Robert Lee obituary

My colleague Robert Lee, who has died aged 78, began a distinguished career as an economic historian with his Oxford DPhil thesis of 1972 on population and social change in Bavaria (1750-1850), later published as a book.

It drew on continental European historiographical methods relating family formation to local economies and social organisation. Appointed as lecturer in economic history at Liverpool University later that year, Robert spent the next four decades there, punctuated by visiting posts in Europe and the US.

Promoted to the Chaddock chair in economic and social history in 1989, Robert served as director of Liverpool’s Centre for Central and Eastern European Studies (1991-96) and Institute for European Population Studies (1986-90). He later co-directed the Centre for Port and Maritime History, an initiative that expanded his research to the public health of Merseyside and other European ports.

For more than a decade, until it was merged with the history department in 1997, Robert also headed Liverpool’s economic history department, which achieved great success by admitting many students via mature entry schemes.

Robert was born in Birkenhead, the only child of Bill Lee, a school teacher, and his wife, Edie (nee Minshall). He attended Birkenhead school, then Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1978 he met Kristina Eriksson (known as Kicki) when she admired his cable-knit sweater in a blues pub in Stockholm. Two years later, returning from a World University Services trip to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, they married in Belize City. Thereafter, Robert firmly embraced Anglo-Swedish family life, becoming an active member, then managing trustee, of the Liverpool International Nordic Community .

Elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2008, Robert continued to research and publish after his retirement in 2011 and until recent months, despite failing health.

In the 1970s he worked as an officer of the World University Service, an international educational rights organisation, managing hundreds of placements for Chilean students displaced by the 1973 coup.

In his last years, Robert applied his energy to the magnificent Birkenhead Park , opened in the 1840s as the world’s first municipally funded green open space. As chair and later president of the Friends’ association, and active through the Wirral Parks Partnership, he led a campaign to save and restore the neglected park.

His commitment to raising the international profile of the park as a means of contributing to the regeneration of Birkenhead, contributed to the bid for Unesco World Heritage Status and in 2013 led to him being appointed MBE. His beautifully produced book on the history of the park (one of three he had planned), Birkenhead Park: The People’s Garden and an English Masterpiece , was published a month before he died.

Robert is survived by Kicki, and their three daughters, Jenny, Susanna and Malena, and son, Oskar.