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Carr, Sir (Albert) Raymond Maillard

Title: Carr, Sir (Albert) Raymond Maillard (1919–2015)
Author: María Jesús González
https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.110364
Published online: 10 January 2019
Licensor: Oxford Publishing Limited
Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear

Copyright © Oxford University Press 2025

Carr, Sir (Albert) Raymond Maillard (1919–2015), historian and college head, was born on 11 April 1919 at 37 Magdalen Avenue, Bath, the only son of Reginald Henry Maillard Carr (b. 1891), and his wife Ethel Gertrude Marion, née Graham (1882–1966). His father, a village schoolmaster, was a strictly religious, conservative, and strong-willed man. From him Carr inherited self-discipline, a love of the countryside, and a quick temper, but also an interest in literature and a boundless curiosity about the past. Yet he would soon rebel, becoming an anti-imperialist, a precocious theoretical communist, and a lifelong atheist. His mother, the daughter of a railway platelayer, worked as a Post Office clerk. Carr’s memories of her were of a sweet but uncultured woman typical of the class he was determined to escape.

Raymond Carr’s childhood was one long trip through rural England following his father’s personal odyssey through the schools of the West Country. A gifted scholarship boy at Brockenhurst County High School, Hampshire, Carr was encouraged by his father to learn languages. He travelled first to Besançon and Bordeaux and then to Freiburg im Breisgau at the height of the Nazi regime, an experience which both amazed and disturbed him. On his return he won a scholarship in modern history to Christ Church, Oxford, arriving there in October 1938, the heyday of the so-called ‘red Oxford’, and was immediately seduced by the place. After befriending Philip Toynbee and flirting with the Communist Party he succumbed to other temptations. The clever and charming undergraduate moved easily in that overwhelmingly male and highly privileged environment. New friends, such as Simon Asquith, the prime minister’s grandson, introduced him into a circle of grand families, stimulating an appetite for that world which would earn him the soubriquet ‘Julien’, the main character in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir. But he also worked very hard: ‘one of the rare cases in which slightly less work should be counselled’, reported one of his tutors (tutorial reports, Christ Church).

When World War II broke out Carr was declared medically unfit for duty, and was not seconded to other war work (oddly, considering his mastery of foreign languages and that his tutor was John Masterman, a leading intelligence recruiter). Instead he finished his course, obtaining both a first-class degree and a Gladstone research exhibition. His first posting was to Wellington College, Berkshire, where he taught history and English to the sixth form while exploring the pleasures of wartime London, playing jazz, and revelling in the raffish ambience of such places as the Cavendish Hotel. The artist John Skeaping identified him as ‘a bright spot on the horizon: brilliant, eccentric as a clockwork orange, and delightful company’ (Skeaping, 139). From 1945 the novelist Nicholas Mosley, just back from the war, became an inseparable companion through the Soho ‘undergrowth’ and a lifelong friend. The return of permanent staff, together with Carr’s lifestyle, hastened his departure from Wellington.

Oxford fellow

After a one-year lectureship at University College, London, in 1946 Carr won a prestigious prize fellowship at All Souls, Oxford. At that time he was working on early modern Swedish economic history and produced some remarkable pieces such as ‘Gustavus IV and the British Government, 1804–9’, published in the English Historical Review in 1945, and, years later, ‘Two Swedish Financiers: Louis de Geer and Joel Gripenstierna’, in a volume of Historical Essays presented to David Ogg (1963). His analysis of seventeenth-century Sweden impressed the eminent historian Richard Pares. He was then commissioned by A. L. Rowse to write a biography (which he later destroyed) of King Gustavus Adolphus. ‘Rowse didn’t like it, and I wasn’t happy with it either’, he later said (personal knowledge). Although very conscious of the privilege of belonging to All Souls, Carr never felt very comfortable there, and would join the internal battle for change and a more academic remit, supporting the wardenship of John Sparrow. Those were Carr’s most bohemian times when he was known as the ‘Soul of All Dons’. A close friend of the labour politician Tony Crosland, he combined an interest in left wing politics and seminars hosted by socialist G. D. H. Cole with excursions to London, where he called on Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana Mitford, and dropped in at the idyosincratic Gargoyle club. It was then that he met Sara Ann Mary Strickland (1926–2004), a beautiful and talented art student at the Slade, daughter of Algernon Walter Strickland and his wife Mary, née Charteris, daughter of Hugo Charteris, eleventh Earl of Wemyss. They married on 6 September 1950 at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Despite Carr’s reputation as a ladies’ man, Sara became his inseperable partner for life, at his side throughout his career, sharing cultural interests, society life, exotic trips, and a love for animals until her death. They had four children, three sons and a daughter.

It was on their honeymoon in Torremolinos that Carr ‘discovered’ Spain. The couple moved around in the footsteps of Rose Macaulay’s Fabled Shore and Gerald Brenan’s Spanish Labyrinth, and enjoyed the guidance of Julian Pitt-Rivers. They witnessed the pitiful situation of a once powerful empire ‘now a country suffering from shell-shock’ (Brenan, 13) and paralysed by poverty, repression, and National Catholicism. Sara felt compelled to feed hungry children in the streets of Madrid, and they both left notes under ashtrays in the cafés, saying ‘Down with Franco’ and ‘Down with the Church’. But the magnificent historical monuments and wealth of cultural diversity impressed them too. Carr returned to Oxford fired by intellectual curiosity about Spain and bursting with unanswered questions. By chance, Alan Bullock and Bill Deakin had just started an ambitious series, the Oxford History of Modern Europe, for which it was hoped Brenan would write the volume on Spain. It was his refusal which gave Carr the opportunity of undertaking a project that transformed his intellectual life.

Carr moved from All Souls in 1953 to become a fellow and tutor at New College, his lecturing style described by one undergraduate as ‘exotic, passionate, and uniquely enjoyable’ (private information). To pursue his research on Spain he obtained a special lectureship. He was even considered as the possible next warden of New College but was beaten by Sir William Hayter. In addition to research and academic duties he frequented society salons and country houses, hosted by the Flemings, the Astors, and the Egremonts. Carr himself was honorary president of the Bullingdon Club, and an enthusiastic party-giver. One episode involving his love affair with a young heiress and the accidental death of one of his students inspired the novel Accident (1965) by Nicholas Mosley, which was then made into a film in 1967 by Joseph Losey with a script by Harold Pinter and starring Dirk Bogarde.

St Antony’s College

St Antony’s College, a new foundation with a focus on international and area studies, was to be Carr’s final Oxford post. He moved there in 1964, at the invitation of its first warden, Deakin, with whom he travelled through Latin America, an area of topical political concern. There were those who suspected Carr of involvement in some intelligence mission. As early as 1961 he was in the Bay of Pigs, hanging about with binoculars and a long-lens camera. Arrested on suspicion of spying (although swiftly released for lack of evidence), he claimed he was birdwatching. When he was elected in 1967 to a chair in Latin American history, a journalist presciently wrote: ‘One of the very few post-war Oxford “characters” with a good chance of becoming legendary … a meritocrat, but not of the familiar modern kind. In a way he belongs more to the eighteenth than to the twentieth century … his interest in people, his humour and gusto, and the eccentricity which he has now brought under reasonable control, make him a good man to be the head of a college one day’ (Observer, 22 April 1967). Although still working on Spain, Carr would produce fine articles on Cuba and Mexican history and, years later, a significant study, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (1984). Yet Latin America was of secondary interest to him. In May 1968 he resigned the chair to succeed Deakin as warden (1968–87), navigating assorted trouble spots: potential student revolution, Cold War spy stories, and burdensome fundraising. In 1970 he founded the Iberian Studies Centre, dedicated to the study of modern Spain. His reputation helped it to attract scholars and encourage research into Spanish history in other British universities. The centre also trained some of the best Spanish historians and was visited by Spanish politicians, among them the Francoist ambassador to the UK, Manuel Fraga, in 1974, and years later the socialist leader and future prime minister, Felipe González, who arrived, in the wake of the failed military coup of February 1981, ‘much preoccupied’ (personal knowledge). In 1973, supported by Isaiah Berlin, Carr established an Israeli visiting senior fellowship with funding from the Rothschild Foundation in Israel (Yad Hanadiv). Those were years of intense academic and social activity. He had by then become a member of The Club, an influential group of handpicked Oxford grandees such as Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, William Hayter, Maurice Bowra, J.C. Masterman, Peter Strawson, Robert Blake, and Kenneth Wheare. As ever sailing too close to the wind, he now also embarked on a notorious love affair with Fanny Hill (daughter of his fellow Oxford historian Christopher Hill) and found time to indulge his most eccentric passion, riding to hounds, on which he later wrote an engrossing book, English Fox Hunting: A History (1976). A rich and documented socio-cultural history with a touch of his personal experience, it was followed by a ‘sequel’, Fox Hunting (1982), which he wrote with his wife Sara.

Carr’s academic prestige and cultural profile continued to grow. In 1968 he joined the board of the National Theatre and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977 and of the British Academy in 1978. In 1980 his name was put forward for the Regius chair of modern history (but he lost out to the military historian Michael Howard) and he became a distinguished professor at Boston University. In 1986 his first Oxford college, Christ Church, made him an honorary student. Although not a political animal, Carr was a committed European, a cultural pro-Zionist, and an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, whose nomination for an Oxford honorary degree he supported, against the tide. His knowledge and contacts in Spain made him a prized ‘inside informant’ for politicians, from Harold Macmillan to Tony Crossland and Thatcher. In 1987, the year he retired, he was knighted and made an honorary fellow of both Exeter University and St Antony’s College. He and Sara then moved to a thatched cottage in his beloved Devon countryside. But he did not stop writing, or attending academic meetings and social events in London. Frequently invited to lecture abroad, he spent the academic year 1989–90 as Sackler Visiting Scholar at the University of Tel Aviv, and 1992 as King Juan Carlos professor of Spanish history at New York University.

The Hispanist

Spain, 1808–1939, published in 1966 after fifteen years of in-depth research, was Carr’s magnum opus. Undogmatic and anti-sentimental, he distanced himself from Brenan’s engaging but populist and romanticized account. Carr also eschewed the stereotypes of nineteenth-century British travellers who imagined a country of anarchists, bullfighters, bandits, and moonlit romance. Instead he employed all possible sources and a multidisciplinary approach to provide a more accurate and complex historical portrait of Spain: counting the miles of railway track, calculating average rainfall, explaining the economy, political parties, and parliamentary life, military coups d’état, revolutions, and civil wars. Inspired by a reading of its literature, Carr produced masterful pen portraits of Spanish society and culture. Intellectuals, prime ministers, aristocrats, and rebels now acquired faces and humanity. Insightful and gracefully written, the book combined colourful and original explanations, scientific argument, and encyclopedic knowledge. It was widely reviewed and gained spectacular international recognition, placing Spain centre stage and reviving interest in the country’s history and politics. Carr’s even-handed approach helped the work negotiate Francoist censorship and appear in Spanish in 1969. His broad sweep met a crying need in Spanish historiography. He rescued nineteenth-century Spain from the ‘dustbin of history’ to which it had been consigned by Franco and dealt with ‘taboo’, ‘difficult’, or even ‘impossible’ subjects for Spanish historians of the day. The book became the standard text on modern Spain for a whole generation and retained its prestige for many decades thereafter.

With his erstwhile pupil, Juan Pablo Fusi, Carr later wrote Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy (1979), which appeared at a key moment when the country was undertaking the uncertain journey towards democracy—the so-called ‘Transition’. It hit the bookshops in time for the 1979 Spanish general election and became an instant bestseller, winning the Espejo de España literary prize. Its masterly analysis of the whole period, wealth of fascinating detail, and inclusion of post-war developments made it unputdownable. It also breathed a ‘serene neutrality’ at a time when people were eager for consensus, and portrayed Spain as a ‘normal’ European nation. The New York Review of Books printed a lengthy and complimentary review by the then ageing Brenan, significantly entitled ‘Out of the Labyrinth’. Together with Carr’s lesser-known volume, The Spanish Tragedy: The Civil War in Perspective (1977), it cemented his international reputation, his work now characterized as ‘incontestably the most important contribution made by any English historian to Hispanic studies in this century’ (Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, 182).

Carr’s academic impact and popularity in Spain were unprecedented. Journalists sought his opinions about the political situation and he was respected and acclaimed by both right and left. This British historian and ‘lover of Spain’, this simpático Hispanist, this ‘wise and distinguished’ Oxford academic and knight of the realm, with his long legs and permanent smile, grew into a figure that sloughed off the academic straitjacket and became a media personality. On his frequent visits to Spain he was received almost like a rock star. When the Oxford historian Richard Cobb toured the country with him in 1989 he wrote: ‘It was like travelling with royalty. Raymond is, quite rightly, a National Institution’ (Heald, 192). Carr was invested in 1983 by King Juan Carlos with the grand cross of the Order of Alfonso X el Sabio; in 1987 Queen Sofia gave him the medal of honour of the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo; in 1999 he was awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias prize for social sciences; in 2000 he received an honorary degree from the Universidad Complutense; and in 2012 the Fundación Banco Santander prize for Anglo-Spanish relations.

Final years

After the blow of Sara’s death Carr moved to London, to an apartment in Fitzgeorge Avenue, West Kensington. In his last years the sheer breadth of his intellectual and social interests was reflected in his many and various writings published in newspapers and periodicals. A frequent contributor to The Spectator, he aired his views on politics, life, literature, and history. A selection of those pieces was gathered as a sort of intellectual autobiography in El rostro cambiante de Clío (2005).

Carr, who was a distinguished academic but also an original, ‘never left a subject the same as he found it and he had the art of being serious without ever being solemn’ (private information). He was considered part of a ‘fabled Oxford generation’ that included many of his friends such Anthony Quinton, Freddie Ayer, John Bayley, Isaiah Berlin, David Cecil, Ian Little, and John Cooper (The Independent, 25 June 2010). An insatiably curious man, a passionate historian, and a hard worker (his listed bibliography runs to some thirty pages), he abruptly gave up writing on the death of his artist son, Matthew, in 2011. He himself died of pneumonia on 19 April 2015. He never wanted a funeral: ‘I’m a committed atheist, for God’s sake!’ (personal knowledge). A commemorative seminar was held in his honour on 27 November 2015 at St Antony’s College. His ashes were scattered in the same place as Sara’s, on Hoar Oak, Exmoor, a remote and romantic place where the family once loved to ride to hounds.

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