Smuts: Study for a Portrait

by W.K. Hancock

31p yellow card cover, sewn booklet, a very good copy

Paperback

Published March 1, 1965

About the author

A distinguished historian of Australia, William Keith Hancock was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and later the University of Melbourne where he was resident at Trinity College from 1917. As the Australia-at-large Rhodes Scholar for 1921, Hancock went to Balliol College, Oxford in 1922. He graduated in 1924 with a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in Modern History. He then became the first Australian to gain a Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford in 1923. After returning to Australia he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Adelaide between 1924 and 1933.

From 1934 to 1944 Hancock was the Professor of History at University of Birmingham and during this war period was also appointed to the War Cabinet Offices. In 1941 he was appointed Supervisor of the United Kingdom Civil Series of the History of the Second World War and was thereafter editor of the series. Between 1944 and 1949, he returned to Oxford, becoming Chichele Professor of Economic History. In 1949 he left Oxford, taking up an appointment as the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He served as the Professor of British Commonwealth Affairs at the University of London until 1956.

Hancock returned to Australia in 1957 to take up an appointment as Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, a position he held until 1961. He 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 the ANU. Other positions he 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.