Leon Radzinowicz, who has died aged 93, was an exceptional man. This Cambridge professor, fellow of Trinity, fellow of the British Academy, member of the Athenaeum, and engine extraordinary of the development of British criminology, never conformed to the stereotype of the English academic, quite apart from the small matter of his Polish name.
While he made no secret of his unbounded admiration for the institutions of his adopted country (he was naturalised in 1947), "Radzy", as he was known, remained the essential European. He could switch between English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Polish as readily as from one television channel to another. His urbane manner was matched by a wry sense of humour, an often unexpected generosity and an excellent taste in wine.
He could be good company for lunch at the Athenaeum, dinner in Trinity or over tea and toasted teacakes at Brown's Hotel - he retained a strangely boyish affection for the atmosphere of that establishment.
He had what no one else did, the necessary combination of vision, tireless energy and Machiavellian wit to make criminology an intellectually and politically respectable discipline. But whatever he did, he did it with success and élan.
Unlike criminologists Hermann Mannheim and Max Grunhut, who prudently fled Germany soon after the rise of Hitler and arrived in Britain relatively penniless, surviving on the charity of academic communities, Radzinowicz had been a peripatetic European scholar.
In 1924, at the age of 18, he arrived at the University of Paris; in 1926, he moved to Geneva to take a law degree and, in 1927, he graduated with another from the University of Rome. In 1938, Radzy came to England to report on the English penal system for the Polish ministry of justice. This was the year of Munich, and the following year Hitler invaded Poland. Radzy was astute enough to see what was happening and took refuge in the law faculty at Cambridge; there he spent the rest of his academic life.
Criminology in England had, until the arrival of these emigrés, been a minority interest of the medical profession. It was seen as having little relevance to penal policy and less to forensic aspects of criminal justice. Judges treated it in like fashion.
Mannheim, at the London School of Economics, became the "father" of modern English criminology. Without his teaching in the 40s and 50s, the present generation of academic criminologists would not exist. But he was a proud man who never entirely abandoned the formalities of his youth, when he had been a Prussian officer and judge; he lacked the social skills to give the subject the public legitimacy crucial to its survival; he upset so many people that he was never to have the professorial accolade.
In 1957, the Conservative home secretary, RA Butler, approached London university about establishing an institute of criminology; Mannheim, though he had a record of empirical and policy-oriented research, was not even consulted. At a private lunch given by the vice-chancellor, the principal, Douglas Logan, dismissed Mannheim's claims in a single sentence, but praised Radzinowicz, whom he knew well as a fellow Fellow of Trinity. The lunch was attended by the under secretary of state at the home office and the secretary of the royal commission on capital punishment, on which Radzinowicz had served.
At the time, many in London, not least Mannheim, believed that the whole thing had been a stitch-up and the man with the needle was Logan. It will never be possible to know why the vice-chancellor did not acknowledge, let alone reply, to Butler's letter until prompted by the home secretary's private office. Did Radzy know what was going on behind the academic arras? It seems inconceivable that he did not, but the Old Fox, another of his nicknames, would have been far too wily to have left the least incriminating scent.
Mannheim wasted a disproportionate amount of energy in his retirement expressing his hatred of the "upstart Pole"; this degenerated into such an obsession that any former pupil who visited Cambridge was re-categorised as an "unperson". But by 1959 the institute was established in Cambridge. Radzinowicz became the first professor of criminology in Britain and some of Her Majesty's judges began to accept invitations to contribute to the institute's seminars.
Radzinowicz had already achieved much in wartime and postwar Cambridge and the institute was established on sound foundations. He had carved a niche in the law faculty and, by 1948, he had his fellowship at Trinity. By 1949, he was appointed a member of the Gowers commission on capital punishment. The first volume of his magnum opus, A History Of English Criminal Law Since 1750, appeared in 1948, and the last in 1986.
These five massive volumes stand as testimony to his prodigious industry. Not that they were the result of only one man's labour down the years. Radzy's enemies have ascribed to his various co-workers the greater part of particular volumes. For all that his mind ranged the horizons of the subject quick as a falcon's eye, his individual writings were probably not outstanding. It was the immediacy of his persona that was memorable; he was a master of the spoken word.
His membership of the Gowers commission stood him in good stead, for he made friends in the home office and in the shadows of the political establishment. Trinity and the Athenaeum came in handy for such things and lesser, and younger, mortals got the toasted teacakes. He was never short of money.
In 1966, there was a major scandal following the escape of the Soviet spy George Blake, who had just been sentenced to 42 years' imprisonment. The Labour home secretary, Roy Jenkins, appointed Earl Mountbatten to report. Radzy's seat on the advisory council on the penal system led to his becoming chairman of the sub-committee that considered Mountbatten's proposals for maximum security prisons in 1967-8. He came out in favour not of Mountbatten's idea of a concentration of high risk prisoners in one place but of the preferred home office option of dispersal.
Mountbatten was furious, which must have troubled Radzy, since he was totally sycophantic about royalty; the history of the dispersal policy has been the unmitigated failure its critics predicted. Perhaps, knowing the tide, he judged it better not to go against it. Yet, from his introduction to a book by Richard Sparks in 1971, he clearly saw what was happening in the English prison system and made few bones about it.
In 1986, he spoke at a reception in Lincoln's Inn to mark the publication of the final volume of his History (the Conservative home secretary was the principal guest) and his asides made little secret of contempt in which he held Thatcherite social policies and the mess of British society, never mind its prisons. By this time, he lived in Philadelphia.
His knighthood came in 1970, shortly before his retirement from the Wolfson chair. At last he could feel on equal terms with those senior civil servants whom he had assiduously cultivated down the years, although (not too secretly) his heart had been set on a peerage. He was not to be presented in their Lordships' house, but his retirement dinner was unforgettable.
For many years, Cambridge held regular conferences on criminology and these had become feudal gatherings at which fealty was paid to a liege lord; except that a number of young squires had begun to have their own show, what was to be the York deviancy symposium.
In the paranoid climate of British universities, Radzy was genuinely fearful of the activities of these leftist critics of orthodox criminology and the establishment. Unfortunately, quite a few of them were at his retirement dinner during a conference. Congratulatory messages were read out like wedding telegrams while Radzy, surrounded by the senior home civil service, surveyed the company like a headmaster seeking out absentees on speech day. As he rose to speak, some young squires made an ostentatious exit, but it was not his style to notice such things.
Brilliant as an academic entrepreneur, he was less apt at other things. He was not always good at human relations but there was, in his retirement, a mellowness about him. Some thought it stemmed from guilt, long overdue, for the appalling way in which he had treated junior colleagues.
Carel Weight's portrait of him as a young man conveyed through the eyes a fierce, almost vulpine, impression of a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. He would have been at home in the courts of Renaissance Italy. It was not in his nature to be a tyrant, for he had too much humanity; he was just uncommonly ill-tempered, especially when he thought that he had been thwarted, when his behaviour degenerated to the level of any departmental bully. He despised weakness in others and respected those with the courage to stand up to his tantrums. Not all succeeded.
In old age, Radzy was forgiving, even to Mannheim, in a generous tribute in the Dictionary of National Biography; Mannheim would never have done the same for him. Those of us whom he described in his account of the events of 1957 as "still young, but gifted and enthusiastic... eager to leave a mark on the future development of the discipline" had a lot to put up with in the years of his ascendancy.
But like him or loathe him, we owe him an immense debt. Personally, I like to think of buying him tea and toast in the celestial version of Brown's Hotel.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife Isolde and a son and daughter from his second marriage.
Sir Leon Radzinowicz, criminologist, born August 15, 1906; died December 29 1999