A deputy speaker of the House of Lords, Ruth Henig, who has died aged 80, combined a successful career as a distinguished academic, a published historian and a long-term Lancashire county councillor before moving on to the national stage when created a Labour life peer in 2004.
A former magistrate and an expert on criminal justice, she spent the next two decades at Westminster seeking to secure greater public protection through improving the regulation of the burgeoning private security industry.
Henig was a profoundly committed public servant whose life lines were laid down by 20th century European history. She made this her specialised study, both as a university lecturer and as the author of a range of books on the origin and impact of the two world wars.
Her Jewish parents, Kurt Munzer and Elfriede Gurtz, both fled Nazi Germany for Holland, where they met and married in Enschede in 1939, before making a dramatic escape to the UK in a small open lifeboat in May 1940 as the German invasion of the Netherlands began. They were initially interned on the Isle of Man, where their first daughter was born, but were released as “friendly aliens” in 1942, having secured work in Leicester. Kurt became a bookkeeper and his wife was a photographer.
Their second daughter, Ruth, named after Elfriede’s younger sister who died at Auschwitz, was born in Leicester. None of their relatives survived, apart from two of Kurt’s cousins, who came to the UK on a kindertransport. “My interest in history was there from an early age, but my interest in modern European history was stimulated by my parents’ experience,” Henig would recall. She dedicated Origins of the Second World War, published in 1985, to her grandparents and paid tribute to her parents’ recollections for helping benefit her 1998 book The Weimar Republic.
Ruth went to Wyggeston girls’ grammar school, Leicester, and graduated from Bedford College, London, with a first-class degree in history in 1965. The following year she joined Lancaster University as a postgraduate student and married the academic Stanley Henig, who had established the department of politics at the institution when it was founded two years earlier. Both families came from Leicester, where the couple were married four days before the snap general election at which Stanley was returned as the Labour MP for Lancaster.
Ruth Henig became an assistant lecturer in history in 1968, then senior lecturer, a post she held until her university retirement in 2004. She was awarded a PhD in 1978, headed the history department for two years from 1995 and then became dean of arts and humanities until 2000.
During this period she also published her first book, The League of Nations, in 1973. This was followed by Versailles and After, in 1984, and Origins of the First World War in 1989. She also co-authored Women and Political Power: Europe Since 1945 (2001) with her son Simon Henig and in 2010 published A History of the League of Nations (revised as The Peace That Never Was, 2019).
She was a dedicated Lancastrian. She sat on Lancashire county council for more than two decades (1981-2005) as the Labour member for Lancaster East, chairing the council in 1999-2000. She was chair of governors of Lancaster Adult College (1981-91) and of Central Lancaster high school (1987-95). She chaired the board of the Duke’s Playhouse from 1987 to 1995 and was active in numerous other community roles.
After her husband lost the Lancaster parliamentary seat in 1970, she stood twice as the Labour candidate, in 1979 and 1992, coming within 3,000 votes of winning on the second occasion. Throughout her life she was an ambassador for the development of her adopted city. She was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Lancashire in 2002.
She was made CBE in 2000 for services to policing. A justice of the peace in Lancaster from 1984 to 2005, she chaired the Lancashire Police Authority from 1995 to 2005 and the Association of Police Authorities (of which she became president) from 1997 to 2005. She was at one time a member of the commission on the future policing of England and Wales and a member of the National Criminal Justice Board (2003-05).
After joining the House of Lords in 2004, she was appointed in 2006 by the then home secretary, John Reid, as chair of the Security Industry Authority, the private security regulatory body, a post she retained until 2013. She worked throughout this period in trying to build public trust and confidence in the security industry, a subject she addressed in the debate on the king’s speech last autumn. She also sought to empower women working in the sector.
As a member of the Lords, she served on the EU external affairs committee (2012-15) and the EU committee (2014-15). She was a member of the joint committee on national security strategy from 2018 and of the justice and home affairs committee from 2023. She was made a deputy speaker in 2018.
Henig had a wide range of leisure interests – including walking and decades of support for Leicester football club – but was particularly renowned as an ace bridge player. She had played solo whist at university, but developed a passion for bridge thereafter. She played for Lancashire from the early 1990s, captained the House of Lords’ bridge team and chaired the all-party bridge group.
She and Stanley divorced in 1993, and the following year she married Jack Johnstone, her bridge partner for the previous decade. He died in 2013. She is survived by the two sons of her first marriage, Simon and David.
• Ruth Beatrice Henig, Lady Henig, historian and politician, born 10 November 1943; died 29 February 2024
