ERIC HOBSBAWM
This is not the occasion to talk at length about Victor’s contribution to history. There will be other times when we discuss this. This is the moment to pay tribute to a remarkable and enchanting man. Anyway, some of us will not be able to do so for much longer.
Memory is a curious thing. Victor and I were comrades and friends for seventy years or so, though generally divided by very long distances. Apart from the short spell between his return from what was still India and his departure for Edinburgh, when both of us were in Cambridge, there was no time when we lived in the same place for more than a day or two. We met at more or less regular intervals: in the early postwar years at the Communist Historians’ discussion in a Clerkenwell that was still closer to Dickens than to the world of the Financial Times’ ‘How to Spend It’ supplement; later on at the Oxford editorial board meetings of Past & Present, of which he was a member in the 1970s and 1980s. For the rest we only met on the infrequent occasions when he came to London and the even rarer occasions when I found myself in Edinburgh. And, in the mid-1980s, at an enjoyable conference on nationalism in war-torn Belfast in connection with the Wiles Lectures, enlivened by the sponsor’s main product, Bushmills whiskey.
Then why do I remember him so vividly? Why do occasions when nothing particularly memorable happened live on like photographs in my memory – a visit to the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, a walk with him and a Pakistani friend in Belsize Park, a ride in a hired car through the Ulster countryside, a moment on the bridge watching the salmon leaping up the Tweed? Why was I so glad every time I heard his voice on the phone or received one of those single-spaced typed missives which somehow made even typescript seem to reflect the unmistakable Kiernan hand? Let me say again what I wrote on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. He was
a man of endless sincerity, charm, warmth and surprise. A double surprise. On the one hand he surprised the friends who loved him, but who had trouble in understanding what went on inside this apparently open and welcoming person, but one who kept his emotions very much to himself – at least until his fortunate marriage to Heather. On the other hand I always had the impression that he himself was constantly surprised by a world that was not quite like his, a world where people did not travel with Latin editions of Horace or Virgil or treated every human being with good-tempered courtesy, or wrote English with beauty and correctness but no concession to colloquialism. Instead he found himself in a world where it was common to drive cars, go to the movies, go to pop concerts and live with children.
And – I may add – in a world where people pursued personal ambitions and elbowed each other aside, even in universities. He made his friends smile and feel better for helping him to navigate its strange waters.
I miss him and shall go on missing him. It was good to be his contemporary – a man not exactly life-enhancing, but confirming that goodness, honesty and virtue, with the lightest of touches, are still to be found in the world. If the good lord were to ask me (Richard Dawkins permitting) for a good deed that would help to get me through the narrow gate on Judgement Day (assuming that’s where I wanted to go), I’d say: ‘I knew there was only one man capable of writing The Lords of Human Kind, and I got him to write it.’
Goodbye Victor.
28 February 2009