NEWSOME, David Hay 1929-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 15, 1929, in Leamington Spa, England; died April 28, 2004. Historian, educator, and author. Newsome was a scholar of Victorian England and former master of Wellington College. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he earned a B.A. and M.A. with first class honors in 1954, his first post was as history master at a private boys school in Wellington, where he later also headed the department for three years. In 1959, he joined the faculty at Cambridge University as a fellow of Emmanuel College. He served in a variety of tutor and lecturing posts there until becoming headmaster of Christ's Hospital in 1970. A conflict with the school in 1979 concerning coeducation policies led Newsome to resign, but he was quickly appointed master of Wellington College, which he headed until his 1989 retirement. Always conservative in his ideas about education, which often stressed the Christian history of the institutions for which he worked, Newsome was respected by his colleagues even when they tended to adhere to the more liberal theories of education that began to spring up in the 1960s and 1970s. His history books reflected his concerns, including A History of Wellington College, 1859-1959 (1959), Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies in a Victorian Ideal (1961), and The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (1997). Newsome, who was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and member of the Royal Society of Literature, also earned a Whit-bread Book of the Year Award in 1980 for editing On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson, the Diarist (1979).

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PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), April 30, 2004, p. 39.