Neville Phillips and the Mother Country

Neville Crompton Phillips (1916–2001), later Professor of History at the University of Canterbury, served in the Royal Artillery from 1939 to 1946. He served from the ages of twenty-three to thirty—years of young adulthood that are usually thought of as among the defining period of a person’s life, when attitudes are shaped and life courses chosen. This was a time spent in military service witnessing traumatic events, so the expectation might be that the war years would shape his world view and approach to history for the rest of his life. But this is not really a story