Commonwealth Affairs at the University of London until 1956. During this period he was sent as a government expert to examine constitutional questions in Uganda in 1954, at the height of the Kabaka crisis. At this time he began work on his authoritative biography of the South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, which appeared in two volumes in 1962 and 1968, and editing for publication, with Jean van der Poel, the first four volumes of the Smuts papers. Hancock returned to Australia in 1957 to take up an appointment as Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, a position he held until 1961. He was Professor of History at the Institute of Advanced Studies, ANU until his retirement in 1965. On his retirement he was made Emeritus Professor (1968) and created the first University Fellow of the ANU. Other positions he held were Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography from 1958 to 1965 and inaugural President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 1969 to 1971. In 1961 he was appointed to the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In his honour, a library of science resources at the ANU was named after him. He retired in 1965, having been appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 1965 New Year's Honours. In these later years he moved south of Canberra, becoming a firm supporter of environmental politics. He disliked American bases on Australian soil, and he was a very prominent but ultimately unsuccessful opponent of the construction of Black Mountain Tower in Canberra. He married Theaden Brocklebank in 1925; she died in 1960. In 1961, he married Marjorie Eyre, who had been his research assistant for the previous 15 years. He died in Canberra on 13 August 1988. The science library at the Australian National University was named in his honour. References Low, DA (ed.) – Keith Hancock; the Legacies of a Historian, Melbourne University Press (2001) Davidson, Jim. A Three-cornered Life: The Historian W.K.Hancock, University of New South Wales Press, 2010, Donald Markwell, "Instincts to lead": on leadership, peace, and education (2013) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Proceedings of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 1898 births 1988 deaths People educated at Trinity College (University of Melbourne) Australian Rhodes Scholars University of Adelaide faculty Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford