Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell (23 May 1887 – 14 March 1941) was a British historian and academic who served as dean and later principal of Hertford College, Oxford. His field of expertise was modern European history, his most notable work being A History of the Great War, 1914–18. He is mainly remembered, however, for the vendetta pursued against him by the novelist Evelyn Waugh, in which Waugh showed his distaste for his former tutor by repeatedly using the name "Cruttwell" in his early novels and stories to depict a sequence of unsavoury or ridiculous characters. The prolonged minor humiliation thus inflicted may have contributed to Cruttwell's eventual mental breakdown.
Cruttwell gained first-class honours at The Queen's College, Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1911, and he became a lecturer in history at Hertford College the following year. His academic career was interrupted by service in the First World War during which he suffered severe wounds; he returned to Oxford in 1919 and became dean of Hertford, and then principal of the college in 1930. It was during his tenure as dean that the feud with Evelyn Waugh developed while Waugh was a history scholar at Hertford in 1922–1924. Waugh pursued this hostility until shortly before Cruttwell's death.
Cruttwell's term as Hertford's principal saw the production of his most important scholarly works, including his war history which earned him the degree of DLitt. Beyond his college and academic duties Cruttwell held various administrative offices within the university, and was a member of its Hebdomadal Council, or ruling body. In private life Cruttwell served as a Justice of the Peace in Hampshire, where he had a country home, and stood unsuccessfully for the university's parliamentary seat in the 1935 general election, representing the Conservative Party. Ill-health, aggravated by his war injuries, caused his retirement from the Hertford principalship in 1939. A mental collapse led to his committal to an institution, where he died two years later.
Family background, childhood and education
Cruttwell was born on 23 May 1887, in the village of Denton, Norfolk, the eldest of three sons of the Rev. Charles Thomas Cruttwell, Rector of St Mary's Church. The elder Cruttwell was a scholar and historian of Roman literature; his wife Annie (née Mowbray), was the daughter of Sir John Mowbray, who served as Conservative member of parliament for Durham from 1853 to 1868 and for one of the two Oxford University parliamentary seats from 1868 to 1899. The young Cruttwell was educated at Rugby School, where in 1906 he won a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford, to read classics and history. At Queen's, Cruttwell enjoyed considerable academic success, including a first class honours degree in modern history. In 1911 he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College and a year later was appointed to a history lectureship at Hertford College.
On the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Cruttwell was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 1/4th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, a Territorial Force unit in which his brother was also serving. By 1915 he was serving in the trenches, in France and Flanders, and led numerous patrols into no man's land, receiving a severe leg wound. Early in 1916, persistent myalgia and rheumatism led to him being declared unfit for further active service. In August 1917 he was an instructor with an Officer Training Battalion in Oxford, and late in the war joined the Intelligence Department at the War Office. Demobilised in 1919, he resumed his academic life in Oxford, and in 1922 published a short history of his regiment's wartime exploits.
Apart from its physical effects, Cruttwell's wartime experience seemingly inflicted permanent psychological damage on his personality, replacing the general good manners of his youth with a short-tempered, impatient and bullying character. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, an undergraduate at Hertford in the 1920s, wrote later that "It was as though he had never cleansed himself from the muck of the trenches".
On his return to Hertford College, Cruttwell was elected to a fellowship in modern history and a year later was appointed Hertford's dean, responsible for general discipline within the college; he held this post for five years. He also became active in the administration of Oxford University and was elected to its ruling body, the Hebdomadal Council. He served as a university statutory commissioner and was one of several academics nominated by the Vice-Chancellor as delegates to the Oxford University Press.
Cruttwell's administrative competence was recognised in 1930, when he was elected principal of Hertford College. In this office, he helped to establish the university's geography school and arranged that the first Oxford professorship in geography was based at Hertford. During his tenure as principal, he completed his most significant academic works, including his Great War history (1934) which earned him the Oxford degree of DLitt. In 1936 Cruttwell delivered the Lees Knowles Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the title "The Role of British Strategy in the Great War". In the same year he published a biography of the Duke of Wellington and in 1937 produced his final major academic work, A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World. An attempt in 1935 to emulate his grandfather and become one of the university's members of parliament failed when, as a Conservative candidate in the general election of 1935, Cruttwell was defeated. An Independent, A. P. Herbert, beat him on the third ballot in a single transferable vote system. This was the first time since the 1860s, that a Conservative had failed to hold either of the two university seats, a humiliation noted with relish by Waugh who harboured a deep hostility towards his former tutor. According to The Times, Cruttwell had underestimated the nature and determination of the opposition and had taken his election as a Conservative for granted. In first preferences, he came bottom of the poll with only 1,803 votes, while his Conservative running mate, Lord Hugh Cecil, gained 7,365, almost five times as many. Because he polled less than one-eighth of the first ballot votes, Cruttwell forfeited his deposit.
Evelyn Waugh joined Hertford College on a scholarship in January 1922. He had received a congratulatory letter from Cruttwell welcoming him to the college and complimenting him on his English prose: "about the best of any of the Candidates in the group". Despite this warmth, Waugh's initial impressions of his tutor were unfavourable—"not at all the kind of don for whom I had been prepared by stories of Jowett." The main basis for the rift that rapidly developed between them was Waugh's increasingly casual attitude towards his scholarship. Cruttwell saw the scholarship as a commitment to hard and devoted study. Waugh, however, considered the scholarship a reward for his successful school studies and a passport to a life of pleasure. He involved himself in a range of university activities to the detriment of his academic work, until Cruttwell brusquely advised him in his third term that he should take his studies more seriously—a warning which Waugh interpreted as an insult. "I think it was from then on that our mutual dislike became incurable", he wrote.
During his remaining time at Hertford, Waugh missed few opportunities to ridicule Cruttwell. He did this in numerous unsigned contributions to Isis, including an article in March 1924 in the "Isis Idols" series. The mockery in this article was disguised as a paean of praise, according to Waugh's biographer Martin Stannard, arranged around an unflattering photograph of Cruttwell displaying "bad teeth within an unfortunate smile". Cruttwell made no apparent response to these provocations, other than a dismissive reference to Waugh as "a silly suburban sod with an inferiority complex".