By Gavin Drewry (former Bedford College staff, 1966-85; RHBNC, 1985-2009)
My former colleague, Professor John Edwards, a long-serving and distinguished member of the academic staff at Bedford College, and then at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, died on 26 January 2023, at the age of 79. He had been in poor health for quite some time.
John was born and brought up in Coventry, where he attended King Henry VIII School. He graduated in Sociology from the University of Bath in 1967, and then embarked on a long and productive academic career with research posts at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham and then at the Universities of Southampton and Leeds, where he undertook an evaluation of the Home Office’s Urban Programme.
In 1975 he was appointed to a lectureship in Social Policy in the Department of Sociology (later to become the Department of Social and Political Science) at Bedford College. His early research focussed mainly on urban policy and the social dynamics of inner-city life, but his interests started to move in a more philosophical direction, and much of his work in the 1980s and thereafter explored issues to do with ethics and public policy and with human rights and affirmative action. His extensive and sometimes controversial work in the latter area, notably a study of the morality of racial preference in Britain and America, attracted widespread attention and he became involved in an important, and politically sensitive, study of fair employment legislation in Northern Ireland. He also developed significant research links with other universities in the UK and elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. He was appointed to a personal chair at RHBNC in the mid-1990s. And he served a two-year term as Head of the Department of Social and Political Science, from 2001 to 2003.
He eventually retired in 2008 but, despite the deterioration in his health during his retirement years, he retained an active interest in research and scholarship up to the time of his death.
John Edwards was very much a bon viveur. He had a fondness for fast cars. He was a generous host and an enthusiastic Francophile. He prided himself on his knowledge of French wine. He and his wife, Bridget, who survives him, spent many very happy days both in their charming house in Hampton and in their French second home.
