2 Colin Matthew (1941–1999)

Abstract This chapter describes Colin Matthew's early life and his career as a professional historian. The youth who went up to Oxford in 1960 was independent minded and resilient but still reserved, and at times even tongue-tied. In 1978 he had been elected to a Tutorial Fellowship at St Hugh's College. Colin's two-volume analytical biography of Gladstone, based for the most part on his successive Introductions, was published in 1986 and 1995 and won him the Wolfson Prize for History. Colin was active in helping the University to meet some of the challenges of recent years. He stood for pragmatism and common sense, and yet he remained at heart an idealist. Fully alive to what he once called ‘the charm and the danger of Oxford’, he was preoccupied in a wholly Gladstonian way with how such institutions might evolve organically to perform newly required duties, without sacrifice of their fundamental purposes.