Posts Tagged ‘John Saville’

Welcoming Stan Newens

August 24, 2009

George Barnsby, The  Barnsby Blog, August 23, 2oo9

I had a great surprise today. A call from Stan asking if he could call on me within an hour or so. Stan visits me regularly but it has usually been at the end of a series of visits to John Saville and other contributors to the Dictionary of Labour Biography and a visit to relatives in the Midlands before coming on to me and then returning to Essex where he has lived for many years, a sort of Grand Tour of Britain which he undertook regularly. But, alas John Saville and others are dead so that he is paying me the great honour of coming specially to Wolverhampton and then returning home.

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For more on Stan Newens, see  Wikipedia,

Obituary: John Saville

June 16, 2009

Marxist historian renowned for his great work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography

John Saville, the socialist economic and social historian who has died aged 93, was an academic at Hull University for nearly 40 years, but will be remembered above all for the great, open-ended Dictionary of Labour Biography (partly co-edited with Joyce Bellamy), of which he was able to complete the first 10 volumes (1972-2000), and the three volumes of Essays in Labour History (1960, 1971, 1977) co-edited with Asa Briggs (Lord Briggs).

He was born John Stamatopoulos, in a Lincolnshire village near Gainsborough, to Edith Vessey, from a local working-class family, and Orestes Stamatopoulos, a Greek engineer who disappeared from the lives of both soon after. His mother’s remarriage in London some years after the first world war to a widowed tailor, freemason and reader of the Daily Mail, to whom she had acted as housekeeper, gave her son a comfortable lower-middle-class childhood and the name he later adopted.

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