John Grenville
John Ashley Soames Grenville was a British historian who studied the modern world. He was born in Berlin on 11 January 1928 as Hans Guhrauer. In 1939 he escaped the Holocaust with his brothers Julian and Walter through the Kindertransport. Their mother died in the Riga Ghetto, while their father had already fled to England. In 1949 he became British and changed his name to John Ashley Soames Grenville.
His family had little money. He attended a boarding school in Essex and then Cambridge Technical School. He worked as a gardener at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was allowed into the college library only if he promised not to apply there. He studied on his own by day and took evening classes at Birkbeck College. A London County Council Grant helped him study at the University of London. He studied at Birkbeck and the London School of Economics, under Sir Charles Webster. He earned First Class Honours in History in 1951 and a PhD in 1953; his PhD was titled Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the 19th Century. He later became a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Yale University.
Grenville began his career at the University of Nottingham as an assistant lecturer and reader. He was Professor of International History at the University of Leeds (1966–1969) and then Professor and Head of the Department of Modern History at the University of Birmingham (1969–1994). He also worked at Hamburg University and the Leo Baeck Institute in London. He often framed his work around his English identity with German roots and helped create the international studies degree at Leeds, which used film to teach history. He lectured at many universities, including the University of California, and was known for his friendly, good-natured personality.
Grenville married twice. His first wife, Betty Anne Rosenberg, they met through a Harkness Fellowship at Yale, and they had three sons. She died of cancer. He later married Patricia Carnie in 1975. Patricia had a daughter, Claire, from a previous marriage, and Grenville adopted Claire. John and Patricia also had a daughter, Annabelle. He died on 7 March 2011 in London, aged 83. His final book, The Jews and Germans of Hamburg: The Destruction of a Civilization 1790-1945, was published shortly after his death. He was survived by his wife Patricia, his brother Walter, his sons George, Edward and Murray, and his daughters Claire and Annabelle.
A John A. S. Grenville PhD Studentship in Modern Jewish History and Culture was established by the Leo Baeck Institute in his memory.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 04:36 (CET).