Victor Henry Thomas Skipp (1925 – 24 December 2010) was an English local historian, art collector and amateur philosopher, who left his estate to
Kettle's Yard in
Cambridge.
Life
Brought up in an "austere
Nonconformist family", Victor Skipp "was exposed to a very different life serving with the
Marines during WW2, and different again with post-war
Cambridge".[1] He graduated from Cambridge University in 1950 before teaching in secondary schools. In the 1960s and 1970s Skipp lectured at
Bordesley College of Education, as well as running extramural research in local history at the
University of Birmingham.[2]
Collection
Skipp built a collection of Modernist art and literature which he and his wife Pat arranged around their home, an old farmhouse in
Hopton, Suffolk.[3] His art collection included work by
Ivon Hitchens,
Bob Law,
Linda Karshan and
Alison Turnbull. Skipp took enormous care to consider the possibilities created by arranging disparate works of art in relation to each other:
In the last resort, the 'right' relationships often appear to be a matter of precise positioning, and/or of slight (and generally accidental) visual echoes and correspondences.[4]
Upon his death he left his estate to
Kettle's Yard in Cambridge. An exhibition of objects from Skipp's collection showed at Kettle's Yard in 2013–14.[2]
Selected works
Discovering Sheldon: a brief history of a Birmingham parish from Anglo-Saxon to modern times, Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1960
An Eighteenth Century Farm Labourer's Family, London: Oxford University Press, 1963
Out of the Ancient World, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967
"The place of team-work in local history" and "The use of local history in the schools", in Victor Skipp &
H. P. R. Finberg, eds., Local History: objective and pursuit, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1967
Honest to Man: a religious alternative to Christianity, Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1967
Medieval Yardley: the origin and growth of a West Midland community, Chichester: Phillimore, 1970
Crisis and development: an ecological case study of the forest of Arden, 1570–1674, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978
The Centre of England: Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, East Shropshire, North Gloucestershire, London: Eyre Methuen, 1979
The Making of Victorian Birmingham, Birmingham, 1983
A History of Greater Birmingham: down to 1830, Studley: Brewin, 1997
Industrial Revolution 'Then' and 'Now', or, Understanding Globalization: (the Birmingham experience), Diss: Greyhound Books, 2002
References
^Nigel Holbrook, "A personal reflection",
Victor Skipp, 2014.
^Skipp, The Binary Business, unpublished manuscript (c.1985–87). Quoted in Andrew Nairne, "Victor Skipp – A Fascination with Art and Life",
Victor Skipp, 2014. Other unpublished writings by Victor Skipp included The Lost Inheritance (c.1987) and The Year of Mythical Thinking (2007 and 2009).