downing text 2012_Layout 1 - Downing College - University of ...

DOWNING COLLEGE ASSOCIATIONof the knee. He had matriculated at Downing in October 1942, having won anaward in the entrance scholarship examination in December 1941, fromDownside Abbey School, Somerset. He was born on 25th July 1924 atTeddington, Middlesex. At school he had learned of Dr F R Leavis from DomHilary Steuert, one of the Benedictines attached to Christ’s College who weretaught by Leavis. After a year reading for the Preliminary Examination for PartI of the English Tripos he was called for military service and was commissionedinto the Royal Armoured Corps and went to the continent in 1944, losing afinger in charge of a tank, and, after the surrender of Germany, to India as aTransport and Education Officer. In 1946 he returned to Cambridge, but toPart II of the History Tripos, specialising in Franciscan history under DomDavid Knowles, graduating in 1947. Nonetheless he remained throughout hiscareer a loyal disciple of Leavis in his teaching of English Literature and keptregularly in touch with him. For a short time he taught evening classes at theCambridgeshire Technical College in East Road (which he recently told me wasthe worst experience of his life) and then went to the Benedictine Priory Schoolin Ealing, from which he moved in 1949 to a Readership in English at theCatholic University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. There he was promotedto a Chair in 1951, became Head of the Department, twice Dean of the Facultyof Arts, and Rector Magnificus (rotating academic head of the University) in1964. He was a Visiting Professor at Amsterdam, Utrecht and Groningen. Hepublished three books in Dutch, on English and American Literature for thegeneral public, one of them on Shakespeare, on whom his university lectureswere said to rival performances by the RSC.In 1977 he was honoured by being made Commander of the RoyalNetherlands Order of Orange-Nassau. When he was presented with a Festschrifton his sixtieth birthday in 1984 the number of former pupils attending includedones by then holding chairs of their own running into two figures. The guidancehe gave to research students, especially in the choice of very diverse subjects onwhich he informed himself deeply, was exemplary. In 1985–86 he took earlyretirement, for reasons like those of many British academics then and since,and settled at first in London, where, amongst much else, he started toreconstruct on paper the Old Royal Library given by George II to the BritishMuseum in 1757, but subsequently distributed into separate subjects and manysold as duplicates. In 1986 he gave the Panizzi lectures at the British Library onEnglish Monarchs and their Books from Henry VII to Charles II, a brilliant andamusing tour de force based on his already wide knowledge of the collection.Later he moved to Oxford but regularly took part in conferences on a widerange of the history of books, most of which have been published, and onehopes may be collected together.59