David Hubback was a life member of the Institute and served on Council from 1957 until 1961 and from 1988 to his death in March 1991. The following is a recollection by one of his contemporaries
I first met David Hubback at Cambridge in 1934 when we sat in the large Mill Lane lecture room listening to the lectures of the small and wiry K M N Pickthorne who had just published the first of his studies on Tudor Government. Pickthorne positively hissed when he mentioned R H Tawney and whether the mention or hissing amused David I don’t know, for he seemed to derive pleasure from both. His genial but unobtrusive presence in the great crowd of historians paradoxically made him distinctive for he was so eminently free from bias, especially that exhibited by members of the Left Book Club whose distinctive yellow volumes proclaimed the loyalties of his contemporaries, loyalties which took John Comford to death in the Spanish Civil War.
But David was au-dessus de la mêlée. He never shared the sentiments of the contemporary verse:
"We don’t have to hum and ha
Nous avons compris tout cela
Our books are chosen for us: thanks
To Strachey, Lewis and Gollancz"
So for three years I would see his tall figure, never writing (as far as I could see) notes on what the lecturer was saying (as were a number of those surrounding him) but aloof, judgemental, appraisive of the content of the lectures and smiling at the nuances of emphasis each gave to his "spiel".
Later I heard that he had on Trevelyan’s recommendation obtained a post at Eton. I once met him on the underground during the war when I was weighed down with luggage and ascending the escalator as he was coming down. We spoke briefly and the next I heard was that he was a back room boy (Speech writer? Certainly not a tame researcher). Brief flashes of revelation through mention of him in the press kept memory alive until I met him in the flesh again at a Eugenics Society meeting when we discovered that we both lived, he on, I near, the Eton College Estate. His interest in the Simon Population Trust and The Eugenics Society brought us closer but only for a brief time. The last time we met it was on a long walk after a meeting. I wished I had known him better but geography forbade it. He was a gentleman but shrewd and so very civilised and rational. I shall miss our meetings very much.
W H G Armytage