Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

RICHARD DAVENPORT HINES

Few of you will see the common ground between “Bongbong” Marcos and Hugh Trevor-Roper. But it exists. As Senior Tutor at St Edmund Hall, Blair had the exacting task of conciliating suave men from the Foreign Office who besought the college not to humiliate the worthless future president of the Philippines by sending him down after he failed his PPE exams. Blair, I think, devised the arrangement whereby Bongbong was awarded a face-saving, if meaningless, special diploma in social studies. It was time-consuming, mentally depleting bosh like this that for twenty-five years diverted Blair from his scholarly avocations. Blair has also given his time, munificently, to the Nachlass of Hugh Dacre, at great cost to his own research and writing. For over twenty years, as the Dacre literary executor, he has proven his loving unselfishness, indeed his sacred self abnegation. He gave lavish attention to rescuing the unfinished manuscript of Trevor-Roper’s best book, his biography of Sir Theodore de Mayerne. Blair criss crossed the continent to check its sources line by line. Europe’s Physician , which Yale published in 2006, expresses Blair’s capacity for love, charity and reverence. I have been one of Blair’s minions in the ordering of the Nachlass , editing four posthumous Trevor-Roper volumes and watching him oversee the selections of essays arranged by John Robertson, Jeremy Cater, and others. I stand agape at his passionate commitment and at his self-control when associates fail him or waste his time. Blair occasionally shows the noblest neurosis of intellectuals, what Germans call Torschlusspanik , that is, alarm at the shutting of gates of opportunity. Many of us over 60 have frantic moments of reckoning when we realise that the time and strength for new investigation and renewed critical thought are expiring. Blair has saintly tenderness. I have seen him shaken with sorrow at funerals of hard men whom others respected rather than loved. He hates physical or mental cruelty. On a visit to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire he saw a field of goats which had such long toenails that they could barely walk. In distress, he wrote to the Dent-Brocklehurst family beseeching them to trim the goats’ toenails. That incident epitomises to me the pure, thoughtful and sumptuous goodness of Blair. I was a guest at his wedding to Vicki: truly the happiest, gentlest, most endearing and deftly-organized event of its kind. Nothing that I say about Blair as a tutor and mentor matters as much as saying what a joy it is to see the radiant serenity of the married man.

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