With the ever-open door of his college rooms providing a warm welcome to generations of current and non-resident members of St John’s, for more than fifty years John Crook was as integral a part of that institution asww the Bridge of Sighs. The open door was a tutorial habit, part of the Cambridge culture that preceded the age of stolen laptops. (Not that the Crookery would have proved profitable in that respect. It was with a fountain-pen, itself a reluctant concession to modernity, that he wrote his annual Christmas letters to scores of former pupils.)

Old pupils (as well as the old pupils of others) and old friends from all over the world who scaled the precipitous staircase to those rooms were just two of his constituencies; from his election as a fellow in 1951 until just last year the College Classical Society regularly met there. Abstemious by nature, he was generosity personified, with seemingly endless time to spare for junior colleagues and graduate students for whom he had no formal responsibility, reading and criticising successive drafts of their dissertations. Beneath a sometimes curmudgeonly exterior, he was expert at doing good by stealth. The college staff had a particular place in his affections, and he in theirs, as was testified by the number of them who visited him in hospital during his final days and attended his packed funeral in the College chapel.

Crook’s early career as a South London boy and the only child of parents of limited means affords a wonderful case-study of the social mobility then provided by a scholarship system since sacrificed by the old universities and successive governments on the altar of social something-else. Coming up to St. John’s in October 1939, he took a first in Part I of the Classical Tripos before being drafted as a private into the 9th Royal Fusiliers and serving in the Middle East and North Africa before he was captured on landing in Italy.

His rueful account of that incident, and of the surrender of his platoon after the providential concussion of his gung-ho colonel sold on death or glory, revealed Crook the anecdotalist at his best, as did that of his time as a prisoner-of-war in Silesia. Here he acquired fluent German, taught languages to other prisoners, and perfected his remarkable skill on the clarinet (the instrument his father, a military bandsman, played). His description of Stalag VIIIB as a prison out of which it was possible to climb and, after spending the night with local girls, knock for readmission with the milk, made the place sound more like a Cambridge college of the 1950s than Colditz. The end of that stage of his life was less of a joke, however. Liberation by the Russian army and the forced march westward to Berlin resulted in the death of many of his comrades.

After completion of the Tripos with a starred first and all the highest academic awards and honours, a year in Oxford and a spell at Reading, in 1951 he returned to Cambridge as a research Fellow of St John’s where the influence of Martin Charlesworth was largely responsible for shifting the focus of his classical interests from philosophy to history.

In the college he was successively Tutor, Praelector and President, and in the Faculty ascended from an assistant lectureship to the Chair of Ancient History, which he occupied from 1979 to 1984. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1970, resigning in 1980 in protest at the failure of that body to expel the spy and traitor Anthony Blunt.

This is not the place to attempt to describe the special merits of Crook’s published work, and above all of his Law and Life of Rome (1967), which ought to be familiar enough to those entitled to entertain an opinion of it. Law was no guide to Life, he insisted, taking as a contemporary example the widespread disregard by Cambridge cyclists of the rules laid down by the authorities. He vigorously championed the status and the calling of advocates (and rhetoric) as opposed to jurists (and jurisprudence).

To an unusual degree, the authentic voice, colloquial yet elegant, was audible in the printed word. I suspect that, like F. W.Maitland, before committing anything to paper he listened to it. This would be consistent with the number of tributes the college has received since his death from students of the 1960s and seventies to his excellence as lecturer. As became the expert on rhetoric, especially forensic rhetoric, who was heard to describe academic life as part of the entertainment industry, use of gesture, movement and facial contortion as well as voice, gown and an impeccable sense of timing, enabled him to capture and hold an audience where, in the big lecture room at Mill Lane (Room 3), he would invariably have a full house at 9 am.

He was neither old-fashioned nor fashionable. He had visited Australia and South Africa, and in both countries was lionised, but sometimes wondered whether it was a cause for regret that he had never crossed the Atlantic. For him, the greatest change in Cambridge during his lifetime had been, not the admission of women (which he strongly championed) but the lowering of the age of majority.
It was reported of another ancient historian of the same vintage and Oxford pedigree, Peter Brunt, sometime Senior Bursar of Caius, that, “mildly teased on one occasion for his instinctive counter-suggestibility, he firmly rejected this idea too.”

Likewise John Crook, who could only be persuaded to agree to a proposition by the promotion of its opposite. Thus, if you wanted him to come to a party with undergraduates (at which he would be wonderful), you had to say: “John, you don’t want to bothered with a lot of undergraduates, do you?” “Of course, I’ll come”, he would respond, bridling. Piece of cake.

It is not as widely known amongst classical undergraduates as it should be that the question expecting the answer “No” was actually invented by John Crook.

As was said of the man at the end of the Hardy novel, John “was a good man who done good things.” His death, which occurred at Addenbrookes Hospital on 7 September, leaves a huge void in the college he loved and in the affections of all those, there and much further afield, who loved him. He was 85.

Peter Linehan, Dean of St John's College

Illustration is by John Edwards, courtesy of St John's College