Did you know that there is a figure who played a key role in both VE Day and the history of the University of Dundee? In this blog Kenneth Baxter from the University Archives explains how Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, went from accepting the German surrender to shaping the future of the University.
Arthur Tedder was born in Glenguin, Stirlingshire in 1890 and was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He then joined the Colonial Service and went to Fiji, but the outbreak of the Great War a few months later saw him return to the UK to join the army. In 1916 he joined the Royal Flying Corps, going on to serve in the newly formed Royal Air Force. After the war ended, he continued his career in the air forces, eventually becoming Commander of the RAF Far Eastern Forces in the 1930s. During World War Two he commanded Allied air operations in the Mediterranean and North Africa and was promoted to Air Marshal. He was appointed Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, under Eisenhower, during the later stages of the war. It was in this role that he travelled to Berlin to receive the unconditional surrender of the German Armed Forces which officially ended the war in Europe on May 1945. He was one of two Allied signatories (the other being Marshal Zhukov) and was effectively the representative of Britain, the USA and the other Western Allies. He was knighted in 1942 and ennobled in 1946.
In 1951 Lord Tedder was invited to chair the Royal Commission on University Education in Dundee which led to the creation of Queen’s College, Dundee. This had been called to deal with the growing tensions about the place of University College, Dundee within the University of St Andrews. Broadly three rival views had developed. A faction led by D. C. Thomson and supported by the Town Council and most local politicians wanted the College to breakaway from St Andrews and become an independent university. On the other side of the argument there were some, led by Sir James Irvine, the Principal and Vice Chancellor of St Andrews, who want University College to lose all its autonomy and other colleges of St Andrews set up in Dundee to replace it. In the centre were most of the staff and students of the College who looked for a middle path. These included the Principal of University College, Major-General Douglas Neil Wimberley, himself a hero of World War Two.
The resulting commission led to University College being replaced in 1954 by Queen’s College, Dundee which also took over the Medical and Dental School and incorporated the Dundee School of Economics. It paved the way for the affairs of Dundee to be given more importance by the St Andrews authorities and to gain more investment. This meant that when in the 1960s it was decided to expand the number of universities in the UK, Queen’s College was in an ideal position to become the University of Dundee.
Arthur Tedder died in 1967, a few weeks before the University of Dundee officially came into being. He was succeeded as Baron Tedder, by his son Professor John M. Tedder who, since 1964, had been Roscoe Professor of Chemistry at Queen’s College, Dundee. In 1969 the second Lord Tedder became Purdie Professor of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews. He gave his father’s papers relating to the Royal Commission to the University of Dundee and they are now held by Archive Services https://archives.dundee.ac.uk/recs-a-861