Basil Davidson (1914-2010)

Basil Davidson, who died on 9 July 2010 aged ninety-five, was a man of multiple talents and multiple lives. He was a soldier and a secret agent, a novelist and a journalist, a political organizer, agitator and commentator. He was even, for a brief time after he left school aged sixteen, a bill-sticker posting advertisements for tropical fruit. But he was perhaps above all – certainly for longest, for lasting international impact, and not least for readers of History Workshop Journal – a historian of Africa. Born in Bristol, Davidson soon moved on from that lowly role in the advertising business into journalism: a step closer, at least, to his teenage ambition to become a professional writer. In his early twenties he began to travel widely across Europe, sometimes on assignment, sometimes under his own steam. Such adventures, and the languages he rapidly picked up, caught the eye of recruiters for the newly-forming Special Operations Executive. In their service, but also always with a fierce individualism and independence, he worked undercover successively and often at huge risk in Hungary, in Egypt, with Tito's guerrillas in the Vojvodina and in northern Italy. (Decades later, indeed well into what for many men would be counted as old age, he was still travelling rough with guerrillas: this time anticolonial African ones in several countries.) By war's end he was a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, though he apparently never used the title except in self-mocking jest, with multiple decorations. In 1943 he married fellow SOE operative Marion Young. She and their three sons survive him.

Adventure · Art history · Economic history · Independence (probability theory) · Journalism · League · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Classics · History · Law