College Record 2017

Glen was very keen on making Walton Street the centre for Chinese Studies in all
aspects of life. He felt very loyal to the staff at the new Institute of Chinese, and
our offices were grouped round the Director’s in such a way that we ran into each
other every day so there was a strong sense of community. He loved having long
conversations with all of us – as he said, he was ‘a bit of a gasbag.’
Glen was very conscientious and hard working. He put the institution he worked
in as well as his own work on the same high level. He was very interested in all
aspects of Chinese studies, putting much effort for instance into students’ progress
in learning the modern Chinese language. He insisted on the highest standards from
his students, and strove hard to find it in them as well as in himself. One student
remembers ‘the contortionist crossings of his long legs he used to manage in class’
which shows his attention to their utterances and his determination that they should
produce their best.
His own spoken Chinese was excellent. His children noticed that their parents
still communicated in Chinese. His wife Sylvia who is Chinese by birth gave him
every support. According to his colleagues who were once students with him at
Cambridge, Glen was very good at the language side of things especially in Classical
Chinese from the beginning. Glen himself started his research in Chinese fiction,
beginning with Journey to the West which had been composed in the vernacular.
He diversified into all sorts of narrative, some in classical Chinese, from the T'ang
dynasty onwards, using material that showed the development of fiction in his many
publications.
He loved music, and one of his ‘treats’ for himself was to buy a baby grand piano for
his retirement. We used to be quite surprised to find our professor playing in a band
(in place of his son) on the street in Oxford at the weekend.
Glen’s successor but one, the current Shaw Professor, Barend ter Haar, adds:
For many decades since my doctoral studies, ‘Professor Dudbridge’ was mostly a
much respected, somewhat intimidating presence in distant England. I worked in
Leiden and Heidelberg, where I did meet him from time to time at conferences.
As these things go in scholarly life one gets to know a person mostly through his
articles and books, which were always a great joy to read and most of all to use in
class and in doing research. When I came to Oxford in January 2013, it was as his
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