My friend Trevor Thomas, who has died aged 85, was a historian who specialised in east-central Europe, particularly the Habsburg monarchy. Yet this description barely scratches the surface of his knowledge. Isaiah Berlin described academics as either hedgehogs or foxes. A hedgehog knows much about one thing, while a fox knows a little about many things. Trevor was a wise and agile fox who knew much about many things.
Born in Birkenhead, the only son of a GP and a district nurse, Trevor was educated at Birkenhead school before going on to do a degree in history at Cambridge.
His national service in the RAF accidentally proved to be a turning point, for he was taught Czech and Slovak in order to listen to the broadcasts of the Czechoslovakian air force. This prompted a fascination with Central European history, and so when he left the RAF in 1958 he started (though never finished) a PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES, now part of University College London) and joined the staff there as a lecturer in 1965.
As a result he was in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968, and when the Russian tanks rolled in he left quickly, forced to leave behind friends and a girlfriend. He remained as a lecturer at SSEES until 1989.
Trevor was a kind, generous colleague to fellow workers at SSEES and provided especially invaluable help for those beginning their careers. Conversations with him would invariably produce a flurry of ideas, reading suggestions and discussion points, and then when you next met him he would say: “I have something you might find interesting,” followed by the production of reams of photocopies, copiously annotated with insightful comments.
In retirement Trevor was a fixture at parties and lectures, and would come down from his home in Kilburn, north London, to meet regularly in the evening with friends and former work colleagues at pubs near to the SSEES in Bloomsbury. He could be rambunctious and boisterous in company – his whispered asides were often heard across the room – but he was also a shy, private, and modest person who disliked talking about himself.
