Habakkuk was born in
Barry,
Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, the son of Evan and Anne Habakkuk. He was named "Hrothgar" after
Hroðgar in
Beowulf, which his father was reading at the time of his birth. However, he came to be known as John when he started to travel to the United States, and when he was knighted he found it easier to call himself "Sir John" than "Sir Hrothgar". His surname was assumed by a seventeenth-century forebear after the prophet
Habakkuk, it being a Welsh custom at that time to take patronymics from the Bible. He was educated at Barry County School and
St John's College, Cambridge (scholar and Strathcona Student, starred He began to study for a PhD under
John Clapham, but his progress was interrupted by the Second World War. and
Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1977–84). He retired in 1984 and was Ford Lecturer in the following year. and a member of the
American Philosophical Society in 1966. Habakkuk married Mary Richards (died 2002), whom he met during the war and who later studied history at Cambridge, in 1948. They had a son and three daughters. He died, from renal failure and
myelodysplasia, at the house of one of his daughters, Little Orchard, Scot Lane,
Chew Stoke, in
Somerset, England, on 3 November 2002. ==Publications==