In Memoriam: Tommy Pritchard
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1Dr Thomas Pritchard died on January 18, 2024, as a result of injuries received in a road accident on Christmas Day, 2023. He was one week short of his thirty-second birthday. He had been due to contribute a paper on ‘Disraeli and the Art of Political Collaboration’ to the conference from which these proceedings are drawn. It has not proved possible to discover any copy of this communication. Consequently, the editors resolved, with the permission of his parents and executors, to include a revised version of one of the relevant chapters of his 2022 PhD thesis in these proceedings. It can be found below.
2Thomas Pritchard was an undergraduate, then postgraduate, student, and finally a staff tutor in the School of History at the University of Leeds between 2011 and 2022. As such, he was first a pupil and eventually my colleague. However, I furnished him with none of his most important ideas about Disraeli and Victorian politics. These were all his own. ‘Tommy’ was also a man of parts: a formidable rugby player—winning more ‘caps’ for the men’s University First XV than anyone, before or since. He also played golf off a ‘handicap’ of 4. He was latterly a successful businessman, landlord of the hugely popular ‘Fox Inn’, on Boar’s Hill, just outside Oxford. He became my good friend. What follows is the text of an address I delivered at his funeral at North Oxfordshire Crematorium, on February 29, 2024.
Funeral Address, North Oxfordshire Crematorium and Memorial Park,
Tackley, Kidlington, England – February 29, 2024
Thomas Pritchard, BA, MA, MAR, PhD
(1992–2024)
3Tommy—no-one ever called him Thomas—did not look like an academic. Representative samples of that species are generally: short of stature, voluntarily malnourished (another way of saying ‘vegetarian’) and badly dressed. Tommy was none of those things. He looked like the prop forward in a rugby scrum. That was because he often was a prop forward in a rugby scrum. Latterly, he sported the attire of a successful publican. This was because he became a successful publican. But ‘the landlord’, as his old friends styled him, was also a scholar. Moreover, he made an original contribution to historical knowledge. Since I had the privilege of being the supervisor of his PhD—in truth, I did little more than correct his grammar every now and then—I hope you will forgive me if I explain just how remarkable that contribution was, and is.
4Tommy was not the first, and he will surely not prove the last, to be fascinated by the extraordinary political career of Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister of this country during the reign of Queen Victoria. His achievement still remains almost inexplicable. For ‘Dizzy’ possessed few, if any, of the necessary attributes, either by birth or acquisition, then considered necessary to pursue so vaulted an ambition. He did not come from a distinguished family. He did not possess a grand country seat, held since time immemorial. Finally, so far from being securely rich, he spent most of his life on the verge of bankruptcy.
5The sheer strangeness of Disraeli’s success perplexed the Victorians. Many could account for it only in terms of his innate insincerity and sequential opportunism, the dubious personal qualities characteristic of the ‘exotic race’ from which he sprang. Twentieth-century historians rid themselves of the implied anti-Semitism in that judgment only by way of rueful praise for the very same qualities their predecessors sententiously disparaged. More recent interpreters have pointed to his seemingly unashamed insistence on being the chosen son of a chosen people.
6Tommy realised that none of this made sense. The Victorians may have been high-minded. But they were not naive. They would have recognised a rogue when they saw one. Furthermore, Victorian England was an all too self-consciously Christian society. Disraeli’s father had converted for just that reason. No sensible person would then have pursued an English political career—I use the term ‘English’ advisedly in this context—by emphasising his ethnic and religious peculiarity.
7I do not think it in the least fanciful to suggest that Tommy the cheerful landlord, even more so Tommy the dedicated team sportsman, imaginatively understood something concerning politics in general, and about nineteenth-century politics in particular, that solitary academics often miss, and that had in this case been curiously overlooked. This is that gregariousness and camaraderie are not just attractive, indeed winning, qualities, tout court. They are also assets, more still assets that can be deployed to real effect in the great game of politics. True, government was not, and is not, just a game—though many of Disraeli’s critics accused him of treating it in precisely that fashion. Truer still, as David Lloyd George once caustically remarked, ‘there are no friends at the top’. Truest of all, politics demands active co-operation amongst people who may otherwise despise each other, and this includes people ostensibly on the same side. Context and process—which is another way of saying reality—are (and is) everything. Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the United States of America, once put it thus: ‘In politics, this week’s chicken shit may be next week’s chicken salad.’
8Tommy appreciated, more clearly than anyone else before him, that Disraeli understood the value of what I shall call ‘political sociability’ better than all of those around him. He was too obscure a young man to have attracted a distinguished patron, and too much of an oddball to have been blessed by unselfconscious equals amongst the British upper classes. But he could—and did—collaborate with them, in part instrumentally but in part also sociably, exchanging position, respectability, and wealth for intelligence, skill and charm. Such relationships never developed into real friendships. But they were invariably cordial and often fruitful, on both sides. All his life, Disraeli forged collaborative relationships with members of the British ruling classes: with Lord John Manners and ‘Young England’, Lord George Bentinck and the Protectionists, finally the 14th Earl of Derby and what became the modern Conservative Party. Derby smoothed the path for Disraeli to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, Leader of the House of Commons, and, finally, Prime Minister. But he never invited him to dine at Sefton Park. Disraeli talked too much about politics at table for Derby’s taste. (Remember, Derby was three times Prime Minister of this country under Queen Victoria.) Through such collaborations, Disraeli made himself first useful, then indispensable, and, finally, preeminent. In the same way, he became Queen Victoria’s favourite public servant. No reigning monarch ever saluted a First Minister more fulsomely after his death than her. If you have not seen her heartfelt tribute to Disraeli, on his gravestone at Hughenden, pay a visit soon. It is not far from here.
9Tommy exploited this simple but seminal idea as the best way of both describing and explaining Disraeli’s career. He worked hard at commanding all the relevant sources, but no less onerously, in interpreting what they told him. In all of this, he demonstrated the psychological insight of a master, mature far beyond his years, even of one possessed by a delicate, almost feminine, intuition that belied his otherwise overwhelmingly masculine appearance. The result was a truly path-breaking work of history. It was also a wonderfully engaging essay in biography. Tommy’s infectious enthusiasm for this project only made his conclusions more convincing still. His external examiner, Professor Brian Young of Christ Church, Oxford, described Tommy’s viva—the oral defence of his work required of every PhD candidate—as the most impressive he had ever come across in his career. Had he lived, Tommy would have spent his 32nd birthday in Paris, presenting a paper to a distinguished academic conference on, you guessed it, ‘Benjamin Disraeli and the Art of Political Collaboration’.
10When someone good—when one of nature’s gentlemen—is cut down long before their ‘three score years and ten’, it is natural and proper for family, friends and colleagues to grieve, with a particular intensity, for their loss. When that person was also stirred by the creative juices, it is similarly common to lament what might have been. This is similarly understandable. But we should also recognise that some people achieve a lot in the few years permitted to them. They must be honoured as much as mourned. Dr Thomas Pritchard—‘Tommy’—was one of their number.
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Simon J. D. Green, « In Memoriam: Tommy Pritchard », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 101 Printemps | 2025, mis en ligne le 07 avril 2025, consulté le 17 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/16067 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13qt7
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