Obituary: Christopher Hibbert (original) (raw)

It is a well known fact that Christopher Hibbert, who has died aged 84, was the best loved and most widely read popular historian of the latter part of the last century. "It's a well known fact that ..." was how he would start, and embark on some wildly exaggerated and embroidered story to the delight of his friends and family. "No, really! An extremely well known fact," he would insist.

Hibbert was not a specialist; his oeuvre encompassed topics ranging from the Battle of Agincourt (1964) to The English: a Social History 1066-1945 (1987) to a biography of Benjamin Disraeli (2004). His fourth book, The Destruction of Lord Raglan (1961), won the Heinemann Award for Literature. He had more than 50 books published and was, said the Times Literary Supplement, "perhaps the most gifted popular historian we have".

His favourite subject was Italy. He wrote Benito Mussolini (1962), Garibaldi and his Enemies (1964), Anzio and the Bid for Rome (1970), The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (1974), biographies of Rome (1985), Venice (1988) and Florence (1993). Throughout his career, his works, extensively researched, were always written in a spidery longhand, which would later be transcribed by a stenographer. One such, a woman who had led a somewhat sheltered life, was dealing with a racy passage in his The French Revolution (1981). She stopped typing and turned to her husband: "What's pornography, pet? Because I think I'm typing it."

Hibbert, though, was never sensational for sensation's sake. He wrote in a careful, measured and meticulous style, not seeking to impose his personality on his prose, preferring to present the facts to the reader, to set his story out before them, rather than to embellish his research with supposition, theory and conjecture.

He was born in Enderby vicarage, Leicestershire, where his father was the vicar - and later canon. Hibbert was the second of three children, and christened Arthur Raymond. He went to Radley school in Oxfordshire and later Oriel College, Oxford, but reading history was interrupted when he was called up.

He joined the London Irish Rifles in 1943, where, on his first day in uniform, he acquired his new name. His regimental sergeant major caught sight of the 18-year-old Hibbert, who looked even younger than his years: "What have we got here? Christopher fucking Robin?" The name Christopher stuck.

He served as a London Irish Rifles infantry officer with the 8th Army during the Italian campaign, being awarded the Military Cross during the attack on the German fortification on the River Senio during the winter of 1944-45. He was wounded twice while fighting along with the partisans during the battle of Lake Comacchio in April 1945. He then moved on to become personal assistant to General Alan Duff at allied force HQ in Italy. In a field hospital in Italy, he met the actor Terence Alexander - most famous for playing Charlie Hungerford in the TV series Bergerac. Hibbert was in the next bed to a German soldier. At least one nurse neglected to dress the German's bandages. Hibbert and Alexander tenderly did so, on the grounds that the war was hardly this individual's fault, any more than it was theirs.

Back at Oxford, Hibbert met Susan Piggford, a fellow undergraduate, who was reading English at St Anne's College. She was the love of his life and they married in 1948. After graduating, he began a career as a land surveyor (1948-59) which he did not greatly enjoy. He wrote in his spare time, and, became television critic of the now defunct Truth magazine.

His wife supported his wish to make a living out of writing even though money would inevitably be tight, but she may have cut short his career as a fiction writer. Hibbert had written a radio play about adultery. Sue typed it for him but omitted the raunchy and saucy parts on the grounds that it would upset his parents if broadcast. The play was declined by the BBC. It was only some time later that his wife confessed to that; but by then, his career as a historian had started.

His first book, The Road to Tyburn (1957), was accepted by Longman, Green. There his editor was John Guest, who continued to be Hibbert's editor until his death in 1997. Then came King Mob (1958), on the Gordon riots and Wolfe at Quebec (1959). It was then that he became a full-time writer.

In 1971 he produced The Personal History of Samuel Johnson. Johnson was one of his heroes, and in 1979 he edited Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. The following year he was asked to become president of the Johnson Society. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was awarded a DPhil by Leicester University in 2000.

He enjoyed gardening, bringing home mud-caked vegetables for his wife from his "allotment" - a big corner of a friend's garden - the Simpsons and Coronation Street. The house was crammed with cats when his family was growing up. He was not a connoisseur of film, but liked the adventure of going to the pictures and loved taking his children to appallingly unsuitable films. He enjoyed anything from westerns to Carry On and was proud that he once helped Sid James park his car in Jermyn Street. Above all there was his family, and friends, for whom he would give big parties with big drinks.

Hibbert died in Henley-on-Thames, his home since 1954. He had had just over 60 years of an extraordinarily happy marriage. He was described by JH Plumb as a "writer of the highest ability", and by the New Statesman as a "pearl of biographers". He could not write a dull word if he tried, suggested the Sunday Times. He was uxorious and philoprogenitive, generous, loving, and loved. He was devoted to his children, James, Tom and Kate, and to his three granddaughters, as they were to him.