Frank Bealey

Frank Bealey, who has died aged 90, grew up in the turbulent years of the 1930s which shaped his future as a politics expert. By the time he went to war, in 1941, he was part of a particularly politically aware generation: as a boy he had witnessed the General Strike of 1926 and lived through the period that encompassed the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism.

His own experiences in the navy during the Second World War further coloured his view and in later life he would become a supporter of dissident academics opposing communism in Czechoslovakia, risking his own safety to smuggle in funds and equipment.

Though he spent much of his career in Scotland, his roots were in Bilston, Staffordshire. Raised in Hagley, Worcestershire, he was educated at Edward VI Grammar School in Stourbridge and as a young able seaman during the war endured some of the most harrowing journeys undertaken at sea – escorting flotillas of merchant ships through the North Atlantic to keep the Russian front supplied. He survived the treacherous journeys only for his ship, HMS Marne, to be torpedoed in November 1942.

He was demobbed in 1946 and five days later become a student at the London School of Economics. Within two years he achieved a first class BSc in economics.

Unsure where his future lay, he took up a one-year British Council scholarship to Finland. It was during that time, at the University of Helsinki, he discovered his love of teaching. He had agreed to lecture at Abo Akademi University, Sweden, and the University of Turku, Finland, for three months and that brief experience led to a long and distinguished career in academia.

He became an extramural lecturer at the University of Manchester and then moved to the newly established University College of North Staffordshire in 1951. He taught politics there for 12 years and rose to senior lecturer.

His move to Scotland came in 1964 when he took up the first chair of politics at the University of Aberdeen. That marked the start of a successful quarter of a century teaching there. He built up the department from a small unit with no honours course and few students to a thriving department.

His academic achievements included writing and publishing many books. He had always been interested in party history and his publications included Labour and Politics 1900-1906; Constituency Politics; The Politics of Independence and Social and Political Thought of the British Labour Party. He was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and treasurer of the Society for the Study of Labour History, which he had helped to found in 1960.

While at the University of Aberdeen he had also been a visiting professor at Yale and the organisor of an all-party parliamentary group, Social Science and Policy. In the 1980s, before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, he supported dissident academics who were working against the communist regime in his role as a trustee of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation. Posing ostensibly as a tourist, he smuggled in money and word processing equipment to support the underground movement and attended clandestine seminars.

Through these activities he made contacts that enabled him to follow up his work there after the revolution. With the help of other European academics, he helped retrain the country's communist-appointed local government officers in modern methods.

His role in developing political science in Czechoslovakia was formally recognised in 2010 by the Political Studies Association, an organisation he helped to establish in 1950. It presented him with an award for his outstanding contribution to UK political studies.

He retired in 1990 and moved to Edinburgh and travelled widely but particularly enjoyed his time in Aberdeen where he indulged his love of walking. He is survived by his wife Sheila, three children and three grandchildren.