We are currently advertising for a new Peter Gosden and Richard Aldrich Fellow at the History of Education Society, follow on from our current Fellows who are moving on to new pastures after the end of this year. Alongside this, we would like to share with the community the people behind these fellowships, and their wonderful contribution to the History of Education Society. Today, we are sharing the life journey of Peter Gosden.
Peter Gosden
Peter Gosden (1927–2012) was a leading historian of education who made a substantial contribution to the field during more than three decades at the University of Leeds. With his colleague W. B. Stephens and others, Peter made Leeds one of the most important centres of history of education in Britain, and among other things co-edited the institiution’s centenary history, Studies in the History of a University (1975). Joining as a lecturer in the Department of Education in 1960 – after a history degree at Cambridge and nine years as a teacher of history and religious studies in schools – he became a reader in 1971 and professor in 1979. Peter was a pro-vice-chancellor in the 1980s, and after his retirement in 1992 became secretary of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers.
As a historian, Peter is known for a series of important books on the history of education and voluntary organisations in Britain. His Birkbeck PhD – supervised by Eric Hobsbawm and awarded in 1959 – became The Friendly Societies of England 1815–1875 (1961), and this was followed by The Development of Educational Administration in England and Wales (1966), The Evolution of a Profession (1972, on teachers’ associations); Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in the Nineteenth Century (1973) and Education in the Second World War: A Study in Policy and Administration (1976). In 1968 he also established, with Stephens, the new Journal of Educational Administration and History; this is still in existence, published by Taylor & Francis. Peter was the editor of an anthology of primary sources relating to school classrooms – How They Were Taught (1969), and contributed to History of Education, the British Journal of Educational Studies and other journals in the field.
Also after retirement from Leeds, Peter served as president of the History of Education Society (1993–7), succeeding Richard Aldrich in the role. According to Peter Cunningham’s obituary of Peter in the History of Education Researcher, ‘colleagues who worked with him on the executive committee … recall him steering the Society quietly through choppy waters’, among other things putting the finances ‘onto a more secure and professional footing’. Peter was given a Festschrift – Studies in the History of Education, edited by Edgar Jenkins – in 1995, and the History of Education Society established a fellowship in his name in 2014.
Further reading
Peter Cunningham, ‘Peter Gosden 1927–2012’, History of Education Researcher 91 (2013), pp. 2–4.
Edgar Jenkins, ‘Peter H. J. H. Gosden, MA, PhD, FRHistS, FRSA’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 45, no. 3 (2013), pp. 283–5.
Paul Sharp, ‘Obituary: Peter Gosden (1927–2012)’, History of Education 42, no. 4 (2013), pp. 419–22.