Albert Frederick (Freddie) Madden, a founder-member of this journal's editorial board, died on 10 September 2011, in his 95th year. His close friend and colleague David Fieldhouse writes:
I first met Freddie Madden in 1958; I had just returned from five years in New Zealand and had been elected to the Beit Lectureship in Commonwealth history. Fortunately for me, since I was anxiously looking for a job in England, Freddie, who had occupied the lectureship since 1947, had in 1957 been promoted to the recently vacant Readership in Commonwealth Government, with a professorial fellowship at Nuffield College. As a claimed descendant of the American Indian princess Pocohantas, he had been an undergraduate at Christ Church, initially reading English. He had switched to history when he found that his tutor merely gave him a topic for the next essay and made no comments on what he had written. He had a distinguished undergraduate career, winning both the Boulter and Gladstone prizes in 1937 and 1938 and the Beit Senior Scholarship in 1939 but surprisingly received only a second class in the final honour school. He completed a B.Litt. in 1939 (on early New Zealand) and a doctorate (on the Evangelicals and imperial problems) in 1940. From 1946 to 1948, he was assistant librarian at Rhodes House and was elected to the Beit Lectureship in 1947. For him election to the readership was s a very valuable promotion since the Beit Lectureship, established before 1914, was a half-time job. It had been set up to enable fellows of Oxford colleges to devote part of their time to researching and lecturing on colonial history as a sideline. It had had many distinguished holders, but only for five years at a time. Freddie was the first to hold it for longer, for ten years, by 1957. This had meant that he had to teach endlessly in Rhodes Hous to make a living (he had no college fellowship) and Vincent Harlow, then Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, had constantly tried to persuade him to take a permanent job elsewhere, including Canada. Although Freddie appeared to be in thrall to Harlow, who had brought red brick attitudes to the role of professor from his previous chair in London, Freddie had hung on and, in effect, ran imperial and Commonwealth history, giving the basic lectures and running the main history seminar on imperial history for the final honour school. Since Harlow spent most the week in London researching for his major work on The Founding of the Second British Empire, and came into Oxford from Old Marston only on Fridays, when he saw postgraduate pupils, gave a lecture and chaired the postgraduate seminar on Commonwealth history, Freddie was the essential provider for the subject.
This gross overloading helps to explain why he had then published so little. His most significant publication was an excellent chapter in Volume 3 of the Cambridge History of the British Empire, which had been passed down to him at very short notice when Harlow decided not to write it. In addition, he and Harlow had published a series of documents on British imperial policy between 1774 and 1834, as the basis for the History Faculty's final-year special subject on the empire, and Freddie had published a short collection of documents on constitutional issues relating to the empire for another final honour paper on British constitutional history. In the meantime, Harlow had persuaded Freddie to start work on a constitutional history of the empire, to be published in a single volume of text with an additional volume of documents. Freddie was working on this when I first knew him. How far he had got then with the main text, then or later, I never found out. But as soon as I was elected he persuaded me to collaborate with the collection of documentary material, which I continued to do until I left for Cambridge in 1981. The documentary volumes were to be ‘Madden and Fieldhouse’, but after I went to Cambridge he decided that I could no longer take as active a role, so that, when the documents were eventually published, they were by ‘Madden with Fieldhouse’. He then recruited my successor as Beit Lecturer, John Darwin, and their volumes were by ‘Madden and Darwin’.
My main role was to organise the mass of his documentary material. Apart from published material he got research assistants, mainly postgraduates, to work through and type out the relevant material in the Public Record Office. By the time I came on the scene, he had a mass of typewritten sheets. In 1965, I took all the material to Canberra, where I was spending a sabbatical year at the Australian National University. I sorted it all out under subject headings, adding a number of documents on Australian constitutional and political history which I researched in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. I took it all back and announced that, subject to his review, it was ready to go to the publisher, with whom he had a contract. But I was over-confident. Freddie said that was fine but he had not yet footnoted it. He proceeded to do so, with immense care and high scholarship, and meantime more documents were collected. By the early 1980s there were enough documents and footnotes, the latter often longer than the document itself, for several volumes. By then the contracted publisher had decided that academic interest in the constitutional history of the Commonwealth and the use of select documents by students had declined since the work had started and the contract was voided. We now had to find a substitute publisher. I contacted Robin Winks of Yale, a close friend and expert in the subject, and he suggested the Greenwood Press in Connecticut, which specialised in publishing work of this kind. But it had to be provided as camera-ready copy. We got a contract with them, and Freddie got his secretary at Nuffield to type out the first volume in the correct format. Unfortunately, although computers were then available, Freddie insisted that the typing was by ordinary IBM electric typewriter, so the margins were not justified and the end product looked like a DPhil thesis. Freddie then flew to America with the documents, which were eventually published. It was followed by seven more volumes. It was, and remains, by far the most detailed and erudite record of the constitutional history of all parts of the British Empire and Commonwealth, a worthy testament to Freddie's vast knowledge and academic ability.
But Freddie was by no means confined to scholarship. He was a man of many parts. In the 1930s he suffered from a bad back, which kept him out of the services during the war, but enabled him to get on with his research and teaching. He can best be described as an all-rounder. He could well have become a professional actor and took a leading part in amateur play productions, particularly in Abingdon, near where he lived until 1957. Plays in which we saw him there included The Lady's not for Burning and The Rivals, always in the leading role, where he had a resemblance to Lawrence Olivier. Within limits set by his back, he was a keen games-player. He loved playing cricket and playing squash with his wife, Margaret, before work on many weekday mornings. In 1957, after he was elected to the readership, they moved to a big house with a large garden on Shotover Hill. There he cultivated his garden and enjoyed the large bluebell wood he owned. They entertained widely. There they gave parties when the bluebells were out for many friends and colleagues. He supported the Samaritans and gave blood regularly to the NHS. Later, when the house became unnecessarily large, they built a bungalow in the grounds in which Freddie had a small study which resembled a shrine. There also they bred barn owls as an endangered species. This was not always successful (one young brood was eaten by its parents), but they persisted.
Freddie was an enthusiastic college man. He was its dean of degrees for fifteen years, chairman of senior common room for many years, He stood in for domestic bursars when they were away or there was a gap. In 1964, he did me the huge service of proposing me for the then vacant post of domestic bursar at Nuffield, for when I returned from Australia in 1966. This would also give me a college fellowship, which was very important for me after seven years without one, in local terminology a ‘non-don’, and therefore outside the core of collegiate Oxford. Outside college, he played many roles in the university. He was director of the Oxford Institute of Commonwealth Studies from 1961 to 1968, then vice-chairman of the Modern History Board for five years. He was academic adviser to the Devonshire Course which brought colonial officials back for a refresher course. He supervised very many postgraduate students. In short he was indefatigable. He was a visiting lecturer or fellow in many Commonwealth countries and the USA. Although he never produced a normal monograph he co-edited several collections of essays and festshrifts, notably Kenneth Robinson and Frederick Madden (eds), Essays in Imperial Government Presented to Margery Perham (1963) and Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (eds), Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth: Essays presented to Sir Edgar Williams (1982). He never gave up in retirement, even after the sad early death of his wife, Margaret, then living in Stanford in the Vale, near Faringdon, in sheltered accommodation.
He continued to get to Nuffield whenever possible for feasts and special occasions and to review and write. No one did more to preserve and publicise imperial and Commonwealth history in the second half of the twentieth century. He was an outstanding scholar and a delightful friend.