| K. G. Tregonning | |||||||
| Birth Name: | Kennedy Gordon Phillip Tregonning | ||||||
| Birth Date: | 13 June 1923 | ||||||
| Birth Place: | Perth, Western Australia, Australia | ||||||
| Death Date: | 20 July 2015 (aged 92) | ||||||
| Nationality: | British, Australian | ||||||
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| Father: | Donald R. C. Tregonning | ||||||
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Kennedy Gordon Phillip Tregonning MBE (13 June 1923 - 20 July 2015) was a British-Australian officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, journalist and historian of modern Southeast Asia.[1] From 1958 to 1966, he was Raffles Professor of History at the University of Singapore.[2]
Tregonning was born in Perth, Western Australia on 13 June 1923, the son of a British-Australian army officer and physician Donald R. C. Tregonning and his wife Florence Agar.[3] He was educated at Christ Church Grammar School and at Hale School.[4] In 1941, Tregonning volunteered to join the Second Australian Imperial Force, serving first in the army and then as an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. Tregonning saw active service as a bomber pilot stationed in England.[5]
After the Second World War, Tregonning returned to Australia for his university studies, graduating with a double first in political science and history from the University of Adelaide in 1949.[6] He then went to New College, Oxford, where he studied the history of the British North Borneo Company, graduating in 1953. As part of his degree at the University of Oxford, Tregonning conducted researcher in Downing Street on a Nuffield Fellowship.[7]
Following his studies at Adelaide and Oxford, Tregonning traveled to Singapore, in 1953, to take up a position as a lecturer in the history department of the University of Malaya in Singapore.[8] In 1958, he succeeded C. Northcote Parkinson as the Raffles Chair of History at the University of Singapore, named for Sir Stamford Raffles.[9]
During his time in Singapore, Tregonning established the Journal of Southeast Asian History in 1960,[10] published by Cambridge University Press. He also published several books, including A History of Modern Sabah (North Borneo, 1881-1963) and The British in Malaya: The First Forty Years 1786-1826.[11] Sponsored by the Colonial Office as part of the Corona Library, Tregonning's North Borneo was published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office in 1960 with a foreword by Sir Winston Churchill. Correspondents of Tregonning at the time included Lee Kuan Yew, Jawaharlal Nehru, Habib Bourguiba, and Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
In 1967, Tregonning returned to Australia to the position of headmaster at Hale School. His students there included the diplomat John King Atkins, the Australian Army general Daniel McDaniel, and the composer Ash Gibson Greig. After retiring from Hale School in 1988, Tregonning was appointed to the Official Corruption Committee on which he served until 1993.
Tregonning also worked in an advisory capacity for the Australian Senate's Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence and was a board member of the West Australian Ballet.
The artist Mel Tregonning, was K. G. Tregonning's great-granddaughter and the tennis player Don Tregonning was his second cousin.[12]