Jack Butterworth, Baron Butterworth

John Blackstocke Butterworth, CBE, DL (13 March 1918 – 19 June 2003) was a British lawyer and the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick.

Jack, as he liked to be called, was graduated in jurisprudence from Oxford University. On the eve of the Second World War he enlisted in the Royal Artillery and spent much of the war in Scotland, protecting strategic targets from air attack.

He qualified in 1946 as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and then became a law tutor at New College, Oxford. He had a reputation as an outstanding teacher and he was made an Honorary Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn in 1953. He was quick-witted and shrewd, which accounts for his appointment as bursar of New College for the last seven years of his time at Oxford.

Butterworth married his wife Doris in 1948 and they had one son and two daughters, including Anna Walker, who became a senior civil servant of some distinction.

In 1963, he became the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick. Warwick was one of the handful of new universities created in the wake of the Robbins Report (1962). One of his colleagues at the time described him as “a noisy” vice chancellor.

Butterworth believed strongly that his job was to select professors who would be leaders in their discipline and that he should stand aside and let them develop their subjects in their own way (though within a tight budget). Because he had worked only at Oxford, he wanted Oxford’s standards of academic performance at the undergraduate level and in research. He had a belief that Warwick must maintain a balance between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ disciplines: you could justify a strong commitment to the Humanities if you had a Business School, a very pure Maths Department if you had Engineering.

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