British Institute of Persian Studies

Dr. Laurence LockhartAuthor(s): Basil GraySource: Iran, Vol. 14 (1976), p. iiiPublished by: British Institute of Persian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4300538 .

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OBITUARY

DR. LAURENCE LOCKHART

Laurence Lockhart was born in 1891; he was proud of his Scots heritage and of the literary tradi- tions of his family, of whom the best known was the friend and biographer of Walter Scott. With his entry into Pembroke College, Cambridge, his life course was set, for he sat at the feet of Edward G. Browne from 1910 to 1914, then at the height of his powers and devoting himself not only to the language and literature of Persia but also to the then present threat to her independence and to her future as a free country. Laurence took first class honours in Arabic and Persian; but the 1914-18 war intervened, during which he served in the Foreign Office. Afterwards he combined cultural work for the Anglo- Persian Oil Company with the pursuit of research into I8th century Persian history, which issued in a thesis on Nadir Shah, accepted for the London Ph.D. degree from the School of Oriental Studies (1935), and afterwards published (1938) in a substantial volume of 350 pages. After the second world war, when he served in RAF intelligence, he returned to this period of research, resulting in a second valuable monograph on the Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan occupation of Persia (1958) for which he was awarded the Cambridge Litt.D.

Laurence was always ready to give his time to deepening and improving cultural understanding with Iran: he served on the council of the Iran Society from its foundation in 1936 and on the Governing Council of the British Institute of Persian Studies from its inception in 1963 until his death on 3 May 1975: he edited the first four volumes of this journal (1963-66). He also served on the Editorial Board of the Cambridge History of Iran from its appointment in 1961 and accepted responsibility for the editing of Volume 6, on the Timurid and Safavi periods, to which he himself contributed a sub- stantial chapter European contacts with Persia. This was a field of study in which he most enjoyed working during his years of retirement since 1960 when he settled in Cambridge. His articles published in Iran (vols IV and VI) and elsewhere show his mastery of original sources and his scholarly use of them. For a wider public he wrote a most attractive volume entitled Famous Cities of Iran (1939), illustrated by his own excellent photographs, revised and enlarged in a new edition Persian Cities (1960) which has met with a deserved success.

He was a very good friend to many, with modesty not enough to conceal his wide knowledge of things Persian, and it was a particular pleasure and privilege to travel with him in Iran, for which land and its people he had deep affection.

BASIL GRAY

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