Roderick Cavaliero
British Council officer, champion of the Romantic poets and chairman of the British School at Rome
RODERICK CAVALIERO, who has died aged 90, was, variously, a teacher, public administrator, historian, and champion of British Romanticism.
A genial and energetic cherootpuffing scholar and an officer for many years of the British Council, Cavaliero served in India and Brazil and, in the 1970s, as director of the British Council in Rome, finally retiring as Deputy Director General of the entire organisation. He wrote books on the Knights of Malta and the Ottoman Turks, but it was for his interest in and love for the Romantic poets that he became best known in later life.
In 1990, following his retirement from the council, he joined the British School at Rome at a time when its tax status and budget were under threat from British government cuts. Instead, the outgoing treasurer’s austerity proposals were cut, and within weeks Cavaliero became chairman.
He spent the next four years radically overhauling the school, negotiating a new charitable charter whereby the Queen would eventually become its patron, extending its financial base and introducing the alien idea of fundraising.
By tradition the chairman of the school was also chairman of its smaller independent cousin, the Keats-shelley House, the museum of the British Romantics at the foot of the Spanish Steps, where John Keats died in 1821.
To promote the British poets and the spirit of Romanticism became one of Cavaliero’s last missions. He embraced with enthusiasm the duties of celebrating the bicentenaries of Keats and Shelley at festivals in Recanati and Lerici, holding forth in fluent if fractured Italian with the formidable Contessa Leopardi at the joint Leopardi-keats party, and giving an impromptu speech on the drowning of Shelley at the helm of a heavily packed boat cruising around the Gulf of Lerici.
His love of the Romantics (although sometimes in emotional moods he would disown them in favour of Browning) spawned two books. Italia
Romantica (2005), subtitled English Romantics and Italian Freedom, was a vivid history of pre-unification Italy as seen through the eyes of Romantic travellers and poets, notably Keats, Byron and Shelley. Ottomania: The Romantics and the Myth of the Islamic Orient (2010) focused on another Romantic obsession, and in addition to the English Romantics Cavaliero explored the fascination with the mysterious Near East of Continental Romantics including Pierre Loti, Rossini and Delacroix.
The younger of two sons, Roderick Cavaliero was born on March 21 1928 at Wrotham in Kent, to Eric and Valerie Cavaliero. His father, a stockbroker, and his four uncles had all fought in and survived the First World War. Their mother died on Armistice Day, it was said, from relief.
The Cavalieros are thought to be a Sephardic family, possibly of Crusader stock, which had come to England in the 1880s from Algeria. Family history, and a post-university stint of six years teaching history in Malta, would imbue Roderick Cavaliero with a lifelong passion for the Crusaders, inspiring his first book, The Last of the
Crusaders (1960), about the decline and fall of the Knights of Malta.
Roderick was sent away to boarding school at the age of six when the family moved to Sussex after the death of his older brother. A studious small boy, he was a passionate butterfly collector, and found a new species, the Long Tailed Blue, a discovery which was published in a letter in The Times.
From Tonbridge School he won a History scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, where he converted to Catholicism and met his wife, Mary Mcdonnell, herself a strong Catholic from a large Lancashire family.
They married in 1957 and the following year he was recruited by the British Council and sent first to India and then Brazil. His writing career had to take second place but in due course it yielded two major histories and a stirring military biography, published after his retirement.
Strangers in the Land: The Rise and Decline of the British Indian Empire
(2002) traced the history of the British involvement in the Subcontinent, first as adventurers and traders, and eventually as rulers. His Admiral Satan: the Life and Campaigns of
Suffren (1994), told the story of the French naval hero Admiral Pierre André de Suffren, admired but feared as a demon by his sailors, who began in the service of the Knights of Malta and rose through the ranks to command the fleet which took on the British in the Indian Ocean, in alliance with Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore.
Cavaliero’s years in Brazil would inspire another account of empire: The
Independence of Brazil (1993), in which he traced the country’s development from the establishment of the Portuguese Kingdom during the Napoleonic Wars to the declaration of independence.
His last foreign posting as Director of the British Council in Rome in the 1970s was, perhaps the most enjoyable. On his way to work he would explore a different church each day and he introduced his children to the world of opera and art.
An ebullient personality, sometimes regarded as a maverick, Cavaliero dominated committees, sliced through bureaucracy and fought successful battles for local funding with Whitehall. During his later career in London as Deputy Director General of the British Council he eschewed the role of poacher-turned-gamekeeper, and toured the world fact-finding and encouraging local initiative.
The exuberant side of his character came to the fore after his retirement when, as chairman of the British School at Rome, he swapped his formal dark suits for colourful Hawaiian shirts (referred to as “Roddy’s Tropicana”) and engaged enthusiastically with the school’s broad spectrum of humanities, which included the work of young conceptual artists.
During his second retirement back in England, he continued to support the Keats-shelley House as a trustee and treasurer of its British charity, the Keats-shelley Memorial Association. He also took on the job of administering the Charles Wallace India Trust, built on the legacy of a rich industrialist, that enabled many hundreds of young Indians to come to Britain to study and train in the arts and humanities.
Cavaliero’s wife Mary died in 2007. He is survived by their four daughters and a son.