Professor Richard Roberts
Financial historian who set out to derive lessons from the mishaps and policy errors of the past
PROFESSOR RICHARD ROBERTS, who has died aged 67, was a financial historian who made it his mission to encourage the City of London to learn from its own past.
From his base at King’s College London, Dick Roberts nurtured a wide network of senior contacts in the financial world – not least at the Bank of England, where he spent time as a research fellow, and the Treasury. He was as comfortable delving into 19th century archives as in analysing and commenting upon modern market upheavals, and capable of elucidating not only the great historical tides of international finance but also the nuts and bolts of balance sheets.
As author or co-author of a dozen books, Roberts combined meticulous detail with accessibility for the non-specialist reader. Perhaps his best and most original work was Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (2013), which revealed the full story – previously untold in such depth – of the closure of the London Stock Exchange on the eve of the First World War and the global market panic that ensued.
In the 1990s Roberts developed a harmonious working partnership with the social and financial historian David Kynaston. Both had the gift of bringing coherent structure to complex research projects, but Roberts’s mastery of financial technicalities complemented Kynaston’s skill in weaving anecdotal material from multiple sources. Their first joint
effort was a project to mark the tercentenary of the Bank of England in 1994. They went on to co-author City State: How the markets came to rule our world (2001), which warned against “triumphalism” in an increasingly rampant financial sector, and to collaborate on The Lion Wakes: a modern history of HSBC (2015). Roberts’s last major piece of work, co-authored with William Keegan and David March, was Six Days in September: Black Wednesday, Brexit
and the making of Europe. Its publication in September 2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Britain’s turbulent exit from the European exchange rate mechanism; Lord (Norman) Lamont, Chancellor of the Exchequer during the episode, called it “required reading”, commending the authors for unearthing details “some of which even I had forgotten”.
Richard Whitfield Roberts, known to everyone as Dick, was born in London on November 25 1950. His paternal grandfather was a Leeds grocer; his father Ben, having left school at 14, won a TUC essay competition which gave him the opportunity to study at the LSE and Oxford. Later, as the LSE’S first professor of industrial relations, Ben Roberts was a leading academic voice in national debates on the responsibilities of trade unions and the limits of strike action.
Dick was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys School and University College London, where he took a First in History. His completed a doctorate at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1982, and went on to Princeton as a Proctor Fellow.
His first job was as an analyst with the oil giant BP, but he returned to academia in 1985 as a lecturer in Economic History at the University of Sussex, where he remained until 2006. His first book, in 1992, was an official history of the merchant banking house of Schroders – where he negotiated the delicate challenge of reconciling the differing recollections of past and present directors and dynastic owners.
In 2001 he co-authored (with Christopher Arnander) Take Your Partners, the story of the pioneering 1970s consortium bank Orion. Later studies of modern financial mishaps included Did Anyone Learn Anything from the Equitable Life? (2012) and When Britain Went Bust: the 1976 IMF crisis (2016).
Roberts was twice winner of the British Archive Council’s Wadsworth Prize for business history: in 2013 for Saving the City, and in 2015 jointly with Kynaston for The Lion Wakes. He brought formidable intellectual energy to his work, forever trying to find time for new projects of his own while continuing to supervise a diverse group of PHD students who held him in high esteem.
He was also co-organiser of a monetary history group under the umbrella of the Economic History Society, and in later years he found himself drawn into the complexities of university administration. Having moved from Sussex to London in 2007 to become director of the Institute of Contemporary British History (then part of the School of Advanced Study, based in the Senate House) he negotiated the Institute’s transfer in 2010 to King’s, where he became professor of Contemporary History. But in 2016 his Institute was announced to have completed its work and was disbanded.
Roberts was always convivial company; he enjoyed the pleasures of the table and his wider interests encompassed cinema, music and modern dance. He made his family home in North Yorkshire, and kept a holiday house in south-west France as a summer writing retreat.
He married, in 2001, Sarah Roberts, who survives him with their two daughters.