SAVILIANS ON SAVILIANS: MICHAEL BENTLEY ON MRD FOOT

M. R. D. Foot – Michael Foot (1919-2012), not to be confused with long hair and monkey jackets, was the Savilian son of a Savilian.  The family had a strong military streak which helps explain Michael’s distinguished war service and his later involvement with the history of the Special Operations Executive and the often-secret resistance to the Third Reich in Britain, France and the Netherlands.  Although he was a member of the Paras during the war and dropped behind enemy lines, he was principally an historian and his postwar years saw him editing the earlier volumes of the Gladstone Diaries – MR Gladstone to you: he was touchy about that – and then writing a number of volumes of Official History for which he and his books needed FO clearance.  When he wanted to arrange a confidential conversation on such matters, he booked a side table at the Savile.  Nowhere safer, he used to say.

His son-in-law recalls him in this short talk and highlights his personality and achievements.  He will also recall Michael’s fastidious manners and skill in conversation and conviviality: the things at which Savilians excel.

Michael Bentley – often called ‘Foot’ by Savilians because of my marriage to Sarah Foot, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford,  I actually knew her father before I knew her.  We both advised on a series of micro-form publications (remember those?) run by another friend, Charles Chadwyck-Healey, whose firm you may recall but who misguidedly got himself elected to Brooks’s rather than Brook St.  When I ‘joined the family’, as Michael liked to say, I got to know him well and indeed he proposed me for the Savile in 2001 when I was a Professor at St Andrews and when a berth in London would be immensely helpful on my visits. Typically, he thought of that and acted on it. I also am an academic and, like him, I write history books: not about war and derring-do but about the history of British politicians who rarely do any derring; but also about historians across time and space and the way they make pictures of the past from particular standpoints and prejudices.  Michael’s only failing was that he did not drink enough, which his why he only made it to 92, so, as you see, I do what I can to make up lost ground. It will be a privilege to recall Michael’s eventful life with affection and to rekindle affection in those fortunate to have known this charming and popular Savilian.