Professor John Barron: Former Master of St Peter's, Oxford

Oxford colleges compete fiercely with each other to pull in the best students, and they try to widen the range of students who will apply by offering subsidised accommodation. But perhaps no scheme for expanding student accommodation has ever been as bold as that of John Barron, Master of St Peter's College, Oxford, from 1991 to 2003. His plan was to take over the town prison, move the inmates out and his own students in.

Barron's ambition was not only to make St Peter's bigger, but to make it older, transforming it from its humble 1928 foundation into the most senior – and thus most honoured – college in Oxford. In an academic paper published in 2002, Barron argued that the first college in Oxford had been based in the Norman castle which was part of the prison compound. So striking was Barron's enthusiasm for doing up the prison that Colin Dexter, who used to visit St Peter's College every summer, put him into his last Inspector Morse novel, The Remorseful Day, as John Barron the builder, a murder suspect who died by falling off a ladder.

Whether sleeping in a former prison cell would have been an added attraction for prospective students of St Peter's was never tested as, following lengthy discussions, the college governing body decided the step was too risky financially. (The building later became a hotel). They did, however, work with Barron to acquire three other properties and transform them into elegant student accommodation.

The prison scheme was typical of the vision and enthusiasm that characterised Barron's whole life – at Oxford, and, for 30 years, at London University, where he taught a range of Classical subjects and served as Director of the Institute of Classical Studies.

Barron's first enthusiasm was Greece in the sixth and early fifth centuries BC, where evidence is scarce and hypotheses have to be constructed with great care. His painstaking The Silver Coins of Samos (1966), established a chronology for Samian coins which could then be used to help date other artifacts and events. This followed his book Greek Sculpture (1965, revised as An Introduction to Greek Sculpture in 1981). His articles on early Greek poets such as Ibycus examined the origins of the lyrical victory song, composed to honour victors in contests such as the Olympic Games.

In 1971, at the age of 37, Barron was appointed Professor of Greek at King's College London. He was interested in promoting Classics from school to research level and was a natural choice in 1984 to run the Institute of Classical Studies at London University.

During the Eighties, Barron worked on two projects that were to shape aspects of university education in the decades to come. One involved persuading the different humanities institutes in London to work together to create an umbrella body, the Institutes for Advanced Studies, which he led as Dean from 1989 (the Institutes became the School of Advanced Study in 1994). Acting as a group, the research institutes were better able to make a case for themselves in the next decade when their funding was threatened.

More controversial was his work with the then University Grants Committee, which was instructed, among other things, to look at the viability of Classics departments around the country. Some professors refused to sit on the committee, especially when it was proposing department closures. Ever a pragmatist, Barron chose to work within the system. The Barron report (Review of Classics, 1987) proposed the amalgamation of some Classics departments into fewer, but stronger bases.

In 1991 he was elected Master of St Peter's College, Oxford. But if the tutors had feared a Thatcherite management style they could relax. His natural approach was evolution, not revolution. Oxford colleges are, anyway, democratically governed by their Fellows and the head can only steer the college through tactful chairmanship of meetings. He promoted high standards by showing that he cared. He met every undergraduate with their tutors at the end of every term. He believed the best of them and was eager to praise every success.

John Barron was born in Morley, West Yorkshire, in 1934, the son of George Barron, a devoted schoolmaster. He began his education at Wakefield Grammar School and retained an affection for Yorkshire all his life, chanting "Ilkley Moor bar tat" with the best of them. George Barron took two jobs in order to send his son John to Clifton College, from where he went on to Balliol College, Oxford.

But it was the world of small-town Cornwall, visited every summer and relayed to him in stories by his mother, Leslie Marks, that Barron was to carry in his head throughout his career. Leslie grew up in St Just-in-Penwith during the decline of the tin mining industry, the daughter of a builder, member of a fragile bourgeoisie whose struts were collapsing. In St Just, families existed over centuries and insults could be felt for almost as long. Her tales of feuds and slights impressed her son deeply, and in all his administrative posts he took great trouble over people's feelings, especially their pride. At St Peter's he worked hard not to let any issue divide the community.

His mother's sense of family gave Barron a strong regard for the life of an institution stretching over time. He also had an instinctive respect for the dynastic ambitions of potential benefactors of the college and developed genuine friendships with them.

At the same time, as chairman of the university's Admissions Committee (1997-2000), Barron worked to widen Oxford's intake from the state system. This was not do-gooding, but a desire to find excellent students, believing that many applicants from state schools hesitated to present themselves at Oxford because of a lack of confidence. He encouraged all his students, and his two daughters, to be confident in themselves.

The Fellows at St Peter's voted to extend Barron's period as Master beyond the usual retirement age. When he finally retired in 2003, he returned to his love of the Greek island of Samos, focusing his studies on an ambitious 18th-century archbishop of that island, Georgirenes, who founded the first Greek Church in London. Barron enjoyed travelling with his wife Caroline, a distinguished medieval historian. In his short illness he showed as much consideration for others as in the rest of his life, slipping away quietly in the night, and not falling off any ladders.

Katie Barron

John Penrose Barron, classical scholar: born Morley, West Yorkshire 27 April 1934; Assistant Lecturer in Latin, Bedford College, London University 1959-61, Lecturer in Latin 1961-64; Lecturer in Archaeology, University College London 1964-67, Reader in Archaeology and Numismatics 1967-71; Professor of Greek Language and Literature, King's College London 1971-91, Head of Classics Department 1972-84; Director, Institute of Classical Studies, London University 1984-91; Master of St Peter's College, Oxford 1991-2003, married 1962 Caroline Hogarth (two daughters); died London 16 August 2008.