H S Ferns

Professor

Henry Stanley Ferns

Born| (1913-12-16)16 December 1913

Strathmore, Alberta, Canada

Died| 19 February 1992(1992-02-19) (aged 78)

Birmingham, United Kingdom

Nationality| Canadian
Education| University of Manitoba (BA)
Queen's University, Kingston (MA)
University of Cambridge (MA, PhD)
Known for| The Age of Mackenzie King: The Rise of the Leader (1955)
Reading from Left to Right: One Man's Political History (1983)
Spouse|

Maureen Jack

(m. 1940)​

Children| John, Pat, Chris and Eleanor
Scientific career
Fields| Political Science, History
Institutions| University of Birmingham

Henry Stanley Ferns (16 December 1913 – 19 February 1992), known as Harry Ferns, was a Canadian-born historian of Anglo-Argentine relations.

## Background and career[edit]

Ferns was born in Strathmore, Alberta, the eldest son of a poultry farmer.[1] He was educated at St John's High School in Winnipeg, the University of Manitoba, Queen's University, Kingston, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class degree in history in 1938.[2][3] Having won a scholarship to study at Cambridge, it was while travelling on a passenger ship across the Atlantic to take up his place that Ferns met a retired Indian Army major, who "advised him not to wear his bowler hat in Cambridge and converted him to the communist cause."[1] Upon arriving in Britain he thus became an assiduous far-left student activist, at one stage convening the 'colonial group' of the university's Communist Party (although, according to his obituary in The Times, he refrained from becoming a "dues-paying member" of the party itself).[1][4] His closest associates in that group were Victor Kiernan, Pieter Keuneman and Mohan Kumaramangalam.[5]

Returning to Canada in 1939, Ferns joined the civil service and worked for a time in the private office of the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, before leaving in 1944 to teach at his alma mater, the University of Manitoba.[5] Having been offered and then denied the opportunity to lecture in history at a naval college in British Columbia – which he believed was due to his having been blacklisted – he later returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD.[1] In 1950 he obtained a post teaching modern history and government at the University of Birmingham, becoming professor and founding head of the political science department in 1961. He retired from the university in 1981.[1][3]

## Books[edit]

In terms of his academic output, Ferns is perhaps best remembered today for the biography of Mackenzie King that he co-authored with Bernard Ostry, The Age of Mackenzie King: The Rise of the Leader (1955).[6][5][7][8] Although the book was "viewed with shock" in Canada because of its somewhat critical view of King, it was received well elsewhere.[1] Equally important, however, were Ferns's pioneering works on the history of Anglo-Argentine relations. In 1960, he published Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century, which "established his eminence as a scholar in Latin American affairs".[1] Later publications include Argentina (1969), La crisis de Baring, 1890-1893 (1969), and The Argentine Republic, 1516-1971 (1973).

## Political views[edit]

By the 1960s, Ferns had renounced his earlier communist ideals and come to embrace free-market economics – a journey from Marxism to proto-Thatcherism that led Eric Hobsbawm, who knew him as a fellow communist at Cambridge, to describe him as "extremely conservative".[4] His main ideological preoccupation at that time concerned the idea of the "independent (i.e., non-state) university", and in 1967 he authored a polemical work, Towards an Independent University, that was published as a pamphlet by the Institute of Economic Affairs.[9] His efforts in this area were eventually rewarded with the establishment in 1976 of the University of Buckingham, Britain's first modern-day private higher education institution.[1] Ferns recorded his ongoing political evolution in his memoir, Reading from Left to Right: One Man's Political History (1983).

## References[edit]

1. ^ a b c d e f g h "Professor H. S. Ferns", The Times, 4 March 1992, p. 15.
2. ^ "University News", The Times, 20 June 1938, p. 21.
3. ^ a b "FERNS, Prof. Henry Stanley". Who's Who & Who Was Who. Vol. 2023 (online ed.). A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
4. ^ a b Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: a Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), p. 292. ISBN 037542234X
5. ^ a b c H. S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man's Political History (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1983). ISBN 9780802025180
6. ^ Dummitt, Christopher (2010). "Harry Ferns, Bernard Ostry and the Age of Mackenzie King: Liberal Orthodoxy and its Discontents in the 1950s". Labour/Le Travail. 66 (Fall/Autumn): 107–139.
7. ^ Macquarrie, Heath N.; H. S. Ferns; B. Ostry (1957). "The Age of Mackenzie King: The Rise of the Leader". The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. 23 (2): 276. doi:10.2307/138696. ISSN 0315-4890.
8. ^ Mansergh, Nicholas; H. S. Ferns; B. Ostry (1956). "The Age of Mackenzie King: The Rise of the Leader". International Affairs. 32 (3): 336. doi:10.2307/2608127. ISSN 0020-5850.
9. ^ H. S. Ferns, "An independent university" (Letters), The Times, 21 January 1976, p. 17.

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*[m.]: married