Professor of International Relations 1968-1984 Information from LSE Magazine June 1985 No69 p.27 (Obituaries)

Frederick Samuel Northedge, Professor of International Relations at the LSE since 1968, died suddenly at his home on 3 March 1985. He was 66.

Born in Derby on 16 October 1918 he was educated locally and won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, to read classics. Concern about the persistence of warfare led him to take up the study of International Relations at LSE immediately after the Second World War. He became an assistant lecturer in 1949.

He was simultaneously an engaging and entertaining companion and a very private person who needed to withdraw to pursue his researches. He was at once a compassionate man whose sentiments were rooted in his early radicalism and the detached scholar who rarely allowed his political views to obtrude. He was courteous and somewhat self effacing, yet delighted in intellectual controversy and in puncturing pretensions (especially academic ones). Above all he was an idealist who failed to find the formula he had been searching for and was never entirely at ease with his own intellectual realism. Deeply attached to his three children and to Betty whose death in early 1984 ended forty-five years of marriage, he shared his last months with Muriel Grieve whom he married last September. Scholar, teacher, broadcaster, generous host, raconteur and bon viveur, he lived life to the dull and to its untimely end. (Geoffrey Stern)

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