David Englander

Cheerfully proletarian was how E.P. Thompson once described David Englander. A native of Whitechapel, who could boast of having been bought ice-creams as a child by at least one of the more murky characters from Raph Samuel’s East End Underworld, David chuckled about the label with pride. He revelled equally in having received ‘six of the best’ from a headmaster called Rhodes Boyson, later a famous Thatcherite politician.

Following his undergraduate career at Warwick University, David did a PGCE and taught in London before returning to Warwick for an MA and then a PhD. Between 1976 and 1979 he was a junior research fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford, and from there he moved to the History Department at the Open University where he was to spend the bulk of his academic career.