Bruce Murray

Bruce Murray developed polio as a child, but that did not stop him leading an active life. He played in the Witwatersrand University cricket team, in South Africa, becoming its captain and president

My friend Bruce Murray, who has died aged 80, was an outstanding South African historian and a courageous opponent of apartheid.

He was born in Durban. His father was a banker and his mother a noted tennis player in her youth. At the age of eight, Bruce developed polio and had serious disabilities thereafter. Nevertheless, he went on to have an active career.

He attended King Edward VII school, Johannesburg, and graduated with a first in history from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, in 1961. He gained a PhD in 1966 at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, Kansas, and went on to teach at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, for a couple of years before returning to South Africa to a teaching post at Rhodes.

There he joined the African National Congress and worked on an anti-apartheid student newspaper with the activist Hugh Lewin, and campaigned against the government’s policy of educating black and white people separately. In 1969 he took up a teaching post at Witwatersrand University, where he became professor of Edwardian British history in 1986 and head of department, and remaining there until retirement in 2001, when he became emeritus professor.

Bruce showed his courage by facing up to his physical difficulties and not letting them get in the way of living his life the way he wanted to, playing in the Wits cricket team and becoming captain and president. He also played doubles at tennis. He was a devoted chairman of the Wits cricket club, through which he provided scholarships for student cricketers.

I first met him when he visited Oxford University for a sabbatical year in 1974 to work on a book on Lloyd George’s people’s budget. It was published as The People’s Budget, 1909-10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics by Oxford University Press in 1980 and, nearly 40 years on, remains the best book on the subject, as assured in its treatment of public finance as of Edwardian politics. For me, it began 45 years of friendship, from Queen’s College, Oxford, where he was immensely popular, to teaching together in Witwatersrand after 1994.

Bruce wrote two fine volumes on the history of Wits, The Early Years, 1896-1939 (1982) and The “Open” Years, 1939-59 (1997), in which he dealt boldly with controversial racial matters. Later he united two of his great passions by writing on the history of cricket. Caught Behind: Race and Politics in Springbok Cricket (2006) is the definitive account of the murky details of the Basil d’Oliveira affair of 1968, while Empire and Cricket, 1884-1914 (2009) covers relations between British and Afrikaner cricketers as well as black and white people. He became a major chronicler of the sporting boycott.

Bruce, my son and I celebrated the ending of apartheid by watching the resumption of test matches at Lord’s in 1994. Bruce could now rejoice when his countrymen won.

He was a warm man with a genius for friendship. He celebrated his 80th birthday with dozens of friends on a sunny morning at Wits, and then enjoyed a happy final jaunt to Kruger wildlife park.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/02/bruce-murray-obituary

 

Last Modified: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 11:47:15 SAST