Martin Wight - Early Life

Early Life

Martin Wight was born in Brighton, Sussex. He attended Bradfield College and in 1931 went to Hertford College, Oxford, to read Modern History. He took a First Class degree and stayed at Oxford for a short period afterwards engaged in postgraduate research. While at Oxford he became a pacifist, and in 1936 he published a passionate and erudite defence of 'Christian Pacifism' in the journal Theology. At about this time he also became involved with the work of the Revd. Dick Sheppard and his Peace Pledge Union.

In 1937 Wight joined the staff of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). There he worked alongside the Institute's Director of Studies, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee. In 1938, Wight left Chatham House and took a job as a History Master at Haileybury. Two years later, however, his position at the school became untenable: having been called up for military service, Wight chose to register as a conscientious objector, and one condition of the tribunal's acceptance of his application was that he ceased to teach. At the behest of Margary Perham, he returned to Oxford to work, for the remainder of the Second World War, on an extended research project on colonial constitutions. Wight published three books on this topic: The Development of the Legislative Council (1946), The Gold Coast Legislative Council (1947) and British Colonial Constitutions (1952).