John Sturge Stephens

Amongst these papers is a tribute by Philip Styles, who wrote:John Stephens numbered among his antecedents and connections William Stephens (glassmaker), well known to collectors as a painter of Bristol China in George III’s time; and, on his mother’s, Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, the Biblical scholar, and the Birmingham Quaker philanthropist, Joseph Sturge.

It was at Cambridge, under the influence of Terrot R. Glover, that his interest in History developed and he began to acquire, through travel in the vacations, his intimate knowledge of Germany.

[1]In addition to his studies at St John's College, Stephens was also a gifted linguist able to speak several languages, which greatly assisted him in his later international work.

His earliest surviving letters, from War Relief camps in France, are full of botanical discoveries, and botany became one of his chief relaxations when his last illness confined him to his North Oxfordshire home near Witney, where he died on 12 July 1954 of a rare and distressing lung disease.

[7] During the 1920s and 30s, Stephens travelled extensively throughout Europe, visiting a large number of countries, including Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy (especially the South Tyrol with its German-speaking minority) and Poland, thus becoming heavily involved in European geopolitics of that period.

He also liaised with Josef Bürckel (1895–1944), a Nazi German officer heavily involved in the Anschluss, in an attempt to get his sanction for relief work to address the “burning problem of acute Jewish distress”.

In a letter to his father dated 22 April 1938, he wrote:The worst thing the Nazis have done in Austria is the expulsion of the whole Jewish population from the villages of the Burgenland near the Hungarian frontier.

The cultural life of Vienna will be annihilated.…[12] Stephens was referring here to the large numbers of highly qualified Viennese Jews who were obliged to flee their country: doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics, writers, musicians and artists.

Indeed, Philip Styles recalled that during the 1930s, "many young men and women of different nationalities found a home or a meeting place in the friendly atmosphere of the Stephens’s house in Hagley Road.

However, Stephens's deepest interest was in the hopes of a peaceful and democratic future and it was so that he might get to know more intimately the problems and aspirations of German youth that he took a post as Lektor at the University of Frankfurt.

To hear him lecture to a small group on the trial and execution of Charles I, or on the meeting of George Fox and Cromwell was a moving experience".

There was much in seventeenth century England that called for his deepest enthusiasms and his special subject on ‘The Age of Cromwell’ became one of the most notable pieces of advanced teaching in the Birmingham History School.