My friend Byron Criddle, who has died of Covid-19 aged 78, was an academic political scientist who produced works dealing with 20th-century French and British politics.
After graduating he went to Leicester and taught history at Newarke girls’ school, simultaneously taking an MA in European integration at the local university. His dissertation, for which he was awarded a distinction, developed into his first book, Socialists and European Integration, published in 1969.
In 1968 he was appointed lecturer in French politics at Aberdeen University, where he was to stay for 40 years. In the next few years he co-authored with David Bell four books on the French left, and was also recruited by the social scientist and psephologist David Butler to work on eight successive Nuffield studies of British general elections. He wrote chapters on MPs and candidates. This led to a collaboration with the biographer and journalist Andrew Roth writing Parliamentary Profiles, an exhaustive survey of each MP’s personal background and political attitudes. He also was co-author with Robert Waller of successive editions of The Almanac of British Politics.
He was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the son of Levi Criddle, a Congregational minister, and Dorothy (nee Underwood), and after the family moved to Tunbridge Wells in Kent, he attended the Judd school in nearby Tonbridge.
Byron had an encyclopaedic knowledge of British politics. As a teenager he spent time in Tunbridge Wells public library recording the names of all the MPs, “from A to Z, from Abse to Zilliacus”, as he would put it, their constituencies and their majorities.
Byron went on to the University College of North Staffordshire in 1960 – it became Keele University in 1962. There he was elected president of the Debates Union, where he honed his brilliant public speaking skills. In this role he entertained and got to know MPs personally.
From 1983 he lived in Richmond and commuted weekly to Aberdeen where he rose to a readership. In the mid-1980s he had a visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts, and, after he left Aberdeen, taught for eight years at the University of Swansea.
He was a charismatic lecturer, a great raconteur and mimic, and was able to bring the oratory of Aneurin Bevan and Lloyd George to life in the lecture room. So popular was he that students set up a website – the Byron Criddle Appreciation Society.
He is survived by his third wife, Susan Twyman, whom he married in 2010; by Matthew, the son of his first marriage, to Elaine Cotterill (now Seymour), which ended in divorce; and Rosamond, the daughter of his second marriage, to the medical sociologist Janet Askham, who died in 2008; and by four grandchildren.
