H S Ferns

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]

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).

By the 1960s, Ferns had renounced his earlier communist ideals and embraced 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).