Brian Bond obituary: pioneering academic at war studies school

Times

19 hours ago

English and geography once struggled to gain acceptance as degree subjects but war studies struggled longer. In 1966 Brian Bond joined the newly formed department at King's College London (KCL) as a lecturer, giving up his more 'respectable' post in the history department at Liverpool.
A department of military science had existed at KCL since the college's early years in the 19th century but it was not until 1962 that a separate, permanent department was established for the study of war and its impact on the world. Sir Michael Howard (obituary, December 2, 2019) was its founder and, thanks in the main to his support, Bond would go on to become reader and then professor of military history, writing numerous books and papers specialising in the late 19th century and the two world wars.
He was first encouraged in the subject by no less a figure than Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the former Great War soldier, interwar strategist and apostle of 'the indirect approach', although perhaps studied more in Nazi Germany than in Britain. While reading history at Worcester College, Oxford, in the late 1950s, Bond met Liddell Hart at home in Buckinghamshire, where the latter had recently settled and Bond's father had become his gardener. At Oxford, Bond had elected to take the special subject paper on Napoleonic military history taught by Norman Gibbs, Chichele professor of the history of war. Liddell Hart, impressed by his gardener's son's scholarship, gave him access to his library and private papers and introduced him to visiting prominenti including Howard, who encouraged him to take an MA in war studies. This he completed in 1962 while lecturing at Exeter and then Liverpool.
Brian James Bond was born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in 1936 to Edward Bond and Olive (née Sartin). He was an early beneficiary of the 1944 (Butler) Education Act, gaining a free place at Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in 1947. Leaving school in 1954 he elected to do his two years' National Service first, rather than deferring it to take up his place at Oxford, and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. Although hardly the same as Howard's decorated active service in Italy with the Coldstream Guards, it did at least give him an insider's understanding of military culture and some credibility with serving officers looking to KCL for professional development. In 1962 he married Madeleine Joyce Carr. She died in 2023. They had no children.
Bond's first book, as the editor of Victorian Military Campaigns, with each campaign written by a different historian, including Sir John Keegan, was published in 1967. Next came a serious study of the Victorian army and the staff college before two books on the Second World War and a highly regarded study of British military policy between the wars.
He was disappointed not to be Liddell Hart's official biographer, the job going instead to one of his former doctoral students. Evidently Liddell Hart's widow, Kathleen, had wrongly believed that Bond had said that her husband had been a fascist. To an extent, honour was satisfied when, with the diplomatic intervention of Howard, he was allowed to write an interim study of Liddell Hart's ideas, but not touching on his life as a whole: Liddell Hart: a Study of His Military Thought (1977). Unfortunately, two reviews focused not on the book but on Liddell Hart himself — and disobligingly — which further upset his widow.
Bond then turned, as eventually all British military historians must, to the First World War and in particular to the Western Front, which meant Field Marshal Haig. Undoubtedly the pendulum had swung beyond all balance with the publication in 1961 of Alan Clark's The Donkeys, a book that Howard dismissed as being almost entirely worthless. Some rebalancing was needed but Bond's revisionism was considered by many to be almost as unbalanced as Clark's diatribe. It was ironic, too, that Bond's revisionism disputed Liddell Hart's own assessment of the British high command in the First World War. One review of Haig: A Reappraisal said that Bond wrote with blinkers on: '[His] Haigiography testifies to the power of British patriotism and loyalty into which, as a British general, Haig tapped. Bond's defence of Haig's asininity horsed cavalry convictions is only exceeded by defence of Haig when he was faced by the evidence that his major push into the Somme had failed.'
A later book, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History (2002), which tried to unpick the myth, as he saw it, from the 'reality', brought a sharp retort from the other side of the Atlantic that Bond was trying to 'set up traditional military history in the mansion while relegating art to the little shed out back'.
Disappointed not to have become head of the war studies department, Bond knew that his strength lay principally in teaching, which he did at KCL for 35 years. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Western Ontario, visiting lecturer at the US Naval War College, visiting fellow at Brasenose and briefly at All Souls colleges, Oxford, and for 20 years was president of the British Commission for Military History.
In 2001 he retired to Buckinghamshire to watch cricket, a lifelong passion, to tend his garden and to visit country houses. He was, too, a strong supporter of wildlife conservation, especially of foxes, not a species usually thought to require protection, unlike Field Marshal Haig.
Brian Bond, pioneering war studies academic, was born on April 17, 1936. He died on June 2, 2025, aged 89