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Philip Harris (1926-2018)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2019

Michael Hodgetts*
Affiliation:

Abstract

Philip Harris, who died on 21 July 2018 at the age of ninety-one, was born in Woodford, Essex, and educated at St Anthony’s School in Woodford (1932-7), St Ignatius College in London (1937-44), Birkbeck College, London, and the Institute of Historical Research. In 1953 he was awarded an M.A. for a thesis on ‘English Trade with the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late 16th Century’. From 1947 onwards he was on the staff of the British Museum (of which the Library was then part), becoming Assistant Secretary in 1959, Deputy Superintendent of the Reading Room in 1963 and Deputy Keeper in 1966. He was in charge in turn of the Acquisitions, the English and North European, and the West European Branches of the Department of Printed Books. In 1998 he published his History of the British Museum Library, the fruit of more than ten years’ research after his ‘retirement’ in 1986.1 His final project there, almost complete when he died, was on the Old Royal Library donated to the Museum by George II.2 At his funeral the first reading was read by a former head of the Chinese Department there.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Trustees of the Catholic Record Society 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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References

1 Harris, P. R., A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973 (London: British Library, 1998)Google Scholar .

2 Information in this paragraph taken from the Order of Service for the funeral mass, collated by Fr Stewart Foster.

3 Harris, P. R., ‘The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605-12. Part I’, Recusant History 8 (1965), 192249 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Harris, P. R., ‘The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605-1612. Part II’, Recusant History, 8 (1966), 252284 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

4 Harris, P. R., ‘The English College, Douai, 1750-94 ’, Recusant History, 10 (1969), 7995 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Harris, P.R., ‘Douai College Documents, 1639-1794’, CRS Records Series, 63 (1971)Google Scholar .

5 Returns of Papists 1767: Diocese of Chester (London: Catholic Record Society, 1980), foreword.

6 Williams, J. Anthony, Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire , 1660-1791 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1968)Google Scholar ; Aveling, J. C. H., Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, 1558-1791 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1970)Google Scholar .

7 Blom, J. M., The Post Tridentine English Primer (London: Catholic Record Society, 1982)Google Scholar ; Parmiter, Geoffrey de C., Edmund Plowden, an Elizabethan Lawyer (London: Catholic Record Society, 1987)Google Scholar .