King's College London

Professor Brian Bond, who was a pioneer of War Studies at King’s College London, died on 2 June 2025, aged 89. He had a long academic career as a distinguished military historian, serving as President of the British Commission for Military History, and was mentored from an early stage by the prominent military theorist, Sir Basil Liddell Hart — one of those valuable elements of chance in life that Brian openly recognised.

Although born in Marlow, Brian grew up and spent almost all his life, to the end, in Medmenham, Buckinghamshire. After grammar school and national service in the Royal Artillery (rising from gunner to second lieutenant), he read history at Worcester College, Oxford University, where his lifelong focus on military history was inspired by taking the Oxford Special Subject paper on Napoleonic military history taught by Norman Gibbs, Chichele Professor of the History of War. During Brian’s final year at Oxford, Liddell Hart moved to Medmenham, where Brian’s father worked as gardener for him. He learned of the younger Bond and showed great interest in him, encouraging Brian in his academic studies, especially the interest in military history. Liddell Hart allowed the keen Oxford undergraduate access to his extensive library and private papers, and to meet the many personalities who visited him at his home — as Brian would later introduce some of his own students to Liddell Hart.

After Oxford, Brian reluctantly and not very happily turned his attention to school teaching. Following an introduction from Liddell Hart, Brian joined an early cohort of Michael Howard’s proto-War Studies students, taking the new War Studies MA, which was at that time still based in the Department of History, graduating in 1962. His colleagues in that primordial soup included many who would go on to become eminent military historians, such as John Gooch and Peter Simkins. In this period, Brian held a one-year tutorship at the University of Exeter (1961) and was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Liverpool, where he stayed four years. In 1966, he returned to King’s as a Lecturer in War Studies, the third academic appointed to Michael Howard’s new Department, opened the previous year. Indeed, he had already been interviewed as a candidate the previous year, when Wolf Mendl was the successful candidate, a clear signal that Howard’s vision extended well beyond narrow military history to encompass ethics and sociology, as well as a broader range of disciplines, as War Studies grew. Brian remained at King’s for the remainder of his university career, appointed as Professor of Military History in 1986 and retiring in 2001. During that period as a lynchpin of the Department he also had various visiting positions: the University of Western Ontario (1972-3), the US Naval War College (1972-4), Brasenose College, Oxford (1992-3) and All Soul’s, Oxford (2000).

On being elected a Visiting Fellow of All Soul’s, albeit for a limited period, Brian felt he had really arrived, achieving one of his ‘dearest ambitions’. In that period, he prepared the prestigious Lees Knowles Lectures, delivered at Trinity College Cambridge that same year. These were published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 as the brilliant The Unquiet Western Front — an insightful and elegant exploration of the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain. These lectures and their publication in the years either side of his retirement was, in a way, icing on the cake of his career and the confirmation of his talent as a writer. This challenging and contested volume was an example of the kind of work that made him a ‘remarkably gifted military historian’, in the words of his one-time Head of Department in War Studies, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman.

His writing was extensive. An historian of the British army, Brian published books and articles on the Victorian army, Liddell Hart’s military thought, and the two world wars. Brian authored two significant survey works, War and Society in Europe, 1870–1970 (1984) — in some ways, the ‘war and society’ book embodied the approach Michael Howard had promoted in building War Studies at King’s — and The Pursuit of Victory from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein (1996). Generations of students at King’s and elsewhere will be familiar with these works, which remain essential reading in many history modules. His early research was on Secretary of State for War Edward Cardwell’s late Victorian army reforms, leading to two studies of Victorian military affairs, the edited volume Victorian Military Campaigns (1967) and The Victorian Army and the Staff College (1975). His works on the Second World War include a two-volume edition of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall’s diaries (1972–3), Britain, France and Belgium, 1939–40 (1975), and British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars (1980), his major research study that remains the standard work on the subject. Turning in his later career to the First World War and, in particular, the flawed historical memory of that conflict in Britain, he edited The First World War and British Military History (1991) and co-edited Haig: A Reappraisal Seventy Years On (1999). Subsequently, he published Unquiet Western Front and a second book that focused on the contested memory of the First World War in Britain, Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front (2008). The two strands of his thought came together in his final academic work as the Great War’s centenary approached, Britain’s Two World Wars Against Germany (2014), a strongly revisionist interpretation. Brian had sought to stir debate again, but was disappointed that the book was barely noticed. The experience led him to write his final work, Military Historian: My Part in the Birth and Development of War Studies, 1966–2006 (2018), an autobiography, which is a personal, amusing and contemplative reflection on the wider evolution on the subject of war studies and also on the department to which Brian devoted himself for 60 years.

The lack of response to Britain’s Two World Wars was not Brian’s only disappointment — and he was always honest in showing his disappointment. As a protégé of Liddell Hart, he was not happy on two fronts regarding his mentor. First, he was evidently put out, as his memoir made clear, that he was not chosen to be Liddell Hart’s official biographer. The late-Alex Danchev (another product of War Studies, one of Brian’s doctoral students) was preferred, with Kathleen, Liddell Hart’s widow, wrongly believing that Brian had said her husband had been a fascist. This was overcome as Brian was allowed — following Michael Howard’s intervention — to write an interim study of his book and ideas, but not touching on his life as a whole. This appeared in 1977 as Liddell Hart: a Study of His Military Thought. Brian had a balanced approach, avoiding any temptation to idolise his mentor. Sir Lawrence Freedman commented: ‘His relationship with Liddell Hart and his legacy was fascinating, for despite BLH being his mentor, he was well aware of his intellectual and personal flaws.’ However, the publication also ran into challenges: while reviews were generally good, two of them focused not on the book, but on Liddell Hart himself; unfortunately, these drew the attention of Kathleen, who, he wrote, ‘never really forgave me until her death bed’, even though they remained friendly and, indeed, Brian had not been responsible for the reviews.

Brian also had disappointments at King’s. When Wolf Mendl, who had been appointed before him, became Head of Department in 1978, Brian had wanted the role. And when Lawrence Freedman was appointed in 1982, Brian missed out again — though he did later recognise that the right appointment had been made. As the Department flourished and grew, he acknowledged the Head of Department’s qualities as a leader and manager — and he sometimes played crucial roles in that evolution, for instance, talent-spotting Christopher Bogaerts (Dandeker), a sociologist at Leicester, who really was a ‘war studies’ person, and who joined in 1990, shaping the new BA War Studies Programme and going on to succeed Freedman as Head of Department. It was also clear that writing and lecturing were where Brian excelled and that really had his focus. Indeed, his final disappointment was that he could not deliver one final, big lecture at King’s. He had been scheduled to deliver the annual Liddell Hart Lecture in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic prevented all public and social activities. As War Studies celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2021-22, a joint Liddell Hart–Annual War Studies Lecture was planned that would end a year of celebrations in October 2022. Brian had been so keen to round off his long and distinguished career with this lecture. It was with profound sadness that the lecture had to be cancelled, as Brian’s ever-worsening back pain and his caring for his wife, Madeleine, made it impossible for him to travel any more. It had meant so much to him, but he was simply not able, despite all the support offered, to make it. Brian’s salve was the hope that his longtime colleague and collaborator Brian Holden Reid would take on the Liddell Hart baton.

Brian was a key component of War Studies, not just for the 35 years he worked in the Department, but also during the incubating years from 1961 when he was a student and the long period after his retirement. He continued in various roles in the Department, notably overseeing a great initial expansion in PhD admissions, and lecturing on the history of warfare. He nurtured several generations of doctoral, masters and ultimately undergraduate students, inspiring many to enter academe or the professional world of military history and heritage, and supported them thereafter in their future careers. He was particularly proud, as he wrote to James Gow, that he ‘saw more than fifty of them achieve their PhDs.’ The PhD students who followed his lead into academic research — some already noted — reads as a Who’s Who of late twentieth and early twenty-first century British military historians. And following the example of his own mentors, Brian also nurtured the careers of promising military historians beyond the Department of War Studies, such as William Philpott who was his post-doctoral research assistant on a Leverhulme Trust funded collaborative research project ‘Government and the Defence of the Realm’ in the early 1990s — although Bill ended up in the Department when Brian retired, replacing him and continuing his military history focus.

He was also a leader and a pillar of the military history community for decades, serving as President of the British Commission for Military History for almost twenty years, in which role he established the Commission on a more professional basis and strove to develop the organisation as a meeting place for academics, practitioners and professional military historians beyond the university sector. He also gave his time and expertise to supporting the work of the Army Records Society, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives and the Western Front Association among others. He was a member and for three decades convener of the Institute of Historical Research’s Military History research seminar, an erudite and sociable community that has been meeting every other Tuesday for over sixty years.

For all his commitment to military history or war studies, Brian had two overriding passions in life. One was cricket, which, along with football, he played as a young man — he was in the College first teams for cricket, rugby and football at Oxford, and in the army he was saved from disciplinary action because he was an opening bat for the regimental cricket team! He continued to watch cricket as a priority throughout his life — many a time he would leave a meeting at King’s to ‘get to the cricket in time’! Brian’s other devotion was his wife Madeleine, who pre-deceased him in March 2023. They wed in September 1962 and spent just over six decades married, with the ailing Brian caring devotedly for Madeleine through her final illness. They had no children.

 

This piece was written by Professor Bill Philpott, Professor of the History of Warfare and Professor James Gow, Professor of International Peace and Security in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.