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1898 – 1974 - Second director of the Courtauld Institute and scholar of the Art of the Crusades. He was the son of Charles Millet Boase, a bleaching mill manager from Dundee and Anne Malcolm Sherrer Ross. He attended Rugby School from 1912. Between 1917 and 1919 he served in World War I in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire light infantry, assigned to the front lines at St Quentin and Cambrai, France, and awarded the Military Cross. Returning to Oxford, he studied modern history at Magdalen, receiving his degree in 1921, and advancing to a fellowship (teaching position) at Hertford College in 1922. One of his students was the future author Evelyn Waugh. In 1937, when William G. Constable the founding director of the Courtauld Institute, resigned in a furore over the direction the Institute was taking, Boase was appointed to replace him. What he lacked in formal art scholarship, he made up for in his understanding of educational systems. His connections with various international commissions, all working to relieve the plight of persecuted scholars under Nazi Germany, allowed him to continue the relationship with the Warburg Library and Institutewhich was eventually incorporated into the Courtauld in 1944. Boase changed the Courtauld's admission policy to allow only the most serious students and modified the syllabus so that it encouraged detailed study of subject areas in as opposed to generalist training. Boase was close to Anthony Blunt who would succeed him as director. The two shared living quarters in the Courtauld building, the famous Robert Adam structure at 22 Portman Square (they were both homosexuals). During World War II, he worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley, and later in Cairo. He met the actress Edith Margaret "Peggy" Ashcroft (1907-1991) during this time who became a lifelong friend In 1947 he accepted the presidency of his alma mater, Magdalen College In 1947 he was appointed a trustee of both the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He became trustee of the British Museum in 1950. Ill health led to his retirement from Magdalen in 1968. In retirement, he wrote Kingdoms and Strongholds of the Crusades in 1971. He died of cancer in the home he shared with his sister in 1974.
Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase: