Few historians can have embraced his chosen discipline by a more chequered route than John Grenville who summed it up as “from gardener to professor”. As a historian (writing as J. A. S. Grenville), his career may be said to epitomise an important historiographical transition.
After specialising in diplomatic history, he had perceived the need to move away from the rather dry study of international relations, as reflected in treaties, towards an understanding of the impact of social change on the conduct of nations. “The enforced ability to be bilingual and learning other languages,” he wrote, “pointed me towards the study of foreign policy and international history. Later I realised that in the 20th century foreign policy cannot be fully understood without giving ideology its due weight.”
John Ashley Soames Grenville was born in Berlin in 1928 into a well-to-do German Jewish family His childhood proved happy until 1938 when he was expelled from school after he had denounced a textbook on race to his fellow pupils. His father who had been a high court judge was sent to a concentration camp, but later released on receipt of a visa to enter Britain. In March 1939 he and John were assigned to a Kindertransport. John’s mother accompanied them to the railway station. They never saw her again. She died in a concentration camp in Riga.
Unable to speak English, Grenville reached Harwich whence he was taken to Mistley Place, a boarding school where he remained until the age of 13. His school fees were paid by a lady who wished to remain anonymous. His father, meanwhile, worked in a munitions factory.
On leaving Mistley Place Grenville was prevented by a Jewish immigration committee that sponsored him from taking up a scholarship to a public school. Instead, he was apprenticed to a tailor in Leeds. His father, however, paid for further schooling out of his meagre wages. Grenville then entered the Cambridgeshire Technical School where he studied building. Still keen to go to a grammar school, he applied to the Perse School whose head agreed to take him free of charge, but the Jewish committee would not allow this. Grenville became a laboratory assistant in an insecticide factory, but, when his hair turned green, a doctor advised him to take up an open-air job. He became assistant gardener at Peterhouse. Still anxious to better himself, he sought permission to use the college library. This was granted on condition that he should never seek admission to the university as a student.
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By now his interest in history had been aroused. He signed up as an evening student at Birkbeck College, University of London, and in 1948 became a full-time student at the London School of Economics where he was taught by Sir Charles Webster among others. After gaining a first class honours degree, Grenville wrote a doctoral thesis which was published in 1964 as Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century.
This earned him appointment and rapid promotion to a readership at Nottingham University. He also began a life-long relationship with the US as a Harkness Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Yale. There he met his first wife, Betty Anne Rosenberg, who died in 1974. They had three sons. He married in 1975 Patricia Carnie, with whom he had a daughter. With George B. Young he published in 1969 Politics, Strategy and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy 1873-1917.
In 1966 Grenville moved to a chair at Leeds University where he set up a new degree in international studies. Becoming interested in film as historical evidence, with Nicholas Pronay he produced The Munich Crisis of 1938 and The End of Illusions: from Munich to Dunkirk. He also collaborated with Dieter Frank of Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen to produce a TV series, The World of the Thirties, seen worldwide and followed by two more series.
In 1969 he was appointed to the chair of modern history at the Birmingham University. Subsquent publications included Europe Reshaped, 1848-1878 (1976) and The History of the World in the Twentieth Century (1994). In 1980 he became a visiting professor at Hamburg University. This prompted a return to his roots and to research into the relations between Jews and non-Jews in Hamburg under the Third Reich, the subject of a forthcoming book. In 1992 he succeeded Arnold Paucker as editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
He is survived by his second wife and four children.
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Professor John Grenville, historian, was born on January 11, 1928. He died on March 7, 2011, aged 83