Adam Curle

Charles Thomas William Curle (4 July 1916 – 28 September 2006), better known as Adam Curle, was a British academic, known for his work in social psychology, pedagogy, development studies and peace studies. After holding posts at the University of Oxford, University of Exeter, University of Ghana and Harvard University, in 1973 he became the inaugural Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, following the establishment of the University's Department of Peace Studies. Curle's works included several books on education, including Educational Strategy for Developing Societies (1963), and a number of books on peace and peacemaking, including Making Peace (1971). He was also, throughout his career and after his retirement in 1978, active in peacemaking and mediation, and visited Nigeria and Biafra several times as part of a Quaker contingent during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70. Early life and education Charles Thomas William Curle was born in L'Isle-Adam, Val-d'Oise, France, on 4 July 1916, as the Battle of the Somme raged nearby. His father was the British author, critic and journalist Richard Curle. His mother was Cordelia Curle (née Fisher), whose siblings included the historian H. A. L. Fisher, the cricketer and academic Charles Dennis Fisher, the naval officer William Wordsworth Fisher, the banker Edwin Fisher, and Adeline Vaughan Williams, the wife of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Their other relatives included the historian Frederic William Maitland, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the author Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell. He was named after three of his mother's brothers, and took the name Adam, after his birthplace, after returning to France in 1919. He grew up in Wheatfield, Oxfordshire, where he developed an affection for animals and a sensitivity to landscape. Richard Curle was not a frequent presence in his son's childhood; Adam did not meet his father until he was three years old. Curle later described how they became closer in Richard's later life, however, "on a man-to-man basis," having "somehow missed the father–son phase". Curle attributed his pacifism to the influence of his mother, who lost three of her brothers to war and instilled a hatred of war in her son. Woodhouse argued that Curle's mother was also responsible for the "self-confidence which was to enable him later to make a series of unconventional moves at critical turning points in his life".