It is funny how death brings us back to life: I often read obituaries, not (as Private Eye once said in "A Day in the Life of God" 'to see may be coming to dinner'), but to read what these interesting people have done: a useful life passed completely unbeknown - to me, at least.
Sometimes (increasingly, it seems), I read of people I once knew. Invariably the obituary adds to my knowledge of what thereby become an unknown person. I learned a lot about John Saville and his wife Constance from his obituaries in 2009 - Greek origins, and lives of activism and historying. (To me, the parents of a friend.)
My senior Tutor at Cambridge (Derek Bowett) passed away recently. I never appreciated him - to me he was always that old reactionary who, I was told by my Tutor, announced to the SCR "Thank God that Bibby is in his final year; the college will be a lot quieter when he is gone". I found this was flattery in a way. Now, from his obituary I learned of a legal life spent developing human rights and international law - "speaking truth to power", in no doubt a quiet and legal manner. Someone I should have taken more notice of while he was alive, no doubt.
Sometimes (increasingly, it seems), I read of people I once knew. Invariably the obituary adds to my knowledge of what thereby become an unknown person. I learned a lot about John Saville and his wife Constance from his obituaries in 2009 - Greek origins, and lives of activism and historying. (To me, the parents of a friend.)
My senior Tutor at Cambridge (Derek Bowett) passed away recently. I never appreciated him - to me he was always that old reactionary who, I was told by my Tutor, announced to the SCR "Thank God that Bibby is in his final year; the college will be a lot quieter when he is gone". I found this was flattery in a way. Now, from his obituary I learned of a legal life spent developing human rights and international law - "speaking truth to power", in no doubt a quiet and legal manner. Someone I should have taken more notice of while he was alive, no doubt.
The recent passing of Eric Hobsbawm led me to dust off his "Age of ... " trilogy, and I also took his autobiograohy out of the library. "Interesting Times" it is called, in Confucian self-reference. It has to be said that his autobiography is not as good as his history, but he skilfully weaves his personal peripatetic childhood story (Alexandria, Vienna, Berlin, London, Cambridge, ....) with the political developments of the time (fall of Ottoman empire, depression and inflation, the rise of fascism ....). I half-expected to find several people whom I have known or know of in Hobsbawm's story - John and Constance Saville again, Edward Thompson, the Millibands .... - but others who appeared there were a great suprise to me, among them two statisticians
R R Kuczynski the great demographer is mentioned for instance, along with his sons and daughters, some of whose family I have known. One had "a long and adventurous career in Soviet intelligence" i.e. as a spy: I have seen her autobiography. However her brother Juergen Kuczynski was unknown to me: a "charming and ever-hopeful economic historian". His family "owned the Grunewaldviertel" in Berlin was "probably the richest citizen of east Berlin" says Hobsbawm (p.45), who does not find this incompatible with being a communist activist,
Hobsbawm's comments on Cambridge and King's are as revealing of him as they are of the Place.
He is near-libellously uncomplimentary about Provost, J.T. Sheppard, "one of the few people in my life for whom I came to feel a genuine hate" (p.108): he was "a lifelong spoiled child of quite appalling character ... A failure as a scholar and as the head of a college ... he became an active enemy to the pursuit of knowledge. ... He was against science. "King's College, Cambridge?" said the President of Harvard. "Isn't that the place where the natural sciences are denounced from the chair?" (Wikipedia tells me that Sheppard was the first non-Etonian to become Provost of King's College: does that tell us or Hobsbaum something?!)
Yet Hobsbawm himself seems to have little if any science in his education - although he does telloingly contrast the ease of study in an english sixth-form with that of its German counterpart: British specialisation meant that only one-half of knowedge had to be covered, while German students had to cover all of it.
p.116 in Hobsbawm's autobiography
"The student Party's chief local commissar at the time was a lean-and-hungry looking mathematician from a working-class family, ...xxx who ended his career as President of the Royal Statistical Society and
whose younger sister, Dorothy (Wedderburn) ... Thus, my old friend George Barnard ...
