The Times - UK (2022-04-05)

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Professor Sir Tony Wrigley could be an
obstinate man when he knew he was
right. Once, on a family holiday in
Wales, he resolved an argument over
the width of a country road by getting
out of his car and lying across the road
at multiple angles. On another occa-
sion he proved the principle of centrifu-
gal force to his startled children by
swinging a bucket of water around his
head in the middle of their bedroom.
Not a drop was spilt.
As a young fellow at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, this stubborn streak had
proved useful. It was the 1960s and he
had been specialising in historical de-
mography. The trouble was, the statisti-
cal study of population depended, at the
time, upon scant records provided by
the first decennial census in 1801 — and
these shed little light on why popula-
tions had changed during the Industrial
Revolution.
Wrigley hit upon a method that
would fill in the gaps, one that would
mean taking on Thomas Malthus, a
giant in the field. In his An Essay on the
Principle of Population (1798) Malthus
had argued that population growth was
stalled by “positive checks”, in the form
of war and food shortages, and “pre-
ventive checks”, in which marriage and
childbirth were delayed as a result of
falling incomes.
Wrigley thought that, while probably
correct, Malthus had not provided an
adequate mechanism for proving his
theory. He looked for inspiration to
what scholars in France had started do-
ing, namely studying parish registers of
the 17th and 18th centuries to examine
population change through “family re-
constitution”. Wrigley was intrigued by
this technique but David Glass, then
Britain’s leading demographer, and his
former dissertation supervisor, told
him the French method was a non-
starter when it came to explaining Brit-
ish population growth.
Wrigley persevered. In 1964 he and
his former tutor Peter Laslett founded
the Cambridge Group for the History of

a singular eyebrow or a barely audible aside in his Lancastrian burr. Edward Anthony Wrigley was born in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, in 1931. Like his paternal grandfather, his father, Ted, was a Unitarian minis- ter. His mother Jessie (née Holloway) was a schoolteacher. At the age of eight Wrigley was evac- uated to north Wales with his brother Nick, leaving behind his sister Rachel and their parents. There he received a rudimentary education (most of which was self-directed) in an English-only

school. He also developed what would become a lifelong fascination with rural life. His favoured companion was a pet goat called Dindini who would follow him around like a dog. Wrigley returned to England to attend the King’s School, a grammar in Macclesfield, where he formed a close bond with his history teacher. He was also interested in maths but the school would not allow post-certificate students to study the subject. He felt the analytical absence in his academic ar- moury later on, though his research

Population and Social Structure and from their small office in Silver Street, Cambridge, they gathered data on bap- tisms, burials and marriages from hundreds of English parishes over a 300- year period, in which the population rose from three to 21.5 million. The country’s first parish-register- based study, executed through radio appeals and volunteer groups and con- sisting of hundreds of charts and graphs, proved Malthus’s “preventive check” theory: that the English modi- fied their fertility in a way that ensured they avoided the worst effects of population growth. Wrigley’s findings spawned one of the most influential works in the field of historical demography during and after the Industrial Revolution. Co-written with Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871 was published in 1981 and became known popu-

larly as Wrigley and Schofield. This daunting, 800-page volume is, to this day, considered the definitive work on the subject. A number of “glittering prizes” came Wrigley’s way too. After creating a new demography department as a professor at the London School of Economics between 1979 and 1988, he became a senior research fellow at All Souls Col- lege, Oxford, before returning to Cam- bridge in 1994 as master of Corpus Christi College. In 1996 he was knight- ed for his academic work and the following year he was elected president of the British Academy. Despite these academic laurels, Wri- gley was an unassuming and unostenta- tious man. And while his diffidence towards others could sometimes come across as coldness, he had a wry humour that was imparted with the slight arch of

He had a wry humour

imparted with the slight

arch of an eyebrow

Email: [email protected]

Inge Deutschkron

Prominent author and speaker on the Holocaust whose extraordinary account of wartime survival helped Germany to confront its past

When the German parliament marked
the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s coming
to power in 2013, one eyewitness, Inge
Deutschkron, held the Bundestag
chamber enthralled. A small, elegant
woman, already in her nineties, she
spoke with characteristic directness
and vivid detail of how the Germany
she felt she belonged to descended into
Nazi barbarity.
There was the dismissal of her loyally
Prussian father from his teaching job,
the constant fear of boots on the stairs as
neighbours were taken away. There
were the humiliations as Jews were
made to change their names and wear a
yellow star, banned from owning a radio,
having a haircut or buying soap. She
spoke too of her own extraordinary war-
time survival, hidden by the owner of a
Berlin workshop and courageous Ger-
man families, as thousands, including
many from her wider family, were de-
ported to their deaths. Germans, she
always argued, had had a choice. Some
helped with shelter or food, some openly
cursed her as a Jew; the majority,
however, “simply looked the other way”.
She spoke with great personal
authority too about what happened
after Nazism: how far Germany had, or
had not, ever faced the enormity of the
Third Reich’s crimes. For Deutschkron,
unlike so many Holocaust survivors,
returned to postwar Germany, engag-
ing as a feisty journalist with its new

politics and society. She later became a tireless campaigner for remembrance. Disdained as a troublemaker by many in the earlier postwar German generations, she was celebrated, especially by younger Germans, towards the end of her life as a symbol of how their society had become once again a happily diverse one. Inge Deutschkron was born in 1922 in the Brandenburg town of Finsterwalde. Her family moved in 1927 to Weimar Republic Ber- lin, where her father was a schoolteacher and enthusiastic Social Democrat. As a girl Deutschkron used to help him and his friends sort leaflets in the back room of a pub. Then in 1933 the Nazis came to power and anyone with Social Democrat associations was a target. Her family were doubly vulnerable as her parents, despite being non-believers and consid- ering themselves fully assimilated, were Jewish. Schoolmates began avoiding her, calling her a “dirty Jew”. Her father Martin, who had fought in the First World War German army, won the Iron Cross and “felt German”, lost his job. He took part in under- ground resistance against the Nazi

regime but after Kristallnacht in 1938 decided to emigrate to Britain, assum- ing his wife and daughter would soon be able to follow him. They failed to get out in time. The ratchet had slowly turned on the Jews remaining in Berlin and deportations to the death camps con- tinued. Deutschkron watched in Febru- ary 1943 as police units started grabbing and removing Jews wherever they found them. Suddenly many of her family, friends and former workmates were gone. “I began to feel guilty. By what right had I hidden myself from a fate that could have been mine too?” After working as a forced labourer in a parachute silk factory, Deutschkron had had the good fortune in 1941 to come across Otto Weidt, proprietor of a brush-making workshop that employed mainly Jewish blind people and was seen by the authorities as useful for the war effort. As a kind of Berlin version of Oskar Schindler, Weidt took it upon himself to employ and help hide Jews on his premises. As the authorities pursued the few remaining Jews even more ruth- lessly after 1943, Deutschkron and her mother spent over two years more or

less on the run, “aware every single min- ute of the fragility of our existence”, liv- ing at one stage in a goat pen in Potsdam. They were helped by a few brave non- Jewish families — “simple craftspeople, retirees”, she recalled. “They couldn’t stand the barbarism and risked their lives to save ours.” Some 1,700 Berlin Jews survived thanks to these “quiet heroes”, the exceptions to the idea that all Germans sustained Nazi rule. After the war Deutschkron worked as a secretary in Berlin. Her new political hopes were punctured as she saw the Soviet occupiers’ forced merger in their zone of her Social Democrats with the Communist party, as they cement- ed total control. In 1946 she and her mother were able to join her father in Birmingham. He was waiting forlornly for a summons to return to Germany as a teacher. That never came, and he took out British citizenship. Deutschkron meanwhile, after studying languages and working for the Socialist International organisation, took the decision in the mid-1950s to move to what was then West Germany. She worked in its capital Bonn for the Reuters news agency and then as corre- spondent for the Israeli newspaper Maariv. Her encounters with a new German elite doing its best to focus on economic miracles rather than the Nazi past were bruising. Former Nazis now in high official positions patronised her:

“one even told me, grinning, that times had changed and I should forget what happened”. When political leaders did address the past, they claimed that the majority of Germans had opposed Nazism. She was outraged in the 1960s when the Social Democrat leader Willy Brandt sent a bunch of red roses to greet the Nazi war criminal Albert Speer’s family on his release from pris- on. It was also the growing anti-Israeli rhetoric of the German left that helped persuade Deutschkron to leave West Germany for Israel in 1972. Her autobiography, I Wore the Yellow Star, was published in German in 1978. When a Berlin theatre company based a play on her book in 1988 she began to spend time back in her former home, and gradually became reconciled to the idea of returning there permanently. She visited schools, talking to new generations eager to discuss the past openly, and discovered that the Otto Weidt workshop, which had sheltered her during the war, had remained more or less unaltered under the German Democratic Republic. With her support, it was later opened as a museum.

Inge Deutschkron, Holocaust survivor, was born August 23, 1922. She died on March 9, 2022, aged 99

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Wrigley produced some of the most influential works in historical demography

was still painstakingly empirical. He was offered a scholarship to study the history tripos at Peterhouse. He received firsts in both parts of the course and upon graduat- ing travelled to Chicago, where he studied the industrial coal belt of Europe. The disparate and cumbersome data available on the countries Wrigley analysed ignited an interest in technical approaches to population change. He returned to Peterhouse to do a PhD and focused his energies on analysing methods of demographic study. His dissertation won the Ellen McArthur Prize in 1958 and he stayed on at the university as a lecturer. His interest in the Unitarian church led him to attend a religious conference in the Netherlands and there he met Mieke Spelberg, a Dutch music teacher, who he married in 1960 and who sur- vives him. Together they had four children; Re- becca, who is founder and director of Rewilding Britain and is married to the climate thinker and journalist George Monbiot; Marieke, a former mental- health worker; Tamsin, a retired coach and author; and Ave, the former CTO of a start-up. Bespectacled and often seemingly buried under a mound of academic pa- pers, Wrigley was the serene, if sometimes distant, centre of a chaotic house- hold. As well as finding time in retire- ment to craft a violin for a daughter, he also looked after Spelberg when she was diagnosed with dementia. Wrigley was always eager to expand his own horizons by listening attentive- ly to what his students had to say. With regard to his own field of study he was fond of quoting Kipling: “What do they know of England, who only England know?”

Professor Sir Tony Wrigley, economist and historical demographer, was born on August 27, 1931. He died on February 24, 2022, aged 90

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Professor Sir Tony Wrigley

Pioneering, polite and stubborn Cambridge don who redefined population history through the use of parish records

ROBERT PRISEMAN/COURTESY OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE

The Times - UK (2022-04-05)

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