Professor Gavin Drewry reminisces about Professor W J H Sprott a visiting lecturer in in the Sociology Department.
I joined the Bedford Sociology Department in 1966, as a junior research assistant and one of my earliest memories is of arriving quite early one morning and encountering Madge Simonis, our redoubtable departmental secretary, scurrying down the corridor, muttering crossly to herself, and carrying an office armchair. ‘What on earth are you doing, Madge’, I asked. ‘Those wretched students’, was the gist of her reply – and she pointed at the wooden arm of the chair - on which someone had carved, probably with a penknife, the words, ‘Grotty Sprotty’. ‘Jack Sprott is coming in later today’, she said, ‘and I don’t want him seeing this.’ Whereupon she flung the offending item into an empty office and locked the door.
The unknowing victim of this outrage was Professor W J H Sprott, who was a visiting lecturer in criminology in the Department for several years, following his retirement from the University of Nottingham in 1960. Having graduated with a double first in Moral Sciences from the University of Cambridge, he had begun his career at Nottingham in 1925, as a Lecturer in Psychology, and had then risen through the ranks to become, in 1948, Professor of Philosophy, the position that he occupied until his retirement.
From my very slight acquaintance with Professor Sprott as a colleague, I formed the impression of an elderly, courteous and quietly spoken gentleman-scholar. I was familiar with his textbook on Sociology, that I had used intermittently as an undergraduate and I had read his Pelican paperback, Human Groups’. What I did not realise until much later – partly through happening upon the entry on Sprott, by the Oxford sociologist, A H Halsey, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - was just what a very distinguished and interesting man he had been. As Halsey’s essay makes clear, not only was Sprott a major contributor to the early development of the social sciences, spanning many decades and several sub-disciplines, but he had also, outside the university world, been a significant figure in the Bloomsbury Group: he was the lover for several years of John Maynard Keynes and was (in Halsey’s words) ‘an intimate’ both of Lytton Strachey and of E M Forster, whose literary executor he subsequently became. In the Bloomsbury world he was given the soubriquet, ‘Sebastian’ – but he later became ‘Jack’, the name by which he was known to senior colleagues at Bedford. To students and to junior staff like me, he was always Professor Sprott!
He must have had very many interesting stories to tell, and I wish that I had known more about him and engaged him in conversation at the time. He left the Department in or around 1968 and died three years later.
What about that armchair incident? I remember being told by some of our students, that Professor Sprott often fell asleep in seminars, particularly after lunch. I have some circumstantial corroborative evidence of this, having acquired his office desk, in which there was a collection of bar bills (I still have them!), on which bottles of gin featured very prominently. Perhaps my informants, whose names, they may be relieved to know, I have forgotten, included the possessor of the offending penknife? If so, now is surely the time to confess! And, if any of our readers have memories of Professor Sprott that they might like to share, we at this Newsletter would be delighted to hear from them.
Gavin Drewry
Professor Drewry is Emeritus Professor of Public Administration at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. He worked in the Sociology Department at Bedford College from 1966 until 1984 and (semi-) retired from RHBNC in 2009.
