Ross McKibbin

Background

Ross Ian McKibbin was born in Sydney, Australia, in January 1942, the son of Arnold Walter McKibbin, a teacher, and his wife, Nance Lilian, a daughter of Clarence Spence, a bank manager from Bega.

Education

In 1959, Ross enrolled at Sydney University, around the same time that his father was offered a bureaucratic post in the city's Education Department. At the university, he involved himself in the Labour Club, wrote a dissertation on the origins of Australian nationalism.

Keen to access British archives, he completed his doctorate on the party's early history under the supervision of Pat Thompson at St Antony's College, Oxford, between 1964 to 1967.

Career

After studies Ross McKibbin returned to Australia to lecture at the University of Sydney between 1968 and 1969; finding, once again, that he needed ready access to British archives, he was appointed a Research Lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1972, McKibbin became a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, and remained there for the rest of his career.

He wrote The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910-1924 in 1974. Listener critic John P. Mackintosh called that work a “serious historical analysis’ and claimed that it does a good job of helping the reader understand how the Labour Party came to replace the Liberal Party as a popular alternative to the Conservative Party. Reviewer Kenneth O. Morgan praised McKibbin’s work in the Times Literary Supplement for bringing new understanding to the history of the Labour party and for his scholarship and perseverance in collecting research for the subject.

In The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950 McKibbin challenges the often touted premise that the “labour process breeds militancy and radicalism in the same way ... that a nuclear reactor breeds fissionable material.” Times Literary Supplement reviewer Harold Perkin praised McKibbin’s use of his fluent research and knowledge to challenge many of the assumptions made about the British working class.

McKibbin’s 1990 publication Twentieth-Century British History was co-edited with John Rowett and is an attempt to add to the perceived scarcity of material on the subject.

Between 2006 and 2015, he was an Emeritus Research Fellow at St John's College and in 2015 he became Emeritus Fellow.

Achievements

• Ross McKibbin is an influential Australian academic historian, whose studies have focused on working-class life and the politics of the Labour party and the labour movement more generally. His most important academic works include The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924, Classes and Cultures. England 1918–1951 and Parties and People: England 1914–1951.

Works

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  • The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950

    (In this incisive analysis of the social character of the ...)

    1950
  • Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951

    (In this fascinating study, Ross McKibbin exposes the fund...)

    1998
  • The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910-1924 1974

Politics

McKibbin states that the Labour party, because of its intentional lack of ideology, was not designed to serve as a front for socialism or even to represent the “true” or total voice of the British working class. The Labour Party’s lack of an official platform caused some to fear that it might be swallowed up by the Liberal party rather than maintaining its own identity.

Membership

McKibbin was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and later, he was elected an honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Connections

Father:

Arnold Walter McKibbin

Mother:

Nance Lilian Spence

Grandfather:

Clarence Spence

tutor:

Ernest Bramsted

coworker:

John Rowett

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 181