A History alumnus with a difference
A History alumnus with a difference
Oliver Thomson (Trinity 1956)
I thought at the time that I had made a mistake reading History. I had come in 1956 as a Classics scholar to Trinity, having just spent two years in Navy (National Service) and wanted to switch from Classics to Economics. But I was persuaded by my tutor that Economics wasn’t worth reading. Hence History as a sort of compromise and I had not even taken history at O-Level. Once started, I was faced with fierce competition from people who had won their scholarships studying history and for the next three years was something of a rebel.
Thus, it seemed natural that after graduating I would never pursue history as a career. In fact, I spent most of the next forty years in the advertising business. However, something had stuck. I was doing lectures to adult groups on the side, the subject changed from advertising to propaganda, and in 1977 I wrote Mass Persuasion in History, which was published in Edinburgh, New York and Tokyo-Japanese translation. In 1990 I slightly improved my credibility by doing a part-time PhD at Glasgow on English war propaganda in the 1730s. This was followed in 1999 by Easily Led-A History of Propaganda, also translated into Portuguese. In total now I have had published fifteen history books including most recently Zealots a new approach to Scotland’s role in the Wars of Three Kingdoms (2018) and Gods at War analysing three millennia of religious warfare (2019). I am still teaching history once a week to adult groups at Glasgow University and elsewhere,
So, in a slightly perverse way I do owe a very great deal to the historians who persevered with me at Cambridge. And I owe to advertising the fact that the underlying theme of all my books has been human manipulation.