Below is an obituary by his colleague and friend, Professor Brian Young.

William Thomas was affectionately known to generations of Christ Church historians by an acronym, ‘WEST’: William Eden Sherwood Thomas. It was, therefore, a nice irony, that William was the last of a distinguished group of Oxford historians – including Charles Stuart, his senior colleague at Christ Church, Penry Williams at New College, Cliff Davies at Wadham, and John Walsh at Jesus – to have been born in India in the closing years of the Raj. (E.P. Thompson was born in Bengal into a Methodist missionary family.) William was brought up in a Cantonment and had vivid memories of retreating to the Hills when the heat struck. I heard him read a short account of his childhood over 25 years ago, so beautifully and evocatively written that it has lodged permanently in my memory. 

Educated at King’s School, Canterbury, William did his national service in the army, including time in Germany, where he became a friend of the eminent historian of Qing China, Jonathan Spence. At Magdalen College, he was a protégé of A.J.P. Taylor; as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College his gift for friendship introduced him to a brilliant young Harmsworth Scholar, Tony Nuttall, a friendship renewed when Nuttall much later became a Fellow of New College. William especially enjoyed Nuttall’s literary intelligence, a sensibility he shared in his own way. 

In 1963, William moved to the new University of York, where he was a founding member of a legendary Department of History; it was with some sense of regret that he eventually succumbed to the call of a return to Oxford, arriving as what was still called ‘a lecturer with prospects’ at Christ Church in 1967, and formally elected Student and Tutor in Modern History the following year. (In those distant years of plenty, he had to choose between Christ Church and a fellowship at Oriel College.) 

William had a punishing tutorial load which he approached patiently, rapidly becoming popular with his pupils; his many college and faculty responsibilities held back his research, and it was as late as 1979 that he produced his lengthy and fascinating first book, The Philosophic Radicals, interlocking studies of followers of Jeremy Bentham focusing on particular elements of their reformist zeal; his chapter on ‘George Grote and the ballot’ is a lesson in scholarly precision and imaginative focus. 

William’s mastery of dozens of widely separated archives continues to dazzle more sedentary historians. Devotion to several college offices again got in the way of research, although his second study proved well worth the wait. The Quarrel of Croker and Macaulay, published in 2000,is a rich and rewarding study of the relationship between the High Tory Anglo–Irish politician and editor of the Quarterly Review (his review of Endymion supposedly having killed off Keats), and the Whig historian and politician. 

William published an incisive volume on John Stuart Mill for the OUP Past Masters series, which contained a memorable and lapidary characterisation of James Mill’s History of British India as ‘a monument of English philistinism.’ (Although William might appear to the culturally uninitiated to be quintessentially English, he was a proud Celt, of Welsh and Anglo-Irish heritage.) Despite, or because of, his just criticisms, he produced a characteristically thoughtful and discriminating abridgement of Mill’s History of British India for Chicago University Press. I had the pleasure of including an elegantly compressed essay by William in a double festschrift for John Burrow and Donald Winch which I co-edited with Stefan Collini and Richard Whatmore in 2000; he made me a gift of the original contributions which he had elegantly bound himself, having trained as a bookbinder at Oxford Brookes in his spare time. 

In a style Ruskin would have approved, William liked to make things, and he was a draughtsman of real ability and an excellent painter, specialising in water colours. A devoted family man, his relatively early marriage to Deborah secured them the accolade of being one of Oxford’s golden couples; they had two sons, Edward and Mark, and their daughter, Rosalind, is Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Balliol College and a Fellow of the British Academy. 

William had a pleasingly sardonic sense of humour and an alert historical intelligence; when I told him that one of the papers I taught as a lecturer at Sussex University was called ‘Concepts, Methods, and Values’, he laconically observed, in that richly textured voice, ‘Very sixties.’ It was a refreshingly good thing to be told in 1998! 

William was a generous scholar and a great encourager; he was an informal mentor to a formidable roster of historians who passed through the House as Research Lecturers, notably Colin Matthew, Ross McKibbin, Boyd Hilton, and John Robertson; I owe him a great deal as his successor, both by example and by his initiating me into what one might call the secret history of modern Christ Church. He was both a reformer and something of a conservative, a radical by temperament if a conservative by disposition; there was something of the Mr. Brooke of Middlemarch in him, and along with Tony Nuttall and John Burrow, I think of that ‘bit of a radical’ – the friend of Byron at Cambridge – as the honestly sane centre of Eliot’s novel. 

William was a devout if undoctrinaire Anglican. Katya Andreyev extolled his many virtues as Tutor for Admissions, and the producer of the first college prospectus; his rapport with old pupils meant that he was much missed and asked after at Gaudies. Personally, I shall greatly miss his air of slightly melancholy mischief but equally and happily I shall continue to learn from his close studies of the first half of the 19th century, territory he made his own; he was so intimate with his material that one felt he had personally known the many thinkers and politicians to whom he had devoted his considerable powers of scholarship. For a concentrated example of his historical and literary art, see his essay in History and the Imagination, the festschrift for Hugh Trevor-Roper, who trusted William’s judgement implicitly. The cliché once more proves true: we shall not see his like again. 

Brian Young