C. R. M. F. Cruttwell

Apart from its physical effects, Cruttwell's wartime experience seemingly inflicted permanent psychological damage on his personality, replacing the general good manners of his youth with a short-tempered, impatient and bullying character.[6] The novelist Evelyn Waugh, an undergraduate at Hertford in the 1920s, wrote later that "It was as though he had never cleansed himself from the muck of the trenches".^[7]

On his return to Hertford College, Cruttwell was elected to a fellowship in modern history and a year later was appointed Hertford's dean, responsible for general discipline within the college; he held this post for five years. He also became active in the administration of Oxford University and was elected to its ruling body, the Hebdomadal Council. He served as a university statutory commissioner and was one of several academics nominated by the Vice-Chancellor as delegates to the Oxford University Press.^[2]

Cruttwell's administrative competence was recognised in 1930, when he was elected principal of Hertford College. In this office, he helped to establish the university's geography school and arranged that the first Oxford professorship in geography was based at Hertford. During his tenure as principal, he completed his most significant academic works, including his Great War history (1934) which earned him the Oxford degree of

Evelyn Waugh joined Hertford College on a scholarship in January 1922. He had received a congratulatory letter from Cruttwell welcoming him to the college and complimenting him on his English prose: "about the best of any of the Candidates in the group".^[12] Despite this warmth, Waugh's initial impressions of his tutor were unfavourable—"not at all the kind of don for whom I had been prepared by stories of Jowett."^[13] The main basis for the rift that rapidly developed between them was Waugh's increasingly casual attitude towards his scholarship. Cruttwell saw the scholarship as a commitment to hard and devoted study. Waugh, however, considered the scholarship a reward for his successful school studies and a passport to a life of pleasure.^[14] He involved himself in a range of university activities to the detriment of his academic work, until Cruttwell brusquely advised him in his third term that he should take his studies more seriously—a warning which Waugh interpreted as an insult. "I think it was from then on that our mutual dislike became incurable", he wrote.^[13]

During his remaining time at Hertford, Waugh missed few opportunities to ridicule Cruttwell. He did this in numerous unsigned contributions to Isis, including an article in March 1924 in the "Isis Idols" series. The mockery in this article was disguised as a paean of praise, according to Waugh's biographer Martin Stannard, arranged around an unflattering photograph of Cruttwell displaying "bad teeth within an unfortunate smile".^[15] Cruttwell made no apparent response to these provocations, other than a dismissive reference to Waugh as "a silly suburban sod with an inferiority complex".^[16]

Waugh left Hertford in the summer of 1924 without completing his degree, and he received a brief note from Cruttwell expressing disappointment with his performance.

Cruttwell's professional reputation has been overshadowed by the attention given to his feud with Waugh, the true significance of which, according to Geoffrey Ellis's biographical sketch, may have been exaggerated.[2] Cruttwell's experiences as a soldier were such that he spent his entire career writing about war, according to another biographer. "In A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World (1937) he wracks his brains for peaceful changes that were not contingent upon war".^[25] His standing as a military historian is largely based on his 1934 Great War history, which Ellis praises as "most notable for its frank and fearless judgements on those identified as the principal actors (military, naval and political) in that tragic conflict".^[2] The work was widely praised in the press at the time of publication;^[4] The Naval Review thought that its description of the Battle of Jutland was "admirable": "for those who wish to gain a clear but not too detailed idea of the general course of the war, and of the relations of the different parts of it to one another, the book should be invaluable".^[26] Against this, the Royal United Services Institute's review thought the book under-sourced and the quality of its writing poor in places.^[4] More recently, writer and broadcaster Humphrey Carpenter has criticised the book as lacking in humanity, displaying "almost no awareness of the appalling degree of suffering it chronicles".^[27] Nevertheless, historian Llewellyn Woodward considered it "the most profound study of any war in modern times", and the inspiration for his own Great War history of 1970,^[4] while strategist Colin S. Gray describes Cruttwell as "the most balanced of the historians of that conflict".^[28]

Cruttwell's relations with his colleagues and students have been the subject of contradictory reports. Waugh's biographer Selina Hastings describes him as "unprepossessing" in appearance, "good-hearted but difficult", inclined to misogyny, brusque and sometimes offensive towards his male colleagues.^[6] Waugh's description is of someone "tall, almost loutish, with the face of a petulant baby", of indistinct speech, who "smoked a pipe which was attached to his blubber-lips by a thread of slime".^[29] Stannard records that Waugh's student contemporary Christopher Hollis found nothing particularly remarkable about Cruttwell. "Like Waugh", says Stannard, "Cruttwell played up his eccentricities and had an uncharitable sense of humour".^[23] Ellis's 2004 biographical sketch suggests that much of Cruttwell's rebarbative manner may have been the result of simple shyness.^[2]

There was clearly mutual animosity between Cruttwell and Waugh, and Hastings points out that Cruttwell would have been justified in suspending Waugh from the college on numerous occasions but did not do so.^[30] Ellis acknowledges a "forceful, forthright and eccentric character" but stresses Cruttwell's generous hospitality to close friends and his concern for his undergraduates' welfare.^[2]

A list of works published by C. R. M. F. Cruttwell:

• The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T.F.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1922.
• British History, 1760–1822. London: G Bell & Co Ltd. 1928.
• European History, 1814–1878. London: G Bell & Co Ltd. 1932.
• A History of the Great War 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1934.
• Wellington. London: Duckworth. 1936.
• The Role of British Strategy in the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1936. (published version of the 1936 Lees-Knowles lectures.){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1937.
• The Medieval administration of the Channel Islands: 1199–1399. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press. 1937. (Co-author with John H Le Patourel; George Norman Clark; Maurice Powicke.){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)