I first met Valerie Pearl in the summer of 1966 when she was
a lecturer at Somerville College, Oxford. I had gone to see her at the
suggestion of my supervisor, Christopher Hill, to ask her advice on the 2nd
Earl of Warwick’s mercantile connections in London in the 1640s. She impressed
me with her depth of knowledge and her scholarship as she did when I met her by
accident the following autumn on a train from Oxford to Paddington.
I was not, I fear, a very good conversationalist and had to
improve greatly in the following spring when Hugh Trevor-Roper asked me to
assist her on a project then being funded by the University’s Faculty of Modern
History. I got to know her in the Manuscript Room of the British Library where
she was pursuing her research into the Parliamentary politics of the 1640s.
After a while, I learnt how well-informed she was about academic politics and
what a good sense of humour she had.
I was saddened to note how little attention her death in
2016 attracted at that time. She had been born in 1926, the daughter of a
trades union official, Cyril Bence, who was later Labour M.P. for East
Dunbartonshire from 1959 to 1970. Valerie Bence was educated in Birmingham
before entering St Anne’s College, Oxford. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s letters suggest
that she was at that stage of her life attracted to Marxism: her doctoral
research on the city of London in the early stages of the English Civil War was
certainly supervised by Christopher Hill of Balliol College, the leading
Marxist historian of the period then in Oxford even though she was later more
drawn to Trevor-Roper’s views.
Her thesis was, so I understand, lent by Hill to Perez
Zagorin, then on the far left himself, and had to be published rather hurriedly
by the Oxford University Press in 1961 under the title London and the Outbreak
of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics. It was to be
her only book but was seminal in inspiring later work on the city of London in
the latter part of the twentieth century.
The 1960s were undoubtedly her best period as an historian.
Tall, blond-haired with dark spectacles and very elegantly dressed, she wrote
and published important articles on the middle group in the House of Commons
after John Pym’s death and on the Royal Independents whilst a lecturer at
Somerville College, Oxford. Unfortunately, her husband became ill and she was
unable to take up a Fellowship at Somerville College because she could not move
full-time to Oxford. Instead, she accepted a Readership in London History at
University College, London at the invitation of Joel Hurstfield and Robin
Humphreys.
The History Department there lacked the stellar figures to
be found in Oxford (with the exception of the young Nicholas Tyacke) and, after
producing articles on Puritans and Fifth Columnists in the capital and on
London’s Counter-Revolution, her output came effectively to a halt. In 1981,
she accepted an invitation to become President of New Hall, Cambridge in
succession to Rosemary Murray and found herself submerged not just in the
administrative duties of that post but also in the difficult politics of that
college. When she retired in the mid-1990s, she had transformed that college’s
fortunes but had not fulfilled her potential as an historian. Sadly, she was
never to do so.
The obituaries published after her death were brief and not
very informative. In her prime, she was a formidable scholar with extensive
knowledge of the politics of the 1640s, far better informed than most
contemporaries of hers. Valerie Pearl was a woman of charm and high
intelligence as well as someone with a firm conviction in doing what was right
for her family, friends and institutions. Her passing needs greater
acknowledgement and her historiographical legacy more praise.
Chris Thompson
