John Saville, the socialist economic and social historian who has died
aged 93, was an academic at Hull University for nearly 40 years, but
will be remembered above all for the great, open-ended Dictionary of
Labour Biography (partly co-edited with Joyce Bellamy), of which he was
able to complete the first 10 volumes (1972-2000), and the three volumes
of Essays in Labour History (1960, 1971, 1977) co-edited with Asa Briggs
(Lord Briggs).

He was born John Stamatopoulos, in a Lincolnshire village near
Gainsborough, to Edith Vessey, from a local working-class family, and
Orestes Stamatopoulos, a Greek engineer who disappeared from the lives
of both soon after. His mother’s remarriage in London some years after
the first world war to a widowed tailor, freemason and reader of the
Daily Mail, to whom she had acted as housekeeper, gave her son a
comfortable lower-middle-class childhood and the name he later adopted.

He won a scholarship to Royal Liberty school in east London, but in the
conventional and, until the sixth form, not particularly intellectual,
schoolboy sportsman there was little to suggest a future in political
radicalism. But something must have been germinating for, "almost the
day I arrived" at the London School of Economics in 1934, once again on
a scholarship, he began to go to leftwing meetings and within two months
had joined the Communist party, in which he was to remain for the next
22 years.

Saville left the LSE, then (with Oxford and Cambridge) the major centre
of student communism, with a first, with the confident and incisive
manner that became his trademark, in lifelong partnership with Constance
(Saunders), whom he married in 1943, and with his passion for research
postponed. He did not return to academic life until 1947, when he began
to teach economic history at the (then) University College of Hull,
where he was to remain until retirement from the chair of economic and
social history in 1982. He continued to live in Hull until a month
before his death.

Called up in 1940 after a spell of employment, he had the leftwing
equivalent of a good war: "I had several large-scale quarrels with
authority, although I was a good and efficient soldier." Against the
party line, he refused to take a commission, but advanced rapidly from
anti-aircraft gunner to gunnery sergeant major instructor and regimental
sergeant major, engaged in political work wherever he went - especially,
from 1943 to 1946, in India.

India - where he met Nehru and leaders of the Muslim League and his
friendship with Indian communist students in Britain, all from
establishment families, opened most anti-imperial doors - reinforced his
own firm, but no longer uncritical, convictions. (Unlike him, Constance
had never accepted the Moscow-imposed party line of 1939-41, which
followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact). The cold war, particularly frozen
during the years of Korea and McCarthyism, made it easier to maintain them.

He soon became a pillar of that remarkable assembly of talents, the
Communist Party Historians’ Group (“intellectually my lifeline”), and
also of the Hull Communist party and its associated organisations, while
building a double expertise in 19^th-century British economic history and
labour history.

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, or, more exactly, the
failure of the British CP leadership to recognise its significance,
transformed the Historians’ Group from loyalists into vocal critics.
Saville’s was the first voice raised at its meetings. Soon, in
partnership with another Yorkshire Communist historian, EP Thompson, he
launched an opposition journal, the New Reasoner. Both were suspended by
the CP and soon resigned from it with their supporters under the impact
of the Hungarian rising of that year.

Saville remained a Marxist and, like most of the ex-Communist
historians, firmly on the left; indeed, decidedly “old left” rather than
“new left”, let alone New Labour. The Society for the Study of Labour
History, which he helped to found in 1958, inspired his most influential
work: Essays in Labour History and the Dictionary of Labour Biography.
This latter, remarkable, work, the best of its kind anywhere in the
world, will almost certainly remain as his most lasting monument. He was
also a force in the new Oral History Society, of which he became the
first chairman in 1973, and in the library and publications department
of Hull University, not to mention the economic and social history
committee of what was then the Social Science Research Council.

From 1964, most of his political writing was to be published in the
Socialist Register, an annual volume he co-edited for some decades with
Ralph Miliband. In the early 1970s he co-founded, later chaired, and, as
usual, did most of the work for, the Council for Academic Freedom, in
defence of the civil liberties of (British) academics. To the end, he
remained proud of the speakers’ classes he ran for six to eight weeks
every summer for many years in Hull for trade unionists. He published a
book of memoirs, Memoirs from the Left, in 2003.

Lucid, fiercely loyal to friends and causes, and a formidable enemy of
bullshit, Saville made his contribution to history and to scholarship
outside the limelight. "There are not many entries in the Dictionary of
Labour Biography," Miliband wrote in the introduction for the
Festschrift (Ideology and the Labour Movement, 1979) presented to him by
friends and pupils, "which record lives of greater dedication and
integrity."

Constance died in 2007. He is survived by their three sons and a daughter.

• John Saville (John Stamatopoulos), economic and social historian, born
2 April 1916; died 13 June 2009