Francis Thompson (historian)
The son of Francis Longstreth Thompson, he was educated at Bootham School, York; The Queen's College, Oxford, where he took a first-class BA in 1949; and Merton College, Oxford, from 1949 to 1951, taking a DPhil in 1956.He became Professor of Modern History at Bedford College in 1968, and was from 1977 to 1990 director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.He added to the long-standing debate on British class history by new emphasis on "respectability."His model of society contradicted the more commonly employed Marxist assumptions.[5] In 1951 Thompson married Anne Challoner; they had two sons and a daughter.