Temperley was born in
Cambridge, the son of Ernest Temperley, a Fellow and Bursar of
Queens' College, Cambridge. He was educated at
Sherborne School and
King's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a First in History. He became a lecturer at the
University of Leeds in 1903, before taking a fellowship at
Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1905. Temperley's field was modern
diplomatic history, and he was heavily involved as editor in the publication of the
British Government's official version of the diplomatic history of the early 20th century. He also wrote on
George Canning and
Eastern European history. During
World War I, Temperley was commissioned into the
Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, missing the
Gallipoli landings due to illness. He was then seconded to the
War Office, working on intelligence and policy in the
Balkans. His
History of Serbia was published in 1917. He attended the
Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and later worked on an official history of it, on a scheme devised by
George Louis Beer and
Lord Eustace Percy. He was British representative on the Albanian boundary commission; and was an advisor in 1921 to
Arthur Balfour at the
League of Nations. In the compilation of the
British Documents on the Origins of the War he collaborated with
George Peabody Gooch, (1873–1968), another diplomatic historian and a member of parliament for the
Liberal Party from 1906 to 1910. Gooch had spoken out against British policy in the
Second Boer War, and was also a historian of Germany; his appointment was designed to give the project a credible independence. In the event, Temperley and Gooch were constrained financially, and in the use of documents subject to a '
fifty year rule' limitation on their release. To get their own way, they had to employ tactical resignation threats.
Lillian Margery Penson (1896–1963) was involved in both this and a later project on the
Blue Books. In 1923 Temperley founded
The Cambridge Historical Journal at Cambridge. Temperley was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1938. The historian
Herbert Butterfield was a student of Temperley. He commented later in life on how the ageing Temperley and
Charles Webster, an equally aged historian, dominated the college
Combination Room, "like booming giants, cumbersome and dangerous to crockery, bulging with warmth and good feeling, yet capable of overbearingness – terrible lions if you trod on their tales [sic]". Tempeley also influenced British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain's
European foreign policy, including
appeasement of the
Axis Powers and the
Munich Agreement. == Works ==