By the death of Lawrence Hammond the world loses a
notable historian, a notable Liberal in something much larger than the pure party sense, and a man of unswerving intellectual integrity. He came of a fine Oxford vintage—among his fellow contributors to Essays in Liberalism, by six Oxford men, published in 1897 were Lord Simon, Francis Hirst and Hilaire Belloc—and by his marriage to a distinguished Oxford scholar in 1901 he created a literary partnership, J. L. and Barbara Hammond, second only to the Webb?. It was characteristic of Hammond that in 1914, though no man could be less adapted by temperament for military service, he cut off his black beard and took a commission in the R.F.A. He was editor of the long defunct Speaker (reconstituted as the Nation), but his real spiritual home was the Manchester Guardian, to which he con- tributed leaders and reviews for something like thirty years, as well as writing the official life of C. P. Scott. When he represented the M.G. at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he and I stayed for several weeks in the same hotel and shared various trials and diversions. One was a dinner, subtly propagandist, given by the Estonian Delegation at a Champs-Elysées restaurant. Hammond observed that it gave him rather a pang to be there, as the dinner must have cost Estonia at least a penny in the pound income tax. However, they invited us, so we went.
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