Professor Reg Ward
Formerly Professor of Modern History, University of Durham (H9)

International religious belief and practice in the modern period; nineteenth-century atheism in Central Europe

I was born at Chesterfield, Derbyshire on 23 March 1925, the son of a long line of Primitive Methodists whose religious practice I have followed and whose traditions have been among the longer-term influences upon my historical work. The principal educational influence on my early years was that of Devonport High School for Boys, whence I managed to win a sufficient number of scholarships, including a college open scholarship, to proceed to University College, Oxford in 1943. This was only permitted under wartime regulations by the fact that I was in medical grade 4. In wartime circumstances there were no history dons in Univ. when I went up but teaching was found in other colleges. I graduated in Modern History with first-class honours in 1946, and went on to teach for three years in Ruskin College. Thirty years previously I had had a predecessor in following this route, none other than Clement Attlee! While teaching at Ruskin I began work for the degree of D.Phil. under the supervision of Dame Lucy Sutherland FBA, Principal of LMH, a major influence upon my subsequent work. In 1949 I moved on to the History Department at Manchester under Sir Lewis Namier, a presence equally instructive and perplexing.  The result of these two influences was that I put in a long stint on 18th century political and administrative history. Eventually, however, I continued the work on my Georgian Oxford  book into another on Victorian Oxford. and became very interested in modern religious history. At that time it was difficult for any Methodist historian working on that period not to be inteested in it; the proposals for union with the Church of England inevitably provoked sharp differences of opinion, in which both sides appealed to eightenth century precedent. One simply had to look for oneself. This in turn led to another series of books on evangelical history many of them with a Methodist reference including a 7-volume edition of Wesley's journal. It became apparent to me that attempts to explain the origin of the evangelical revival in Anglo-American terms were unsatisfactory and so I began to look for the origins of revival  in Central Europe and these have occupied me until my last book, an attempt to explain what evangelical doctrine was about. 

I have also been interested in religious history of later periods, and have served onthe editorial board of Kiirchliche Zeitgeschichte since its inception. My last work was to produce an English translation of the work by the editor of that journal, Gerhard Besier, on Hitler and the Pope. I am now working on a glamourous group of Central European atheists, in the effort to pin down what it was in Chistianity they found impossibloe to stomach. In between times I have been married for sixty years, have three children and nine grandchildren, and, until our legs began to fail, my wife and I found our chief recreation in hill walking.