Marshall, Thomas Humphrey (1893–1981)

Born in London, Tom Marshall was the fourth of six children in a prosperous and cultured middle‐class family. His father was a successful architect, and his great‐grandfather made a fortune in industry. He was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, where he read history. In 1914 he went to Germany to learn the language and spent the next four years as a civilian prisoner of war at Ruhleben, near Berlin. Marshall (1973) described his period of imprisonment as “the most powerful formative experience” of his life up to that time. It was his first contact with working men, as the Ruhleben camp's inmates included merchant seamen and fishermen. Although Marshall's profession of sociology was a decade away he wrote that from this time there was “a growing sociological curiosity about what was happening in me and around me.”