Stephen Roskill (1903-1982) appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College

As a Senior Research Fellow and historian, Roskill worked tirelessly alongside Sir John (“Jock”) Colville and the Master, Sir John Cockcroft, to seek deposits and collections to complement the Churchill papers.

His extensive network of senior naval, diplomatic, and military contacts; his growing reputation as a scholar; and his personal charm (in spite of his deafness and love of spending time among his books, Roskill was said to be a great conversationalist) helped secure many of the Archive Centre’s great wartime collections.

Roskill’s exhaustively detailed catalogues (e.g. to the Dilke-Crawford-Roskill Papers) and opinionated annotations as to the likely historical ‘value’ of individual documents have become slightly legendary at the Archives Centre.

Roskill died in 1982. Correlli Barnett, the first Keeper of the Archives Centre, proposed a unique and prestigious memorial: a biennial lecture to be delivered at Churchill College by a ‘person of world stature’, covering key themes in the Archives Centre’s collections: international security, foreign policy, war, public policy, and the history of science.

• Find out more about Stephen Roskill in a blog written by former Archives Assistant, Dr Heidi Egginton