H S Ferns

Henry Stanley Ferns (16 December 1913 – 19 February 1992), known as Harry Ferns, was a Canadian-born historian of Anglo-Argentine relations.

Background and career Ferns was born in Strathmore, Alberta, the eldest son of a poultry farmer. He was educated at St John's High School in Winnipeg, the University of Manitoba, Queen's University, Kingston, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class degree in history in 1938. Having won a scholarship to study at Cambridge, it was while travelling on a passenger ship across the Atlantic to take up his place that Ferns met a retired Indian Army major, who "advised him not to wear his bowler hat in Cambridge and converted him to the communist cause." His closest associates in that group were Victor Kiernan, Pieter Keuneman and Mohan Kumaramangalam.

Returning to Canada in 1939, Ferns joined the civil service and worked for a time in the private office of the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, before leaving in 1944 to teach at his alma mater, the University of Manitoba. Although the book was "viewed with shock" in Canada because of its somewhat critical view of King, it was received well elsewhere. His efforts in this area were eventually rewarded with the establishment in 1976 of the University of Buckingham, Britain's first modern-day private higher education institution. Ferns recorded his ongoing political evolution in his memoir, Reading from Left to Right: One Man's Political History (1983).