In June 1995, the BBC began broadcasting, on weekday mornings, a fifteen-minute account of the history of Britain from the arrival of Julius Caesar to the death of Queen Victoria. It ran to two hundred and sixteen episodes — some forty-six hours — every one of them written by one man. Anna Massey read it. Pete Atkin directed it. Extracts from Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples were threaded through Lee's own narrative, read by Paul Eddington, who died during production; Peter Jeffrey finished the job.

Released on cassette and CD, it became the best-selling audiobook the BBC had ever produced, shifting hundreds of thousands of copies. Andrew Roberts called it history in the old style, broad in its sweep and formidable in its knowledge. The wry, dry tone Lee had loved as a boy in the Farjeons' Kings and Queens ran all through it.

The commission itself was almost an accident. Someone at Broadcasting House mentioned that Radio 4 was looking to replace the daily religious slot; Lee suggested a regular dose of history, and when told it could not realistically be done, he chased a two-page synopsis. "I told him, 'For God's sake, just do it.'"

Nobody commissions that now. Nobody would dare.

The pavilion

Christopher Robin James Lee was born on 13 October 1941 on the Kent–London border — Dartford by most accounts, neighbouring Erith by one — the only child of James Lee, a bus driver, and his wife Winifred, née Robertson, a department-store buyer; his father came from a Kentish fishing family. He was expelled from Wilmington Grammar School — the official reason was misbehaviour; the unofficial one involved a pavilion which had come within an ace of burning to the ground — and he went to sea.

Two years on a tramp steamer, sailing the world as a deck boy, which he set down decades later in Eight Bells and Top Masts. The great lesson of the voyage, he recalled, was the discovery that the British were not universally venerated.

There he was - no longer a naughty schoolboy, but an experienced, wholly formed man - at sixteen.

He learned the limits of the national self-image from the deck of a cargo ship, and he spent the rest of his life explaining that nation to itself — affectionately, but never on its own terms.

He came back, took a job ashore to keep himself while he studied at Woolwich Polytechnic, and read history as a mature student at Goldsmiths. The BBC took him on as its radio defence and foreign affairs correspondent for a decade from 1976, sending him to Moscow and the Middle East. Then he left journalism for the academy — first Quatercentenary Fellow in Contemporary History and Gomes Lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later at Birkbeck, working on the history of ideas — where, he claimed, the dons were unmoved by all of it save one credential: "My writing for The Archers was the only thing that impressed them at Emmanuel."

Expelled schoolboy; deck boy; Moscow correspondent; Cambridge fellow. The English class system was not consulted at any stage and would not have approved.

The other career

He held no Merchant Navy qualifications whatsoever, which did not prevent the Royal Navy from recruiting him into its Joint Intelligence Reserve — where, in the 1970s, he produced a study of the order of battle and command structure of the Soviet Northern Fleet. He served in the Services Intelligence Wing of the RNR, commanded the HMS Wildfire unit from 1988 to 1990, and was awarded a Bar to his Reserve Decoration in 1991. For three decades he was the defence and foreign affairs man at the British Forces Broadcasting Service, on Sitrep, every week.

One notes, without further comment, that the boy thrown out of school for arson-adjacent misbehaviour ended up counting Soviet submarines for the Admiralty.

His Falklands reporting earned a memo from the BBC's head of news praising its strength, quality and sobriety — and Lee, characteristically, turned the compliment into a discipline, taping a sign to his office door that he passed every time he went on air: Be careful. They're going to believe you. It is as good a summary of the historian's responsibility as anyone has managed in six words.

Two hundred and sixteen

The Sceptred Isle empire kept growing. In 1999 he took it into the twentieth century, then into Britain's most powerful families, then across ninety episodes into the history of the British Empire, writing a book to accompany each series. Alongside it poured a Stakhanovite output of radio drama — the long-running political satire The House; Our Brave Boys, a sitcom set at the Ministry of Defence with Fiona Shaw, Martin Jarvis and Peter Capaldi; a run of crime novels about Inspector Leonard, an eccentric detective in Bath — plus books on cricket and the Royal family, and a turn commentating on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding for Radio 4.

The one book that cost him was the life of Lord Carrington, which he had agreed to publish only after its subject's death. "So I will be looking up at him from hell when it comes out," Carrington told the Sunday Telegraph — and then lived to ninety-nine, dying in 2018. The verdict, when Carrington: An Honourable Man finally appeared, was that writing without much style about a man to whom style mattered rather grates. Lee would not have minded. He had spent a career being told his history had no style, by people to whom his million listeners were invisible.

He was not universally applauded. Felipe Fernández-Armesto pronounced This Sceptred Isle old-fashioned, unadventurous and intellectually complacent, which is very nearly a review of the entire discipline of narrative history and was doubtless meant to be. Listeners wrote to him in their thousands to say that his was the first history that had not bored them senseless — and of this he observed: "As the author, I'm pleased. As an historian by trade, I'm depressed."

He is simultaneously accepting the compliment and indicting the profession that made the compliment possible. It is the remark of a man who knew exactly what he had done and exactly what it cost.

The boat

He worked seventeen hours a day, six days a week, in a converted Wesleyan chapel in the garden of his cottage, dividing the rest of his life between Sussex and Florence. His wife lived apart from the chapel, and was only occasionally allowed to interrupt the schedule — "she came for Christmas and had the grace to go on Boxing Day," he told an interviewer, and the awful thing is that one cannot be sure he was joking.

The escape from the desk was always the sea. He kept a restored sloop and took her out whenever the work would release him, though even aboard her, he was rarely more than a few minutes from his laptop. He never really came ashore. That is the truth of him: a deck boy who acquired a Cambridge fellowship, a naval intelligence file and forty-six hours of national broadcasting, and who still, at the end, wanted to be on the water.

He married first, in 1969, Christine Adams; they divorced in 2010, and the following year he married the portrait and landscape painter Fiona Graham-Mackay, who illustrated Viceroys, his history of the Viceroys of India, and skippered their yacht. He had two daughters and three grandchildren by his first marriage.

He went into hospital for an unspecified illness, contracted the virus there, and died at his Sussex home in Rye on 14 February 2021, aged seventy-nine. Even the manner of it had a grim aptness: the man who had spent his life explaining how Britain endured its plagues and its wars went out in the middle of the nation's worst modern pandemic, in a Cinque Port within sight of the water.

Members will recall that he was the sort of man who, offered a drink and some time and attention, would give you the reign of King John and leave you convinced you had known it all along.

The Club is much poorer and considerably less well-informed.


Christopher Robin James Lee, 13 October 1941 – 14 February 2021, a former Eccentric Club member.