Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

Foreword

I N SEPTEMBER 1980 we sat together in the tea-room of Cambridge University Library and contemplated Susan’s impending remove to Oxford, where she knew no one. John, oracular, spoke of who and what she would find there, until finally he pronounced ‘Blair Worden is the person you must meet’. He described the wit, the brilliance, the kindness, the mischief of his friend of many years. Now, more than forty years on, and improbably to mark Blair’s eightieth birthday, we have brought together tributes from other devoted friends. The idea of the celebratory day and of this volume is that it should reflect the whole of Blair’s career. So there are contributions by those he taught as undergraduates, those whose excellent doctorates he supervised, those he mentored, and those who he first knew as colleagues. All became his friends. Everyone approached agreed with joy to contribute, and we selected those who first met him from each of the last four decades of the twentieth century. We were prompted to devise a day in celebration and gratitude by Chris Jones. His was the vision and his was the power to make it happen. Chris first met Blair when he arrived from Blair’s old school – St Edward’s in Oxford – to Selwyn College Cambridge where Blair spent a couple of happy years before returning to Oxford. Chris combines devotion to Blair with dynamism and he ensured that all the arrangements for the day of celebration (4 April 2025) and the printing of this volume was a collaboration between himself and the current authorities at St Edward’s School, urged on by Malcolm Oxley, Blair’s wondrous history master in the early 1960s and still his close friend. That tells us much about both of them. Blair’s gift of friendship inspired this book and its title.

SEB | JSM | 12 January 2025

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