Joan Urquhart, 1916-2023

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.

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.

Growing a beard

On 20 July, the day before our public holiday for Belgium’s National Day, I shaved my entire lower face and neck for the last time. The last time forever? I don’t know. The last time to date, anyway.

Photo taken in London by my colleague Andrei Goldis

I had tried this a couple of times before. In 1985, aged 18 and fresh out of school, I grew a moustache, which I kept until 1994; it defaces our wedding photographs, unfortunately.

Indeed, living in Germany in 1986, at the point I turned 19, I even grew a beard; not terribly successfully.

I had thought of giving the beard another try over last Christmas, and stopped shaving on 15 December; but then a crucial work meeting came up on the 20th, and I decided that I couldn’t really do it with five-day stubble.

I don’t really like the way my mouth looks in these pictures, and that was one more reason to try and grow a beard, to conceal the tight grimace I sometime unconsciously slip into.

Why? Well, I am 56 and can’t really carry off the “smart young man” look any more. My once fine head of hair has been thin on top for many years. I was interested to see whether, almost four decades on from my last attempt, the results might be different. I was also somewhat inspired by a former colleague who is about the same age as me, and pulled off the transition to distinguished beard a few years back.

Part of it also came from my genealogical researches. My father grew a beard one summer when he was 52, a bit younger than I am now, but was unsatisfied with the outcome and shaved it off again at the end of the holiday. My mother’s father was clean-shaven, and so were both of her grandfathers, at least in all surviving photographs and memories. My father’s father had a neat military moustache for most of his life. But both my father’s grandfathers sported splendid whiskers. (They never met each other; John Joseph Whyte had been dead for over a decade by the time his son met Henry Deming Hibbard’s daughter in 1927.)

My great-grandfather John Joseph Whyte (1826-1916)
My great-grandfather, Henry Deming Hibbard (1856-1942)

So there is some cause for hope from my genetic heritage. (Both salt rather than salt-and-pepper, at least in the evidence we have.)

For completeness, here are my beardless forefathers of the last three generations.

Left: my father, John Henry Whyte (1928-1990); top centre, my paternal grandfather, William Henry Whyte (1880-1949); bottom centre, my maternal grandfather Sean Francis Murray (1909-1976, bottom); right, my maternal great-grandfathers, William Murray (1876-1956, top) and James Stewart (1885-1954, bottom)

A majority of my male work colleagues have beards of varying degrees of success – here is a photo from an office outing to the pub last week, and as you can see beards outnumber the cleanshaven by eight to five among the adult men. (The smallest male in the picture is too young to shave. Another very young chap was also present, but didn’t catch the photographer’s eye.)

I feel right now that I’ll probably keep the beard for a bit. I was perhaps hoping for a salt-and-pepper effect, but in the end I got only salt. It’s been a little weird to adjust to the fact that the edge of your body is no longer quite where it used to be. But I can adapt to that; people adapt to much worse, after all. I also just like stroking it – it’s a completely natural gesture. It does occasionally itch; but everything occasionally itches.

And the key stakeholder approves, so that’s a decisive factor.

Lighting a candle at the chapel of the Holy Cross; and the parts-of-the-body game

It’s actually our wedding anniversary today, but we’re celebrating next weekend and so instead I’m bringing you an update on our daughters.

We sometimes take B on an excursion to the Chapel of the Holy Cross at Neerwinden, the next village to where she lives. It’s a small 18th century building, on the site of the two bloody battles of Neerwinden (in 1693 and 1793), which is open for visitors most of the time.

B generally lives in her own world, and while she doesn’t often refuse to engage with the rest of us, she doesn’t rush for opportunities to do so either. However, I got her to light a candle in the Chapel of the Holy Cross last weekend – it took three goes, but she got there in the end.

Meanwhile U continues to come to us for about a third of the time. She has recently decided that she no longer wishes to attend school; she is 19 so that’s fair enough really. She is always accompanied by a green Google Android and a spoon. Her vocabulary is limited but she knows many parts of the body.

Our family is not very much like other families. But we get by, thanks to support from a decently funded welfare state.

Speech and silence

Last week I had a work trip to Switzerland and Montenegro. (For unrelated reasons; the two appointments just happened to fall on adjacent days.) The last time I was in any German-speaking country was in February 2020, changing planes on the way to and from Gallifrey One; the last time I was in the former Yugoslavia was a year before that.

And gosh, it was quite a morale booster to feel that travel to other language zones is now possible again. Of course, I live in Flanders and work in Brussels, and in 2020 we went to my sister in Burgundy and on to Geneva, so French and Dutch have been constants in my life; but I also speak German fluently, and my Serbian / Croatian / Bosnian / Montenegrin is at advanced tourist level, so this was my first chance to speak those languages in a long time.

Speaking a familiar but different language is like changing gear mentally, or perhaps like driving a very different car, where the controls may be in a completely different place to where you normally find them. I joke that on some days when I go to work, I will have spoken three languages before I sit down at my desk (to family and train conductors); and on other days, I may not have spoken to anyone at all!

I’ve had the opposite side of the coin this week. When I went to hospital with COVID in November, they picked up a lump on my larynx, and after various backs and forths they removed it surgically (with a LASER) on Monday. Nothing alarming; a granuloma probably caused by acid reflux. My first time under a general anæsthetic, and that eerie experience of feeling the bathwater of consciousness draining away. (But where does it drain to?)

I’m fine – hardly even any physical discomfort (does the larynx even have pain sensors?) but the kicker is that I have to rest my voice until tomorrow, so I’m on my third day of enforced silence. I had to skip the British embassy reception for the Queen’s Jubilee last night, and a much anticipated conference today – not a lot of point in going to such events if you can’t talk to people. And for work I have been typing frantically into the chat during Zoom meetings, rather like a hybrid panel at a science fiction convention, but less fun.

Looking around for wisdom on this topic, I found a blog post by Hannah Little (hi, Hannah!) about the theories of why the human larynx is located lower in the throat that its equivalent in other primates. She cites an hypothesis of Mark Jones that the lowered larynx reduces the amount of lung compression needed to achieve speaking pressure, creating the ability to be louder and have lower resonances. That was in 2010 and doesn’t seem to have been published yet, but I find it convincing.

On the plus side, I took an extended lunch break yesterday to visit B. She was able to talk a little when she was two, but has not said a word for the last twenty-two years. She is still very capable of communicating – she was glad to see us, and also made it clear when she thought that our walk in the park was over. As ever, I need to improve my selfie game. And I am looking forward to talking again for myself tomorrow.

My younger daughter and Magritte

Someone asked after reading about B and the king if I ever write blog posts about U, our other daughter. Well, I do sometimes; and in fact she and I had our own cultural excursion last weekend, when I had the sudden impulse to visit the Magritte Museum in central Brussels. I admit that I am not a massive Magritte fan, but it’s one of those things that as a Belgian citizen working in the capital I feel I ought to have done.

It’s interesting enough. Some of his best known works are elsewhere, of course. I missed my chance to see The Treachery of Images in Los Angeles earlier this year. The Son of Man is in a private collection. Golconda is in Houston. A dozen are in MOMA in New York.

But the Brussels museum does put him in context, and in particular you appreciate how important his wife Georgette Berger was to him. It’s also interesting to see the commercial art that he produced – and one can sense the frustration that drove him to surrealism.

One of the advantages of taking U is that she gets in at a substantial discount, and I get in at a similar discount as her companion. She gets a brisk walk looking at confusing but stimulating things, and I don’t feel I have to spend ages in every room because she doesn’t feel I should spend too long in any room either. But she did gracefully pose for me at a couple of pictures.

U enjoying “Ceci continue de ne pas être une pipe“, a drawing from 1952
which is obviously a sequel to “The Treachery of Images” (1930)
U, the green Android and “The Unexpected Answer” (1932), probably the best known in the collection.

Having tolerated me snapping her in front of those two, in the next room she spotted one that she really liked and stood beside it waiting for me to photograph her and the Android. When we got home she insisted on looking at the picture I had taken. What was going through her mind? Did the two masked men and the candlestick with three female heads resonate for her somehow? Anyway, here she is with Magritte’s Intelligence (1954).

I bought her a mug with Magritte’s clouds on, and we went home.

My daughter and the king

The king died suddenly, aged 62, on 31 July 1993, on holiday in Spain. He is affectionately but not deeply remembered in a country where people are generally positive but unenthusiastic about the monarchy. A modest man, there are not many things named after him, apart from the country’s major football stadium and the canal from Bruges to Zeebrugge.

There is one small corner of land dedicated to his memory. Hoegaarden, 40 km east of Brussels, is most famous for its distinctive white beer. Like many small Belgian towns, it was originally a settlement around a monastery. The monks were kicked out in the late eighteenth century revolutionary period, and the chapterhouse with its gardens sold to a local family. The last of the family died in 1980 (murdered by his gardener, as it happens) and the municipality took over the property, renting out the gardens to the Flemish Show Garden Association from 1991. They weren’t able to maintain it in the long term, and management has now reverted back to the municipality.

A number of small show gardens were set up in the park in the 1990s, and a year after the king died, a special patch was created in his honour, a prize-winning design by Ingrid Garcia Fernandez. In 1998 a terracotta bust of the late monarch was unveiled, produced by local artist Karel Hadermann. The king’s dovecote was moved to be near the bust and garden, but unfortunately the doves were all eaten by stone martens and the dovecote itself was allowed to decay. It has now been demolished and there is a new entrance to the park at the corner of Elst and Maagdenblokstraat, opening straight onto the memorial garden.

My daughters live close to Hoegaarden, and it’s one of the places I sometimes take my older daughter B when I visit. The first couple of times that we went, I got the feeling that she didn’t really like it that much, and then in the summer of 2016 she spotted the king, and fell in love.

I don’t bring her all that often – you don’t want the charm to wear off – but I take her one a year or so. Here she is in 2018, getting up close to the king.

In 2020 I got a short video of her interaction with him.

And we went back again last weekend, where I took the picture at the top of this post.

I think that for someone like B, people are fundamentally puzzling and not always attractive to engage with. She often likes to get up close and stare into people’s faces. The king doesn’t mind her doing that, and he doesn’t mind her poking him with her fingers. Looking at these pictures again, I think she’s also interested by the way his body merges with the plinth. He has a somewhat enigmatic and intriguing expression, which on the other hand is not at all threatening. (Here’s a better shot of his face, with F beside him.)

So, if you’re in the Hoegaarden area, do pop by and visit the king; and say hi from me and B.

Edited to add:

I sent this post to the sculptor. He replied:

Dear Nicholas Whyte,

I was very moved by your email and the information on the webpage.  The statue of King Boudewijn was my first commissioned statue.  King Boudewijn was not a very happy man.  He loved children very much but did not succeeded in having one of his own.  He was very young and rather unprepared when he was put upon the throne after the abdication of his father King Leopold III.  So I gave him that look that is at the same time worrying and friendly.  I have since that statue evolved in the use of techniques and materials.  Your daughter demonstrates exactly what I think that art should do.  It cannot make the world a better place but when it succeeds – even for a short moment – to bring joy (or another emotion) to a person it has fulfilled his goal.  Many thanks for sharing this with me.

Greetings to you and your daughter,

Karel