Obituary: Trevor Gardner

Trevelyan Codrington (Trevor) Gardner, colonial administrator and university treasurer: born Portsmouth, Hampshire 3 August 1917; CBE 1960; married 1944 Briege Feehan (two sons, three daughters); died Cambridge 24 September 1997.

Trevor Gardner was a distinguished member of that group of former senior colonial administrators who went on to make second careers in university administration. In Northern Rhodesia he played a key role in the moves to dismantle the ill-starred Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and to create the independent Zambia. At Cambridge University, of which he was Treasurer from 1969 to 1983, he was a powerful and influential member of the trio of principal administrative officers who held office during a period of already accelerating change. His service to the university continued long after his official retirement.

Shortly before his death he had finished correcting proofs of his autobiography, due to be published in the New Year. It provides an informed and critical insight into the period of rapid decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, and a similarly informed view of the often arcane, but notably successful, workings of Cambridge University.

Trevor Gardner was a Hampshire man, who was a pupil at Taunton's School, Southampton, and then went to Queen's College, Oxford, to read PPE (following it with a BLitt). He went straight from Oxford to the Army during the Second World War, and was commissioned into the Hampshire Regiment. Immediately after the war he joined the Colonial Service and was posted first to Fort Jameson in Northern Rhodesia. (It was not his first experience of Africa. He had lived for a short time from 1927 in the Transkei, where his father took up a job.)

In Africa and in Cambridge Gardner demonstrated great ability not simply as an administrator but as an administrator with a truly creative mission. He did not just keep things going; he made them happen.

A committed Roman Catholic (he was received into the Church in 1944) he saw his task in Africa as to serve the African population, and was disillusioned when he found that in central Africa policy was directed in practice at preserving the interests of the white minority rather than the majority black population.

Most of his service was at the centre in Lusaka rather than in the district administration. He reformed the financial administration of the protectorate not merely by computerising the accounting system but also by introducing a proper use of investment. In 1959 he became Minister of Finance, and remained in that post until he left, early in 1964, following the achievement of full internal self-government.

The Federation was set up in 1953. Gardner saw it, rightly, as a great mistake, harmful politically and economically to the people of Northern Rhodesia (and Nyasaland, now Malawi). After seven years it became clear that the Federation could not continue and the Monckton Commission was established to consider its future. Gardner's greatest service to Northern Rhodesia was as its representative on the Monckton Commission. He took his duties seriously, and spoke out with courage - which did not endear him to Federal politicians, nor to some members of the then British government at a time when it was divided over central African policy.

He was contemptuously critical of Alec Douglas-Home and Duncan Sandys, in their roles as Secretaries of State for Commonwealth Relations, responsible for Federal and Southern Rhodesian affairs. With Sir Roy Welensky, the Federal Prime Minister, he always remained on excellent terms, though their visions of Africa were totally different.

The dissolution of the Federation at the end of 1963 marked the end of Gardner's service to Africa. I first met him in November 1963 in Lusaka and was immediately impressed by his vision and his strong sense of purpose. Five years later when I went to Cambridge, and we were Fellows of the same college (Wolfson), he was Deputy Treasurer. In that role he repeated what he had done in Northern Rhodesia, computerising and modernising the system of accounting and financial management, to the great and lasting benefit of the university.

In 1969 he was appointed Treasurer and for the next 14 years was a powerful influence in the university's affairs. He was much involved in re- structuring the Cambridge University Press, transforming it from a financially ailing into a vibrantly successful enterprise. He helped to bring the Kettle's Yard gallery into the university. He played an important part in modernising the administration of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and in the establishment of the associated Hamilton Kerr Institute (for picture restoration).

Gardner was also an important influence in establishing, in the early 1980s, when overseas students' fees were increased by the Government, the Livingstone Trust, to provide scholarship for students from southern Africa, and then the much wider-ranging Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. These trusts continue to make it possible each year for hundreds of overseas students of high quality to study in Cambridge.

He was active in the founding of Robinson College, and was one of its trustees before it achieved full college status.

He was much involved, too, in 1966 in establishing the American Friends of Cambridge University, an organisation which provides a vehicle for support from the United States for the university and its colleges. When he retired as Treasurer in 1983 he set up the Cambridge office of the AFCU, and its activities remained of close interest to him for the rest of his life.

He was associated with the Cambridge Union Society, and with many of the university's sporting activities, notably rugby and rowing. It was through his shrewd advice that the Oxford and Cambridge Rowing Foundation was established in 1985, to support rowing in the two Boat Race rivals.

Gardner was also active in furthering the commercial exploitation of Cambridge's research - the Cambridge Phenomenon - particularly through a group of companies, the Cambridge Research Group, with which he was closely involved from 1990.

A few days before Trevor Gardner's death, when he was very ill and knew he was failing fast, we spoke on the telephone. We discussed his autobiography, and he expressed satisfaction that he had been able to complete it. He had been determined to record the range and variety of activities which he had pursued throughout his life with such constructive energy. It was a life of great and remarkable achievement.

- Bill Kirkman