Tag Archives: deaths

Christopher Priest, 1943-2024

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Like many of you, I was very sad to learn this morning that Christopher Priest has died at the age of 80. I first met him on the printed page, as a teenager in Belfast, where his novels were one of my main escape routes from the Northern Ireland of the day. Inverted World and Fugue for a Darkening Island were favourites then, and the former is a favourite still. Later, when I first started bookblogging, The Separation was the best of the books that I read in the closing months of 2003. I very much enjoyed his Guest of Honour speech and other presentations at Interaction, the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. Nineteen years on, we are preparing another Glasgow Worldcon and we’ll be thinking of him.

In 2007, we became friends. We met in person at the 2007 Beneluxcon which was conveniently for me in Leuven, and started a correspondence which continued for a decade and a half. He filled me in on the story of how he didn’t write for Doctor Who, and we reflected on Brexit and other political disasters together. And I continued to enjoy his writing, both new and old.

In August 2016 I happened to be passing through Devon, and we met up in Burrington, where he and Nina Allan were living at the time, and went for a very pleasant lunch in The Grove Inn, the only pub in the area, in the next door village of Kings Nympton. He and Nina loaded me with books to take away. (They subsequently moved to Scotland.)

The last time we saw each other was at Novacon in Buxton in 2021, where as it turned out I contracted COVID (but he fortunately did not). Fanboyishly (if that is a word) I brought over a small part of my Chris Priest collection, and he signed them all for me after breakfast. (He had already signed the ones he gave me in 2016.)

He was funny, passionate, incisive and (I have to be honest) not always kind. He was hugely entertaining to spend time with and I felt that my teenage enthusiasm for a writer I never expected to meet was ripely repaid a quarter to a third of a century later. Paul Kincaid’s brilliant book, The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, will give you a very good idea of what he was like and what he was trying to achieve as a writer. I feel privileged that I knew him as a person as well. My condolences to Nina, and to the rest of their families.

Jim Bennett, 1947-2023

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I don’t intend for this blog to become a stream of obituaries, but I have just learned that Jim Bennett died last October. He was my supervisor and mentor for my Cambridge MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science, and helped me over the intellectual hurdle into the humanities; in fact he probably gave me some of the best advice on writing I have ever received. He recommended me to Peter Bowler for the Belfast research assistantship which became my PhD, and was then the external examiner who gave me that PhD several years later.

He was tough but fair as a teacher. I remember a couple of teaching moments with him vividly: his class on how to use an astrolabe was masterfully clear, and postgraduate seminars featured Babbage’s original notes for the Difference Engine, and a 17th-century prism “as would have been used by Newton” which, as he eventually revealed, was in fact the actual prism that had been used by Newton. My career took a very different path in the end, but I will always be grateful for the early encouragement that he offered at the point that I seemed to be heading down an academic track.

Here he is in 2010, with his gentle Belfast accent, introducing the Oxford Mueum of the History of Science, which he moved to in 1994. He had cropped the Einstein-like shock of hair that I remember him having in Cambridge.

Thanks, Jim.

Joan Urquhart, 1916-2023

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On Christmas Day we lost my great-aunt, Joan Urquhart, who was born in Dublin in 1916 when it was still under British rule, and had an adventurous life. We had a big family gathering today to say goodbye to her in Bangor, Co Down, where she had lived for the last four decades. Coincidentally, today would have been the 104th birthday of her younger brother, who we lost in 2006.

The local newspaper ran a feature on her 107th birthday last June, reporting her reliance on the Guardian crossword to keep her mind active.

JOAN’S SECRET TO A LONG LIFE

Her father, my great-grandfather, was one of the civil servants who transferred to the new Northern Ireland government when it was created in 1922. He also had a sideline in the performing arts, and Joan followed him into the new-fangled world of radio plays. Here is the Radio Times notice of her first appearance, in a show which was broadcast (probably live) on 26 January 1934, when she would have been 17. (I have checked with the BBC archives and sadly none of her performances survive.)

After school she trained as a domestic science / home economics teacher; married a Scottish soldier, Hamilton Urquhart; served with British forces in Italy in the Second World War; followed Hamilton to Germany and Cyprus (where her four children had to be brought to school under armed guard, during the EOKA uprising); and came back to Northern Ireland, where for much of my childhood her house was in the same block as ours with adjoining back gardens, so we saw a lot of her. Her sister, my grandmother, died twenty years before I was born, so she (and her mother, who lived to the age of 98) filled that gap to an extent.

The first photograph including both her and me was taken at my christening in 1967; she’s on the right in the blue hat. I’m sorry to say that the only people in the picture still living are me, my mother (behind me, no hat) and my second youngest aunt, in the pink dress (also no hat).

At this point she was an activist in the tourism sector; here she is trying to sell “Friendly Northern Ireland” to the Dutch in 1974. (A tough sell at the time, I suspect.)

Joan is third from the left.

She eventually moved to Bangor, where she ran a bed and breakfast until she was in her mid 80s. She and I did our German O-Levels on the same day, when I was 16 and she was 67; we both got A’s. (“Luckily,” as someone else said.) Two years later she did a French A-Level and got an A again. Twenty years later she did a German A-level, in her late 80s. Young F got to know her too; here he is on her 90th birthday, when he was not quite seven.

She was sharp, optimistic and humorous, and regaled us with anecdotes at her hundredth birthday party:

My first job was at a boarding school in Purley, in Surrey.
I had a strange incident there.
We used to go up to London to see the sights occasionally.
And I was waiting for somebody at the Piccadilly Hotel.
And she was late. I think she was Irish!
I got a bit fed up and started walking up and down the footpath.
And suddenly this young woman tapped me on the shoulder,
and she hissed in my ear, “Sister! Get off my beat!”
That was my first introduction to the seamy side.

Joan had four children, but no grandchildren; sadly her oldest daughter, on the left in the picture taken on her 100th birthday in 2016, predeceased her, but the others were able to spend time with her at the end.

F and I saw her last August, and she was in good form. But it was clear that her spirit was gently taking leave of her body, and I knew we would probably not see her again.

A lot of us gathered today to say goodbye to her, and a lot more were there in spirit. She touched many people’s lives for the better, and I am glad that I knew her. My thoughts are especially with her three children today and going forward.

Me with my mother, my son, three aunts, two uncles, three first cousins, seven first cousins once removed including Joan’s two living daughters, a second cousin and a couple of other halves.