Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell was a British historian and academic who served as dean and later principal of Hertford College, Oxford. His field of expertise was modern European history, his most notable work being A History of the Great War, 191418. He is mainly remembered, however, for the vendetta pursued against him by the novelist Evelyn Waugh, in which Waugh showed his distaste for his former tutor by repeatedly using the name Cruttwell in his early novels and stories to depict a sequence of unsavoury or ridiculous characters. The prolonged minor humiliation thus inflicted may have contributed to Cruttwells eventual mental breakdown.
Cruttwell was born onMay 1887, in the village of Denton, Norfolk, the eldest of three sons of the Rev. Charles Thomas Cruttwell, Rector of St Marys Church. The elder Cruttwell was a scholar and historian of Roman literature his wife Annie , was the daughter of Sir John Mowbray, who served as Conservative Member of Parliament for Durham from 1853 to 1868 and for one of the two Oxford University parliamentary seats from 1868 to 1899. Cruttwell was educated at Rugby School, where in 1906 he won a scholarship to Queens College, Oxford, to read classics and history. At Queens, Cruttwell enjoyed considerable academic success, including a first class honours degree in modern history. In 1911 he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College and a year later was appointed to a history lectureship at Hertford College.
Source: Wikipedia