University College Oxford Record 2020

JOHN HAROLD
FAWCETT
CMG (Radley) died on 14 December
2019 aged 90. His son Harry, who
himself came up to Univ in 1993, has
kindly provided this obituary:
John Fawcett was born in Harrogate,
in 1929. As a boy, he had a close,
collaborative relationship with his father,
Harold, a former naval officer who rejoined the
Admiralty during the war. Father and son would
work together on Harold’s wartime work: the
airborne campaign against German U-Boats in
the Atlantic.
John won scholarships to Radley College and
then to Univ, where he read Classics. He loved
his time at the College and it would remain an
important part of his life, as would his tutor and
friend, George Cawkwell.
He had two parts to his career. The first was
with British Oxygen, in South Africa and then in
the UK. In 1961, he married Elizabeth Shaw, and it
was she who found his half-completed application
to the Foreign Office, and encouraged John to
finish it, and send it off.
They enjoyed postings to Bombay (as was),
Port of Spain, Hanoi, Warsaw, Wellington and Sofia.
In Vietnam and Bulgaria, John was Ambassador.
During a spell in London in the early 1970s, he
was the lead civil servant managing the Cod War
with Iceland. At that time, he would walk to work,
wearing a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella.
He was once chased down Whitehall by an
American tourist calling: “Wilbur, Wilbur! Come
look! It’s an Englishman in his native costume!”
Indeed John was a traditionalist, and retained a
deep love of the institutions of which he was a part.
But he was also unconventional, and had no qualms
about challenging received wisdoms, and authority.
He loved to write (mostly
comic) verse. Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Modern Major General thus became a
“pliable ambassador” (definitively not
autobiographical):
So thus, by careful stages, I have reached
my present pinnacle,
By keeping to the cautious and the trivial
and cynical;
With honesty as policy a man has no fluidity
And so is hampered by his unprofessional rigidity.
In 1989 John retired to Dent, in Cumbria,
where he put much of his energy into projects
benefiting the community and local church. He
was instrumental in restoring bells to the church
tower, helping raise the £70,000 required. He also
successfully campaigned for a change in diocesan
practice, allowing unconfirmed church-goers to
receive communion.
The village more than repaid John’s support
with its own, when Elizabeth died in 2002. His
great good fortune was to meet and marry his
second wife, Linda Garnett, with whom he shared
an unexpected and very happy coda to his life.
In retirement, he developed further a longheld
passion for mathematics. In particular he
engaged in an in-depth study of the numerical
and geometrical relationships hidden inside
the octagon, and had his work published in a
mathematical magazine. He would sometimes
regret not having studied the subject in earnest
from a young age.
Until almost the last, John was an active, fun
and funny man, a natural host and storyteller. He
had a profound belief in the untapped talent in
the world, and within individuals, and did his best
to draw it out in those he knew.
He is survived, and missed, by his wife Linda
and son Harold.
66 University College Record | October 2020