University College Oxford Record 2020

FORMER
LECTURERS
PROFESSOR EDWARD ALAN BEVAN
died on 26 June 2015 aged 89. Having studied
at the University College of Wales and the
University of Glasgow, in 1955 he was appointed
a University Demonstrator on the Botany
Department, and was made a member of this
College. In 1963-4 he was also our College
Lecturer in Botany, before being appointed a
Professor of Botany at Queen Mary College,
London, in 1964.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN REUEL
TOLKIEN
died on 16 January 2020 aged 95.
From 1959 until 1964, when he
became a Fellow of New College,
Christopher Tolkien was a Lecturer in
English at Univ, studying and teaching
Early and Middle English like his father,
J. R. R. Tolkien. He was also one of the
first readers of his father’s great novel, Lord
of the Rings, and assisted in drawing the maps
for the book. On J. R. R. Tolkien’s death in 1973,
Christopher became his literary executor. In
1975 he resigned from his post at Oxford and
devoted himself instead to the work for which he
is now best known, namely editing and publishing
his father’s uncollected writings. The many books
which resulted, and which have done so much
to shed fresh light on his father’s creative work,
include The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the
twelve-volume History of Middle Earth.
OLD
MEMBERS
1941:
KENNETH CHARLES ELLISON
(Sir William Turner’s School, Coatham, Yorks.)
died on 31 August 2019 just a few days after his
97th birthday. He came up on a cadet course,
and then went down to serve in the Second
World War. He returned in 1945 to read English,
getting a First. He then became a schoolmaster,
first working at Thames Valley Grammar School
in Twickenham, and later to Solihull School.
1946:
MICHAEL GRANVILLE
BRADLEY
(Wanganui Collegiate School, NZ)
died on 11 June 2020 aged 91. His
granddaughter Caroline Guillet has
kindly provided this obituary:
Michael came up to Univ to read PPE
and was the son of John Bradley, who
had read Greats at Univ in the 1920s,
and great-grandson of Dean George Granville
Bradley, Univ’s Master from 1870-81. Michael
arrived at the Dean’s meeting for freshers in his
best suit, which was bright blue and had been put
together in New Zealand using clothing coupons,
and was relieved to see that most of his fellows
had turned up in similarly garishly coloured post
war demob suits issued to them by a grateful
nation. Michael dutifully handed in his green
adolescent’s ration books to the Domestic
Bursar, being still only 17, which entitled him to
bananas that the college never gave him to his
disappointment. He signed up for the Boat Club,
in family tradition, as his father had rowed for
Univ in 1922. Michael rowed in Univ’s 1 st Torpid
in the bow. At that time, in winter, the boats
were kept at Salters and “Bossom” the boatman
would ferry the crews to the Univ boathouse
University College Record | October 2020 59