After a curacy in Huddersfield, he became chaplain at Wellington College and then Fellow and historian at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from 1947.
A proposed scholarship to Germany was thwarted by the Second World War instead, Chadwick studied for ordination at Cuddesdon, near Oxford. Keen to study the fourth and fifth centuries, he moved into theology and was influenced by Martin Charlesworth, President of St John’s, “a wonderful teacher a rip-roaring man, full of go and humour, and generosity”. This coincided with a change from classics to history. Rejecting his mother’s Christian Science, he arrived at Cambridge in 1936 as an agnostic but moved towards Christianity, inspired by the example of the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller. He also represented the British Lions on their victorious 1936 tour of Argentina. Owen went to Tonbridge School, where he excelled at rugby, a pursuit continued at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he won three blues. One of six children, his younger brother Henry also became a prominent theologian and later a collaborator with Owen in editing the multi-volume Oxford History of the Christian Church (1981 to 2010).
He combined academic brilliance with administrative gifts and pastoral sensitivity, making him an outstandingly successful Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, from 1956 until his retirement in 1983. Owen Chadwick, who has died aged 99, was an Anglican scholar-priest of the old school. One of the most distinguished church historians of his generation
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