Sir Barry Albert Cross, C.B.E. 17 March 1925-27 April 1994.

Abstract

Barry Cross was born at Coulsden, Surrey, the second son of Hubert and Elsie Cross (nee Richards). Hubert Cross was a life assurance cashier with Scottish Provident in the City of London. In the First World War he served with the Honorable Artillery Company in Palestine as ‘a private and proud of it’. Untroubled by career ambitions he was content with a routine job, family life, and playing rugby at county level. His sons remembered him as kind, firm and a little distant, while their mother was more indulgent and the provider of puddings. With the possible exception of Penuel Cross, a paternal great–grandfather, who was a bass chorister and lay vicar at Winchester Cathedral for 43 years, there was little trace of a creative or scholarly impulse on either Barry's father's or mother's side. Yet Barry and his younger brother John (who became Professor of Politics at University College Cardiff) had academic ambitions and well thought–out career goals from an early age. As Barry was later to write: