New to archives catalogue - Sir Keith Hancock collection

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies began work in 1949. The first Director was Professor Keith Hancock who started work in that year. We were pleased to be able to add descriptions of our collection of Hancock's papers to the ULRLS Archive Catalogue in December last year. The collection has been catalogued to file level and is now available to be searched online.

Sir (William) Keith Hancock was born in Melbourne, Australia on 26 June 1898 and obtained his BA at Melbourne University. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, 1922-1923, and obtained a BA with 1st class honours in Modern History. In 1923 he was the first Australian to be awarded a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and in 1924 he returned to Australia to be Professor of Modern History at Adelaide University. He was Professor of Modern History at Birmingham University from 1933-1944, and Professor of Economic History at Oxford University, 1944-1949. He was appointed to the War Cabinet Offices as Supervisor of Civil Histories, 1941, and thereafter editor of the series. In 1949 he became the first Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Professor of British Commonwealth Affairs, University of London.

In 1954 he headed an inquiry into constitutional problems in Buganda. The Report was published by HMSO in 1954 as Cmd 9320, Uganda Protectorate Buganda [Namirembe Conference]. Hancock returned to Australia in 1957. He was Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University from 1957 to 1961 and was Professor of History at the Institute of Advanced Studies, ANU until his retirement in 1965. On his retirement he was made Emeritus Professor (1968) and created the first University Fellow of ANU. Other positions he has held were Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography from 1958 to 1965 and inaugural President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 1969 to 1971. He was knighted in 1953 and awarded the KBE in 1965. Sir Keith Hancock died in Canberra in 1988.

The papers of Sir (William) Keith Hancock largely relate to his chairmanship of the Buganda Constitutional Committee, 1954, and include correspondence, in particular with Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of Uganda, papers from a seminar on constitutional issues in Uganda, background notes, papers of the Buganda Constitutional Committee and Steering Committee, minutes of the Namirembe Conference, papers about the Uganda Development Corporation and the Uganda National Congress, notes of visits to Ankole, Toro, Bunyoro-Kitara and Busoga and press cuttings.

There are also correspondence and press cuttings relating to Hancock's books , "British War Economy" and "Problems of Social Policy" (History of the Second World War UK Civil Series Vol 1 & 2), 1949-1950; press cuttings of the Liberal Summer School, Oxford, July 1955; correspondence and other papers collated for his biography of Jan Smuts; notebooks with details for his autobiography; a black and white photograph, with supporting correspondence, of a bust of Hancock by the artist Alan Jervis and tapes of radio broadcasts made by him for ABC, mainly of an autobiographical theme but including views on arms control, the atomic bomb, Australia's defence treaties and relationship with the USA.