Bernard Pares

Sir Bernard Pares
Pares in Russia during World War 1.
Born	(1867-03-01)1 March 1867 Albury, Surrey, England
Died	17 April 1949(1949-04-17) (aged 82) New York City, U.S.
Nationality	English
Occupation	Historian, teacher, writer
Known for	His work on Russian history and literature

Sir Bernard Pares KBE (1 March 1867 – 17 April 1949) was an English historian and academic known for his work on Russia.

Pares was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in Classics taking a third. He worked over the next ten years as a school teacher spending his vacations touring the main battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars.

He married Margaret Ellis, daughter of Edward Austin Dixon, a dental surgeon in Colchester. They had three sons. Peter (who became a diplomat), Andrew (who became a soldier) and Richard (a historian), and two daughters, Elizabeth and Ursula (Susan), who married Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, the landscape architect, becoming an eminent plantswoman and photographer in her own right.

Pares first visited Russia in 1898; at about the same time as he was appointed a university extension lecturer in Cambridge. In 1906, he attended the first duma at the Taurida Palace in Saint Petersburg and took note on how little the British officers attending the duma could understand the political situation of Russia at the time. Viewing the study of Russian as less of a scholarly pursuit than an urgent political necessity, he founded the first School of Russian Studies in Britain at the University of Liverpool in 1907.

In 1908, Pares was promoted to Professor of Russian History, Language, and Literature at the University of Liverpool, which he held until 1917 when he became Professor of Russian at the university's School of Slavonic Studies. In 1909, he organized the visit to Great Britain of a delegation of the Third Duma on which occasion he was presented with a silver punch bowl and salver with eighteen goblets. Reputed to be the products of the Fabergé workshop, these are currently on display in the foyer of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies building at University College London.