Both as administrator (2012-2025) and treasurer (2013-2025), David Gelber made a massive contribution to the Society for Court Studies in time, energy and ideas. His death in his London flat on 12 December 2025, from a heart attack at the age of 44, is a tragic loss for his family, his friends and the Society.
David was the son of Nathan Gelber, a London investment consultant born in Germany of Jewish parents, and the author and interior designer Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, daughter of the 11th Duke of Marlborough. They divorced in 1989 when David was eight. David was educated at Eton, where he made lasting friends but endured anti-Jewish remarks, and then studied history at the London School of Economics. In 2005-2008 he worked at the College of Arms for his friend Patric Dickinson, Clarenceux King of Arms, as a general assistant, and on a database of Tudor and Stuart grants of arms. His twenty-seven-page article in The Coat of Arms, Journal of the Heraldry Society, ‘“Hark, What Discord”: Precedency Among the Early-Stuart Gentry’ (autumn 2007, no 214), concludes with a quotation from Shakespeare, which will appeal to many historians of courts:
Take away ‘primogenitive and due of birth / Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels and, hark, what discord follows’.
In 2011 he finished a PhD at Oriel College, Oxford, titled Heraldry, Heralds, and the Earl Marshal of England, C. 1480-1603: War, Politics and Diplomacy. He had been supervised by Susan Brigden and Hannah Smith and examined by David Starkey and Steven Gunn. Breaking new ground, he focussed on heralds’ importance in political, military, diplomatic and court life and ‘rituals of honour and dishonour’. They were symbols of sovereignty and legitimacy, and messengers of war and peace. He described the heraldic badge as a ‘vital sign of legitimacy and allegiance’, and ‘the rise of the heraldic visitation designed to regulate the bearing of arms by the gentry’. He also emphasised the growing independence of the Earl Marshal in military affairs, ceremonies and legal jurisdiction. After his thesis, however, he lost interest in heraldry as a possible profession.
We met in London around 2008, and often thereafter, particularly in the British Library and the London Library. Like others, I was impressed by his charm, intelligence and range of interests, from the English nobility to slave kings in Rio. More than most British historians (Clarissa Campbell Orr, SCS President in 2012-2017, and editor of Queenship in Europe: the Role of the Consort, 2004, with contributions on Piedmont, the Empire, Prussia, France, Britain, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Saxony and Wurttemberg, was another), he understood the many connections linking the courts of Europe, including Britain. Appalled by Brexit, he considered applying for German citizenship. Every year his father and David visited Munich, where his father had been educated.
We shared a passion for courts and dynasties, and what they reveal about power, character, and heredity in the present as well as the past. In 2012, at my suggestion, he joined the SCS committee as administrator and treasurer. Young, efficient and conscientious – Patric Dickinson describes him as ‘a demon worker’ – he transformed the society. He helped run membership, finances, and the website in collaboration with the successive webmasters Craig Encer and Dustin Neighbours. We exchanged many emails about The Court Historian, its publishers, membership, the bank account, potential speakers and the committee. He frequently attended seminars, and co-organised with me, at the Art Workers’ Guild in London in 2011 and 2018, two joint SCS/Victorian Society conferences on Courts and Capitals, 1815-1914.
At the same time, he was working for the Literary Review as assistant editor (2012-2025), walking to its offices in Soho from his flat near the Fulham Road. Fellow editor Tom Fleming remembers him as ‘crucial to the commissioning and editing of every issue’. A voracious reader who matched books and reviewers with unusual skill, he helped make it one of the most eclectic literary magazines in London, often covering books ignored by other reviews. He wrote 28 reviews for it, on subjects ranging from Austrian chancellors to Queen Mary and family secrets. Having worked there for thirteen years, however, he resigned in autumn 2025, due to disagreements over management and the choice of reviewers, and began to look for another job.
David also wrote for Apollo (19 articles) and the Times Literary Supplement (11 reviews). His articles in Apollo usually dealt with courts and monarchs: James I and Charles I; the Jacobites; Franz Joseph in Bad Ischl; Charles III of Spain; Brazilian museums and artists. One of his best was on Maximilian I (Apollo, September 2019), in which he wrote words applicable to many other monarchs: ‘For Maximilian art had one function: to glorify himself and his dynasty’. In the Times Literary Supplement, he reviewed books on subjects as varied as Michelangelo, British history painting and heraldry.
He loved travelling, particularly to Munich, Vienna, Berlin and Lisbon, but also to Mexico and Brazil. Free from preconceptions, he could grasp a situation, a book or a person in a flash; there was no need for long explanations with David. Observant and perceptive, with a natural authority heightened by his slow, deep voice, he could be diffident in expressing his opinions. His likes and dislikes were usually masked by his politeness, kindness, and sense of humour. He received many invitations from a wide variety of friends.
Apart from courts and dynasties, however, David lacked a lasting passion for a single, overriding cause or subject. His interest in Portugal and Brazil, on which he wrote seven articles in Apollo and eight in the Literary Review, later diminished. He spoke to the SCS in 2014 on Royal Rio (the only public talk he gave, although he made and wrote speeches for family occasions), and thought of writing a history of the city. Diseases made it so unhealthy, he told me, that ships’ advertisements boasted that they did not stop there. To others he mentioned a study of Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Neither was written. He showed poems to a friend but did not publish them. Despite enthusiastic praise from David Starkey and Susan Brigden, he did not turn his thesis into a book. His study of British attitudes to circumcision since the eighteenth century remains unpublished.
With independent means, he may have lacked other writers’ desire for rewards and recognition. Perhaps he was, as his supervisor Susan Brigden told me, ‘full of self-doubt’. Perhaps being an editor and critic, and co-organiser of complex groups, filled with conflicting personalities, like the Society for Court Studies and the Literary Review, appealed to him more than the solitary tasks of researching and writing a book. More than most of his friends, David was a collection of contrasts, solitary and sociable, friendly and distant, Jewish and Christian, conventional and subversive. He frequently saw his brother and parents (whom he thanked in his thesis for their ‘unstinting support, enthusiasm and encouragement’), and enjoyed visiting his grandfather at Blenheim, but often challenged authorities such as police, customs, or bag-searchers. After complaining to policemen whom he saw molesting a passer-by, he spent a night in a police station. For his intelligence, kindness, originality and exceptional talents, David will be greatly mourned and long missed.
Philip Mansel, from The Court Historian, XXXI, 1, April 2026
