David Hey, Emeritus Professor of Local and Family History at the University of Sheffield, died from a cerebral tumour on 14 February 2016, aged 77. David was the leading local and rural historian of north Midland and Pennine England, an outstanding communicator, and accessible to all the many family historians who looked to him and his work for advice.
David was born at Jessop’s Hospital in Sheffield, 18 July 1938, and spent his first eleven years in the hamlet of Catshaw. He moved with his family into nearby Penistone at the age of eleven, where he was educated at the Grammar School, and secured his first degree at the University of Keele [then the University College of North Staffordshire] in 1960. He returned to his home county to teach, before becoming a lecturer at Matlock College of Education, subsequently securing MA in Local History with distinction at the University of Leicester (1967) and PhD (1971). David moved from a research fellowship at Leicester to the University of Sheffield’s Department of Extramural Studies in 1973, becoming successively Senior Lecturer (1982), Reader (1986), and Professor (1992). Sheffield awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2015.
David’s first major publication was a study of Ecclesfield, exploring a ‘dual economy’ in south Yorkshire in which farming was carried on with a variety of manufacturing trades, especially nailing and cutlery (Agricultural History Review, 17, ii, 1969). This was followed by the principal product of his PhD, An English Rural Community: Myddle Under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester UP, 1974), which also assessed themes of occupations in this largely pastoral Shropshire parish. His edition of the Rev Richard Gough’s, History of Myddle (1981, 1988) allowed a wider readership to enjoy this remarkable text, in which Gough described the parish, as if viewed family-by-family from his pulpit. A wider survey of farming systems in Yorkshire and Lancashire, using similar sources to those applied in Myddle and Ecclesfield, appeared as his contribution to the Cambridge Agrarian History of England & Wales, V, I, 1640–1750, (Cambridge, 1984), used soil type and geology, with probate records, surveys and contemporary accounts, exemplifying David’s core approaches to the study of locality and region.
Preparation for an extra-mural class at Sheffield led to the intensification of David’s interests in family history. Characteristically, he resolved to test his own credentials as a ‘family historian’ by tracing his four grand-parental lines as far back as he could. He succeeded far beyond his expectations, and found three of the four lines back into the sixteenth century, and all living in and around Pennine Yorkshire, with the fourth ‘exported’ to higher wage Devon with charitable help in the early nineteenth century, a perfect exemplar of the stability of the links between family and locality. This was a critical change in his future research, where David rapidly established an unequalled reputation as a family historian, and led to a series of fundamental publications in the field: Family History and Local History in England (1987); The Oxford Guide to Family History (1993); The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (1996); the handbook, The Oxford Dictionary of Local & Family History (1997); Journeys in Family History (National Archives, 2004); and Family Names and Family History (2000). His own work developed to combine family with the specifics of locality, memorably discussed in his inaugural lecture at Sheffield, where he demonstrated the continuity of residence in the broad locality for holders of surnames that derived largely in the fourteenth century from specific geographical features, using computer analysis of telephone directories. Such names as Hinchliffe, Atack, and even Hey were still to be found overwhelmingly concentrated within 50 miles of the homeland that had created them. Later work with George Redmonds and Turi King attempted to extend a genetic dimension to these studies.
These remarkable publications made David a key reference for the many thousands outside the ‘academy’ for whom family history has become a major leisure activity over the last quarter century. He was an impressive and exceptionally patient and helpful respondent to the many enquiries and requests for lectures that came his way. Lectures could be delivered in what his ‘extra-mural voice’, which needed no amplification, with excellent diction, a distinctive Yorkshireness, and engaging humour. His attainments and leadership in local history led to his election to the Presidencies of the British Agricultural History Society and the British Association for Local History, and the chairmanship of the British Record Society and of Local Population Studies.
He produced a very significant contribution to the transport history of the southern Pennines in Packmen, Carriers and Packhorse Roads (1980), which echoed and developed the pioneering work of W.B. Crump. Many later publications concentrated on South Yorkshire, with contributions to the History of the City of Sheffield, 1843–1993, 3 vols (1993), The Fiery Blades of Hallamshire (1991), History of Sheffield (1998), and histories of the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths (2010), the Cutlers of Hallamshire (1997). Contributions to several festschrifts for distinguished scholars of the ‘Leicester school’, W. G. Hoskins and Joan Thirsk (twice, with a further essay in the press) marked David’s intellectual heritage and standing. A further book, The Grass Roots of English History, was in the press at his death.
David was very much a man of the Pennines and the Peak, who loved walking and remained very fit, always looking much more youthful than his years. He drank little, but was very sociable, and in the right circumstances a second half pint could release his wonderful capacity to deliver Marriott Edgar monologues in a voice more authentic than Stanley Holloway, often ‘The Lion and Albert’, or, less frequently, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, to the great delight of any assembled company. He was a delightful and engaging character, welcoming to all, and he will be greatly missed by the large community of local, family, and regional historians, both professional and amateur. He is survived by his widow, Pat, and their children, Emma and Jonathan. Very appropriately, his funeral was celebrated in Dronfield Hall Barn, for the restoration of which David had acted as patron, and had written two studies on the barn and the village.
University of Leeds
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