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Robert Gildea robert.gildea@history.ox.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
History Workshop Journal, dbae003, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbae003
Published:
03 April 2024
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Robert Gildea, Rod Kedward (1937–2023), History Workshop Journal, 2024;, dbae003, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbae003
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Rod Kedward, who died on 29 April 2023, was a pioneer of the study of the French Resistance in the UK, and its doyen for fifty years. When he began work on this in 1969, he was confronted by two embedded discourses of resistance heroism: the Gaullist and the Communist. The French archives on the Second World War were still closed. Kedward cut through the ideological straitjackets and lack of official documentation by undertaking ‘history from below’. He ranged freely across towns and villages of southern France, the former Unoccupied Zone of Vichy. Interviewing former resisters in order to elicit their stories of engagement and struggle he was thus also a pioneer of the fledgling discipline of oral history, at a time when it was criticized as an inferior methodology by the historical establishment in both Britain and France.
Harry Roderick Kedward was born on 26 March 1937 at Hawkhurst, Kent. He was the son and grandson of Methodist ministers; his grandfather, Roderick Kedward, was also a Liberal MP for Bermondsey, then for Ashford in Kent. His father Neville Kedward, a minister in the South Yorkshire coalfield and a naval chaplain, and his mother Nancy (née Judge), a drama teacher, were effectively leading separate lives when he was a teenager. Rod was educated at Kingswood School, Bath, which had been founded by John Wesley, and was captain of both rugby and cricket. In 1957 he won an Open Exhibition to read modern history at Worcester College Oxford, where he was taught by Harry Pitt. His Nonconformity led him to study the English Civil War Special Subject and he graduated with first class honours in 1960. He then did a B.Phil. in history at St Antony’s College, where he was supervised not by Theodore Zeldin but by James Joll, who had just published Intellectuals in Politics, with additional tuition from Wilfrid Knapp (father of historian Andrew Knapp), who was then working on Michelet. Rod went to Paris at the tail end of the Algerian War and witnessed the 17 October 1961 violence against protesters of Algerian origin while writing a dissertation on a constitutional royalist politician, ‘Albert de Broglie. A political study, 1821–1874’ (1962).
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Memoirs and Obituaries
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