The Saltire Society is pleased to welcome Hew Strachan, one of Scotland's most distinguished military historians, as an honorary member of the Society. Hew’s contribution to Scotland was recognised at our Annual General Meeting on 22 September and he was presented with a commemorative plaque.
In 1975, Strachan was elected a research fellow of Corpus Christi College, and from 1977 to 1978 was a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In 1978, he returned to his Cambridge college as a tutor.
His early research and published work focussed on the history of the British Army, and he was awarded the Templer Medal for From Waterloo to Balaclava and the Westminster Medal for The Politics of the British Army. Commissioned by the Oxford University Press to write a history of the First World War to replace C. R. M. F. Cruttwell's one-volume history, Strachan completed the first of three volumes to wide acclaim and is acknowledged as one of the world's authorities on the subject. Accompanying the print publication of his one volume survey aimed at the general reader The First World War (2004) was a multi-part documentary series for television, with some episodes being titled after the chapters in the written work. This set was also released on DVD by Image Entertainment.
He became admissions tutor and then senior tutor of Corpus Christi College, and in 1992 was elected a life fellow. He was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow from 1992 to 2000, then migrated to Oxford as Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls.
He was director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War from 2004 to 2015, and has published a series of important articles on strategy, as well as editing books which have arisen from the project. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society.
Hew joins our growing list of honorary members which includes Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, Professor Peter Higgs, Dr Ann Matheson and many more distinguished contributors to the cultural landscape of Scotland.