he embarked on his Attlee research.

In 1974, at a time of separatist ferment, the Université de Montréal employed Trevor to teach a new course on British history. He took a sabbatical year between 1986 and 1987 to teach at one of the Sorbonne faculties in Paris.

Trevor retired in 1996 and he and Sandra settled in Oxford. I first met him in 1998 when renting a room in his house while I was working at an Oxford research unit. At that time Trevor was doing background research for a book that the former editor of the Observer, Kenneth Harris, was proposing to write on Tony Blair and New Labour.

Trevor had met Harris when researching his book on Attlee in the early 70s, while Harris was working on the official biography of the Labour leader that was published in 1982. Harris did not continue with the Blair project and thus Trevor was left to pursue what, after his family, were his greatest loves: France and tennis.

A man of mordant wit and culture, Trevor could be generous with people when he felt they deserved it, but abrupt when not. When I took him and Sandra to see the Welsh National Opera’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Birmingham, he lasted until the end of the quintet in act three whereupon he stood up, muttered, “I have had enough of this – Wagner was a madman!”, and walked out. Trevor was more at home with the comic verve of Rossini and the rhythmic sonority of Molière than German profundity.

He is survived by Sandra, their children, David and Esther, and grandson, Julian, and by two siblings.