Frederick William Ratcliffe (born 28 May 1927) is an English philologist and librarian.

Life and career

Ratcliffe was born in Leek on 28 May 1927. He has a Ph.D. in German, given for his thesis on Heinrich von Mügeln at the University of Manchester. From 1954 he was an assistant librarian or sublibrarian in the universities of Manchester, Glasgow, and Newcastle upon Tyne. He succeeded Moses Tyson as the University Librarian at Manchester in 1965. From 1972 he was additionally director of the John Rylands University Library. In 1980 he became University Librarian at the University of Cambridge where he remained until his retirement in 1994. He was Parker Librarian at the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College from 1995 to 2000. Ratcliffe has written a number of papers on the subject of librarianship including the preservation of library materials. In 1988-1989 he held the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at Cambridge speaking on "A pre-Lutheran German psalter: A case study of the fourteenth-century translation of Heinrich von Mügeln." One of his sons is George Ratcliffe, a professor of plant metabolism at Oxford.

Selected writings