Biography

John Patrick Tuer Bury was very much a Cambridge man. Nephew of a Regius Professor of Modern History, and the son of a Cambridge LittD, he himself held a Fellowship at Corpus Christi College for over fifty-four years (1933-87), and, following appointment as Lecturer in History in 1937, remained a loyal and hard-working member of the History Faculty until his retirement in 1975. This service, both to college and university, was interrupted only by spells with the Ministry of Supply and with the Foreign Office during World War II. Bury's research interests embraced both the local - he produced a fine History of Corpus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to mark the College's sexcentenary in 1952 - and the international. A leading authority on the French Third Republic, he published, over nearly fifty years, three classic studies of L‚on Gambetta, which in conjunction with his other studies of French history, and of Anglo-French relations, earned him the respect and affection of historians in both countries. Bury was also heavily involved in the compilation of that massive cooperative post-war labour, the Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-39. He edited volume ten of the New Cambridge Modern History (1960), and served for seven years as editor of the Cambridge Historical Journal, years which saw considerable changes in the structure, purpose, and designation of the journal. All these aspects of Bury's work are to some extent reflected in the present collection. The letters and other papers comprising Add MS 8668 were presented by Bury to the University Library in 1987, shortly before his death. In selecting papers for preservation, Bury appears to have kept a large proportion of his editorial correspondence for the Cambridge Historical Journal in the years 1953-58, while limiting himself elsewhere to one or two examples from each significant correspondent. Such a policy has largely dictated the current arrangement of the collection.

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