Pat Thompson was one of the generation of ex-servicemen Fellows who, under the leadership of the Warden Maurice Bowra, transformed the reputation of Wadham College in the post-war years.

Previously considered respectable but rather dull, Wadham later acquired a reputation for dynamic radicalism.

Pat Thompson played a leading part in this transformation of the college, notably for many years as senior tutor, as well as in his own fields of history and PPE.

He was also influential in the university’s History Faculty, notably as a supervisor of graduate students, in building up the serious study of 20th-century British political and social history.

Born in Preston in 1920, he spent the years 1923-36 in Belfast, where his father was a civil servant.

When the family moved to London, he attended Dulwich College, winning an exhibition to Magdalen College.

He was influenced by the Medievalist Bruce McFarlane and AJP Taylor, of later television fame.

He took a first in history in 1941, then was commissioned into the Worcestershire Yeomanry.

He parachuted into Normandy shortly after D-Day, was wounded, and spent the rest of the war in secret activities at Bletchley Park.

He was elected Fellow of Wadham in 1947.

For the next 20 years, he was occupied both as a tutor in both history and politics, and by administrative posts, including a spell as domestic bursar.

Like AJP Taylor, he prided himself on delivering formal lectures without notes.

His approach to politicians and do-gooders generally was invariably sceptical, even cynical, and he acquired a reputation himself as an ‘operator’, not least in placing his pupils in academic posts.

Yet he was intensively loyal to Wadham and the History Faculty, to colleagues and his pupils.

He gave the impression of an even-tempered, pipe-smoking geniality, concealing successfully a volatile temperament.

Much of this was due to his marriage to Mary (since 1941), a Somerville graduate and botanist. She died in 2003.

Dinner parties at their house in Kiln Lane for colleagues, old pupils and current pupils were legendary, not least for the gossip which flowed freely.

Few can have suspected that behind the bland exterior the Thompsons were coping with the problems of a brain-damaged son, John, and, later, the death in young middle-age of their elder son Alan, a journalist.

Their daughter Ruth, a distinguished civil servant, and son John survive them, along with Alan’s son Paul.

He himself wrote very comparatively little, although always of the highest quality.

His approach would not have been well regarded in the modern world, with its emphasis on productivity.

But his influence on the writing of history was enormous, through both his undergraduate and graduate pupils, and his painstaking editorial work, notably for Oxford University Press.

So, too, his influence on the wider world, not least the media, through his pupils — Melvyn Bragg and Julian Mitchell to name just two.

He died after a series of brief illnesses, aged 89, on October 9.