Master-Mind Lecture, read 8 March 1972.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), 3rd Earl Russell, was nominated in 1949 for election to the British Academy as an ‘Ordinary’ Fellow (i.e. a UK-based individual, for their contribution to scholarship). His name progressed to be one of 13 candidates being considered by the Academy’s Council at its meeting on 1 June 1949, for recommendation to the Annual General Meeting in July. In the internal voting at that Council meeting, two candidates received 15 votes, and Russell received the next highest number of votes (14). After recording the voting, the minutes read ‘After discussion it was agreed to invite Earl Russell to become an Honorary Fellow’ (and the nine other candidates who had received 10 or more votes would be recommended to the AGM for Ordinary Fellowship). No explanation for this decision is given, but Russell’s age may well have been a factor: at 77, Russell was by some way the oldest candidate. Having been elected as an Honorary Fellow (rather than an Ordinary Fellow), Bertrand Russell would not have eligible to have a British Academy extended obituary (‘memoir’) prepared for him on his death in 1970. However, perhaps as an alternative way of recognising that he had been nominated as an Ordinary Fellow for his contribution to scholarship, in March 1972 A.J. Ayer delivered the Academy’s Master-Mind Lecture on ‘Bertrand Russell as a Philosopher’.