John Barron

Elected a Fellow of the Society on 4 January 1968

The following obituary was published in the Telegraph on 28 August 2008

John Penrose Barron, classical scholar and educational administrator, born April 27 1934; died August 16 2008

Professor John Barron , who has died aged 74, was an eminent Hellenist and was Master of St Peter's College, Oxford, from 1991 to 2003.

Barron's research interests were wide and still growing at his death. His Silver Coins of Samos (1966) is still the standard work, and he continued to publish intermittently in this area. His Introduction to Greek Sculpture was published in 1965, with a second edition in 1981.

Among his most memorable works were articles on early Greek lyric poetry, which displayed both his ability to combine historical analysis with literary criticism and material culture and a capacity for radical rethinking, some of which is still making waves.

Over a distinguished career up to and well beyond retirement he also served in a number of senior academic posts, as a member of (what was) the University Funding Council and on a large number of committees and governing bodies at Oxford and elsewhere.

John Penrose Barron was born on April 27 1934. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, where he first acquired a love of Classics, and went on to study at that Classics hothouse, Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1957 with first-class honours and a clutch of university prizes. He completed his doctorate in 1961.

His career at London University lasted almost 30 years, and during his time there he taught across the Classics spectrum, a measure of his remarkable versatility. He began as lecturer in Latin at Bedford College before becoming lecturer in Archaeology and then Reader in Archaeology and Numismatics at UCL.

In 1971 he became Professor of Greek Language and Literature at King's College, where he served as head of the Classics department (1972–84) and Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1976–80). A contemporary from his time at King's described him as "one of the most ambitious men I ever knew in academia, and also one of the nicest and most helpful (a rare combination)".

Barron went on to become Director of the Institute of Classical Studies in Senate House from 1984 to 1991. The Institute brought out the best in him. Its library attracts visiting researchers from all over the world, and Barron always found time for them, especially for younger scholars. He was in his element at the institute's social events (the ICS had the reputation for giving the best Christmas parties in the University of London).

While Director he also served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1987 to 1989. He was instrumental in setting up the University of London Institute for Advanced Study (now the School of Advanced Study) to pull together the research institutes in Senate House, and he served as Dean of ULIAS (1989–91).

During this period Barron left an indelible mark on the discipline, when he chaired the review of Classics in British universities set up by the (then) University Grants Committee. This involved face-to-face meetings with potentially threatened departments, which he managed with his customary charm but also with frankness, as well as an ironic detachment from attempts to win a good result through good hospitality.

The 1987 Barron report produced a number of closures and amalgamations, and the process was painful for many of those affected. But it created departments with the critical mass needed to survive in the competitive landscape of post-1980s higher education. It put the discipline nationally in a better position to exploit the expansion of the 1990s and the culture of the research assessment exercise.

At St Peter's he was passionately concerned to raise academic ambitions. A popular Master, he is remembered for an old-fashioned management style with a strong focus on people, both colleagues and students. If his end-of-term progress meetings with students and their tutors had a tendency to overrun, it was because he was genuinely interested in the students. He revelled in freshers' dinners, where those attending would time his speeches to see how long he could hold forth.

He was a keen promoter of creative activity, especially music. He loved church music and never missed Sunday evensong (which also appealed to his sense of community) unless he was away from Oxford. At the formal dinner in hall afterwards he would preside with great style. It was therefore fitting that his retirement was marked with a special performance of The Messiah, one of his favourite works, at a crowded event. One of his high moments as Master was the re-inauguration of the "Father" Willis organ in 2003 after its restoration.

His other great passion was building. Three new buildings were added to the college on his watch; one of the disappointments of his time in Oxford was that his desire to acquire the land around Oxford prison for St Peter's never came off. As ever, he bore the outcome with equanimity.

He was keen on outreach work, and always ready to visit schools to encourage applications from state school pupils. He genuinely enjoyed ceremonial, but his sense of fun meant that he was never taken in by it.

In retirement Barron served as president of Clifton College, where he presided over meetings with easy grace and took an active interest in academic standards and senior appointments. He was also a very effective and committed chairman of the library committee at Lambeth Palace, playing a pivotal role in the cataloguing project of the Greek manuscript collection.

At the same time he returned to London as visiting professor at King's College and senior research fellow at the School of Advanced Study. He became interested in the contacts between Greek Orthodoxy and Anglicanism in the 17th century.

Barron's most recent publication, in the Bodleian Library Record 2008, was on the 14th-century Book of Hours from the collegiate foundation of St George's in Oxford Castle. He also found time to enrol in a graduate class in Greek manuscript hands, a measure both of his love of learning and lack of pomp.

He was a gifted lecturer, reflected in visiting professorships at Vassar and Princeton and a string of public lectures over the years. While at King's he was a much-admired Public Orator for London University. He was also a witty and erudite lecturer on Swan Hellenic cruises, and used to produce hair-raising anecdotes of the rigours of these expeditions in the early days under the likes of Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He was fascinated by, and fascinating on, the Riace bronzes.

Barron was one of those Hellenists who love Greece and Greeks in the present and not just as an abstract in the distant past. He had many Greek friends and loved to travel there, enjoying the food and drink as much as the monuments. Greece was also a source of surreptitious cuttings for his garden.

John Barron married, in 1962, Caroline Mary Hogarth, a distinguished medieval historian at Royal Holloway. She survives him with their two daughters.

The following obituary was published in The Times on 29 August 2008

Professor John Barron: classical scholar and an early supporter of the expansion of the university system

 John Barron was a leading classical scholar and college head who played an important role in the transformation of the British university system in the 1980s and 1990s. His personal qualities made him a natural leader in many academic projects and institutions in the universities of London and Oxford, and also nationally. He recognised that the relatively small and enclosed university system which had nurtured him had to expand, and was successful in persuading colleagues that institutional change should be embraced rather than fought.

John Penrose Barron was an only child, born in Morley, West Yorkshire, in 1934. His father, George Barron, was head of mathematics at Morley Grammar School. His mother, (Minnie) Leslie Marks, the daughter of a builder, was from a deeply rooted Cornish family, and Barron spent childhood holidays by the sea at St Just in Penwith.

From Wakefield Grammar School he moved to Clifton College. Later he was to advise Clifton as its president. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953 where he read classical honour moderations and literae humaniores and was close to two of his tutors, Kenneth Dover and Russell Meiggs, the historian. His doctoral work was on the early history of Samos and led to his most important publication, The Silver Coins of Samos, in 1966. In this Barron displayed his aptitude and passion for hunting down scraps of evidence, making sense of them, and connecting them together. His talent for making connections, indeed, whether across the breadth of his academic interests or between different elements of his academic career or among colleagues, friends and students, was a feature of his approach to scholarship and to life.

Towards the end of his doctoral research, when already a lecturer at Bedford College, London, he met an undergraduate historian from Somerville College, Oxford, Caroline Hogarth, and they were married on her graduation in 1962. As Caroline Barron she became a leading historian of medieval London and held a chair at Royal Holloway College. Together they made a remarkable academic team, encouraging and inspiring their students and offering joyous hospitality to friends in London and Oxford. John’s support for Caroline’s career led him to take a lifelong interest in the promotion of academic opportunities for women, both as students and lecturers.

Barron had wide interests as a classicist. His study of Greek Sculpture (1965, revised in 1981) was a distinguished introduction to the subject. His work on numismatics, concerning the ancient coins of Kos as well as Samos, demonstrated the significance of coins to the broader understanding of the Ancient World. In Greek literature his focus was on the era from Hesiod to the early classical period of the first half of the 5th century BC, and he collaborated with Professor Patricia Easterling in writing on some of the authors of this period for the Cambridge History of Classical Literature in 1985. His interest in Greece extended to every aspect of its subsequent history and contemporary culture. He loved to travel there and was close to leading figures in the Greek community in London.

After periods at Bedford College and then University College, London, Barron was elected to the chair of Greek at King’s College London, at the age of 37. He held the chair for 20 years. He became director of the Institute of Classical Studies in London, 1984-91, and dean of the several London Institutes for Advanced Studies, 1989-91. He was twice public orator in the university, crafting his biographical portraits of those awarded honorary degrees to entertain the university’s Chancellor, the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who presided at the ceremonies.

More difficult commissions followed, however. Between 1989 and 1993 Barron was a member of the University Funding Council (UFC), established by the Conservative Government at the end of the 1980s to take the place of the old University Grants Committee and oversee changes to the British university system. The UFC included a majority of non-academic members drawn from business and public life and was unpopular with academics, some of whom questioned Barron’s decision to join it. Barron believed that it was better to influence an institution from the inside, protecting what was most valuable in the process, than to raise impotent opposition from without. Put honestly and straightforwardly, with the charm and courtesy that characterised everything he did, this argument was unanswerable. Using those same qualities he was able to persuade colleagues to accept the UFC’s decision to protect the study of classics by concentrating it in fewer university departments, a move which was, in retrospect, undoubtedly correct. Barron also supported the overall expansion of the university system which was planned and set in motion while he was a member of the UFC, and which saw participation rates rise from under 10 per cent to more than 30 per cent in less than a decade.

At St Peter’s College, Oxford, where he became Master in 1991, he encouraged many different initiatives to increase access to the university, especially when he served as chairman of the Oxford Colleges’ Admissions Committee, (1997-2000. During his mastership the proportion of women students at St Peter’s increased from fewer than 30 per cent to nearly 50 per cent and the number of female tutors and fellows increased as well. It was also during his mastership that it came of age: founded as recently as 1928 and with only limited resources, under Barron’s guidance St Peter’s became more self-confident and assured. Student numbers increased and the college’s academic position improved, not least because of his insistence that he meet every student at the end of each term to review progress. In reality these were often light-hearted conversations about books read and travels to be undertaken.

St Peter’s also expanded physically in this period. Barron had a sharp eye for architecture and design and was involved from the outset in plans to redevelop the site of the Castle to the west of Oxford city centre, close to St Peter’s. He accepted that this was too big a project for the college to manage alone, but his interest led St Peter’s to build and purchase three elegant student residences, thereby contributing to the regeneration of this previously run-down quarter of the city.

It was a mark of Barron’s success at the head of the college that the Fellows extended his term as Master beyond the usual retiring age. He stood down in 2003 and devoted himself to the many educational organisations which valued his membership and advice, including Lambeth Palace Library, whose committee he chaired latterly. He published articles on the very first institution of higher learning in Oxford, the house of scholars, situated in St George’s collegiate church in the Castle, founded in 1074.

Barron is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Professor John Barron, classical scholar, was born on April 27, 1934. He died on August 16, 2008, aged 74

The following obituary by Katie Barron was published the Independent on 10 September 2008

Professor John Barron: Former Master of St Peter's, Oxford

Oxford colleges compete fiercely with each other to pull in the best students, and they try to widen the range of students who will apply by offering subsidised accommodation. But perhaps no scheme for expanding student accommodation has ever been as bold as that of John Barron, Master of St Peter's College, Oxford, from 1991 to 2003. His plan was to take over the town prison, move the inmates out and his own students in.

Barron's ambition was not only to make St Peter's bigger, but to make it older, transforming it from its humble 1928 foundation into the most senior – and thus most honoured – college in Oxford. In an academic paper published in 2002, Barron argued that the first college in Oxford had been based in the Norman castle which was part of the prison compound. So striking was Barron's enthusiasm for doing up the prison that Colin Dexter, who used to visit St Peter's College every summer, put him into his last Inspector Morse novel, The Remorseful Day, as John Barron the builder, a murder suspect who died by falling off a ladder.

Whether sleeping in a former prison cell would have been an added attraction for prospective students of St Peter's was never tested as, following lengthy discussions, the college governing body decided the step was too risky financially. (The building later became a hotel). They did, however, work with Barron to acquire three other properties and transform them into elegant student accommodation.

The prison scheme was typical of the vision and enthusiasm that characterised Barron's whole life – at Oxford, and, for 30 years, at London University, where he taught a range of Classical subjects and served as Director of the Institute of Classical Studies.

Barron's first enthusiasm was Greece in the sixth and early fifth centuries BC, where evidence is scarce and hypotheses have to be constructed with great care. His painstaking The Silver Coins of Samos (1966), established a chronology for Samian coins which could then be used to help date other artifacts and events. This followed his book Greek Sculpture (1965, revised as An Introduction to Greek Sculpture in 1981). His articles on early Greek poets such as Ibycus examined the origins of the lyrical victory song, composed to honour victors in contests such as the Olympic Games.

In 1971, at the age of 37, Barron was appointed Professor of Greek at King's College London. He was interested in promoting Classics from school to research level and was a natural choice in 1984 to run the Institute of Classical Studies at London University.

During the Eighties, Barron worked on two projects that were to shape aspects of university education in the decades to come. One involved persuading the different humanities institutes in London to work together to create an umbrella body, the Institutes for Advanced Studies, which he led as Dean from 1989 (the Institutes became the School of Advanced Study in 1994). Acting as a group, the research institutes were better able to make a case for themselves in the next decade when their funding was threatened.

More controversial was his work with the then University Grants Committee, which was instructed, among other things, to look at the viability of Classics departments around the country. Some professors refused to sit on the committee, especially when it was proposing department closures. Ever a pragmatist, Barron chose to work within the system. The Barron report (Review of Classics, 1987) proposed the amalgamation of some Classics departments into fewer, but stronger bases.

In 1991 he was elected Master of St Peter's College, Oxford. But if the tutors had feared a Thatcherite management style they could relax. His natural approach was evolution, not revolution. Oxford colleges are, anyway, democratically governed by their Fellows and the head can only steer the college through tactful chairmanship of meetings. He promoted high standards by showing that he cared. He met every undergraduate with their tutors at the end of every term. He believed the best of them and was eager to praise every success.

John Barron was born in Morley, West Yorkshire, in 1934, the son of George Barron, a devoted schoolmaster. He began his education at Wakefield Grammar School and retained an affection for Yorkshire all his life, chanting "Ilkley Moor bar tat" with the best of them. George Barron took two jobs in order to send his son John to Clifton College, from where he went on to Balliol College, Oxford.

But it was the world of small-town Cornwall, visited every summer and relayed to him in stories by his mother, Leslie Marks, that Barron was to carry in his head throughout his career. Leslie grew up in St Just-in-Penwith during the decline of the tin mining industry, the daughter of a builder, member of a fragile bourgeoisie whose struts were collapsing. In St Just, families existed over centuries and insults could be felt for almost as long. Her tales of feuds and slights impressed her son deeply, and in all his administrative posts he took great trouble over people's feelings, especially their pride. At St Peter's he worked hard not to let any issue divide the community.

His mother's sense of family gave Barron a strong regard for the life of an institution stretching over time. He also had an instinctive respect for the dynastic ambitions of potential benefactors of the college and developed genuine friendships with them.

At the same time, as chairman of the university's Admissions Committee (1997-2000), Barron worked to widen Oxford's intake from the state system. This was not do-gooding, but a desire to find excellent students, believing that many applicants from state schools hesitated to present themselves at Oxford because of a lack of confidence. He encouraged all his students, and his two daughters, to be confident in themselves.

The Fellows at St Peter's voted to extend Barron's period as Master beyond the usual retirement age. When he finally retired in 2003, he returned to his love of the Greek island of Samos, focusing his studies on an ambitious 18th-century archbishop of that island, Georgirenes, who founded the first Greek Church in London. Barron enjoyed travelling with his wife Caroline, a distinguished medieval historian. In his short illness he showed as much consideration for others as in the rest of his life, slipping away quietly in the night, and not falling off any ladders.

John Penrose Barron, classical scholar: born Morley, West Yorkshire 27 April 1934; Assistant Lecturer in Latin, Bedford College, London University 1959-61, Lecturer in Latin 1961-64; Lecturer in Archaeology, University College London 1964-67, Reader in Archaeology and Numismatics 1967-71; Professor of Greek Language and Literature, King's College London 1971-91, Head of Classics Department 1972-84; Director, Institute of Classical Studies, London University 1984-91; Master of St Peter's College, Oxford 1991-2003, married 1962 Caroline Hogarth (two daughters); died London 16 August 2008.

The following obituary by Jasper Griffin was published the Guardian on 19 September 2008

Professor John Barron: Classical Greek scholar who sought to widen higher education

The classical scholar John Barron, who has died aged 74, distinguished himself in the field of early Greek history and literature, and went on to become an important figure in the development of higher education in Britain. In 1987, as a member of the (then) university grants committee, he produced the Barron report, which proposed the amalgamation of university classics departments into fewer, but stronger, units. Before that, he was instrumental in setting up the University of London Institute for Advanced Study (now the School of Advanced Study) to pull together their research institutes. In 1991 he became master of St Peter's College, Oxford, which he led with panache.

Although born in Morley, west Yorkshire, where his father was head of mathematics at the local grammar school, Barron came from a family rooted in Cornwall. Childhood holidays were spent by the seaside at St Just-in-Penwith. He was educated at Clifton college, Bristol, a school of which he later became president. In 1953 he went as an exhibitioner to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics. He was lastingly influenced by three of his tutors: Kenneth Dover, Gordon Williams and Russell Meiggs, all Hellenists of exceptional range and flair.

In 1961, he went on to write a DPhil thesis about the Aegean island of Samos in the 6th century BC, a time when the island, just off the coast of Turkey, was at the forefront of intellectual developments in the region. Pythagoras - as well as a host of other writers and thinkers - was born on Samos during this period. The local ruler Polycrates completed an amazing feat of engineering by building a 3,399ft (1,036m) tunnel to carry water from one side of the island to the other through Mount Kastro.

In 1966 Barron published The Silver Coins of Samos, a substantial work showing his mastery of various types of evidence - not just the coins themselves, but also fragments of papyrus, inscriptions on stones and references by later writers - and of their complicated relations. He could thus recreate the history of ancient Samos and its timeline. The book has retained its interest well beyond numismatics specialists. A perceptive art historian, Barron was also the author of Greek Sculpture (1965, revised 1981).

He showed no less flair in dealing with Greek literature, especially the early lyric poets such as Ibycus. Several articles that he wrote on the subject still have value today, and he collaborated with Patricia Easterling on authoritative chapters in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature (1985). He was, in short, a strong Hellenophile and was never happier than when leading groups of travellers and students round Greece and the Aegean islands, often as a lecturer for Swan Hellenic cruises.

Barron's academic career began in 1959, when he joined Bedford College London, as an assistant lecturer in Latin. In 1964 he moved to University College London as a lecturer in archaeology, becoming reader in 1967. For 20 years from 1971, he was professor of Greek at King's College London, having been elected to the chair at the age of only 37. He was also director of the Institute of Classical Studies of London University (1984-91), an important position at a time when the institute was establishing itself as a significant meeting point for classicists from all over the world. A tall and graceful figure, he made an eloquent public orator for the university.

Barron went on to prove a dynamic and successful master of St Peter's College, Oxford, a young and not very rich institution by Oxford standards. He raised the proportion of women undergraduates from below 30% to around 50%, and moved the college up from near the bottom of the Norrington table (which ranks colleges according to degree pass rates) to the middle. During his time, the college acquired part of the Oxford Castle site, an important and highly visible position in the city, and developed three new halls of residence. After he had served two five-year terms as master, St Peter's paid him the unusual compliment of extending his tenure by two more years.

From 1997 to 2000, Barron was an active chairman of the Oxford colleges' admissions committee, urging the need for the university to attract a wider range of applicants. After his retirement in 2003, he chaired a number of educational institutions, such as the Cassel Trust and the Lambeth Palace library committee.

Barron valued education for all as a preparation for a fulfilling life, not just as a narrow conduit for academic research. He believed in education, not just training - the importance of learning how to apply rational approaches to all of kinds of problems and issues in life. He valued classics as a general training of the mind, and saw the power of the transferable skills it bestowed.

In 1962 he married Caroline Hogarth, granddaughter of the archaeologist DG Hogarth. A leading historian of medieval London, she became professor of medieval history at Royal Holloway College in 2002. They were exceptionally well matched, and their hospitality was famous. They had two daughters, Catherine and Helen. All three survive him.