Today’s academics could profit much by studying the life of the doyen of Oxford’s Nuffield College
The obituaries following the death of Sir David Butler on November 8 leave no doubt about his exceptional fame as pioneer of the reporting and analysis of elections and as tele-don supreme. Yet his greatness tends to be underrated.
Only with his passing and with the death in June 2021 of his close friend, former flatmate and colleague Dr Zbyszek Pelczynski, also well into his nineties, can I start to appreciate my exceptional good fortune in having been taught by, befriended by and then worked with two giants. Each of them remained primarily committed to their students, both in Oxford and more widely; in different ways, each had international influence on crucial matters of democratic governance; each were devoted husbands and fathers.
When I came to Oxford for an admission interview with Zbyszek, then in his late thirties and the recently elected politics fellow at Pembroke College, I did not know of course that around that time he’d been invited with David, also a late thirties bachelor, to a theatre and dinner date in London arranged by a couple both working at the BBC, Tony and Joy Whitby. Tony, who was to fall ill at a tragically early age, had been a post-graduate supervisee of David’s at Nuffield College, Oxford. The Whitbys invited two young ex-Oxford BBC women, intending Denise Cremona for David and Marilyn Evans for Zbyszek. Their matchmaking proved far more successful than they could have imagined though each paired for life with the woman intended for the other.
Exceptional gifts come in very different forms. David was all too ready to speak of his intellectual limitations. He left philosophy, political theory and advanced statistics to others. He appears to have had little taste for internal university politicking.