My former colleague, John Shepherd, who has died aged 82, was a leading historian of the Labour party. His book George Lansbury (2002) was acclaimed by Michael Foot as “the best biography of a Labour leader ever”.
John established Lansbury as a major figure in interwar politics and subtitled the book “At the Heart of Old Labour”, an indication of his own politics, which were driven by a strong ethical commitment to leftwing causes including trade unionism, comprehensive education and Labour itself.
He cheekily presented a copy to Tony Blair at the Labour party conference later that year. John showed how Lansbury was devoted to social justice and had gone to jail when he was a councillor for spending money on the unemployed in Poplar, east London, in 1921, and then, as Labour leader (1931-35), maintained a pacifist stance despite the rise of fascism in Europe. His research was painstaking, and extended to contacting politician’s granddaughter, the actor Angela Lansbury.
John followed this with Crisis, What Crisis? (2013), the standard work on the winter of discontent of 1979. Research in this case included interviewing Bob Hawke, the former prime minister of Australia, about the international dimension to the conflict. The fall of the Callaghan government and the election of Margaret Thatcher was a pivotal moment in British history and John’s book was a serious study of how this had happened.
Born in north London, John was the eldest of the four children of Sam Shepherd, a lorry driver, and his wife, Vi. He went to Highbury county grammar school and then the Borough Road College of Education, becoming a school teacher. He researched a PhD on Labour history at Birkbeck, University of London and was supervised by Eric Hobsbawm. In 1980 he obtained a post as a staff development officer at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University).
Although he formally retired in the late 1990s, he continued to work at the university and, with his impressive publications, was made a professor in 2007 and helped found the Labour History Research Unit in the same year. On retirement around 2015 he became a visiting professor at the University of Huddersfield.
John and his first wife, Mary McGowan-Scanlon, had two daughters, Emma and Louise. After the marriage ended in divorce, in 1992 he married Janet Livingstone (nee Seeley), like him a historian, and they co-wrote a number of books about British history.
John’s other great passion was Arsenal FC. He was not only a season ticket holder but a great authority on the club’s history.
He is survived by Jan, his daughters and three grandchildren, as well as three stepdaughters and six stepgrandchildren.