Ladies and gentlemen, I was recruited as director of Saturday's Middle East Centre.
I am so thrilled to see so many of you.
Some of you I haven't seen for so long now. And as everyone says, it's a sad occasion to be coming to remember colleagues that we've lost.
There is still a great sense of celebration to see so many of you come back to college to
remember colleagues who played such an invaluable role of importance in each of our lives.
I came to this college in 1991 to take up my job.
Gary Hockey was on the search committee and Sylvia Kerslake was actually my first teacher in Oxford,
having enough spare time on my hands in my first year of appointment.
I actually jumped at the opportunity to sit in on serious Turkish language classes and then only knows I needed them.
She grew up and I can confirm that Syria was as precise and thorough a teacher as she was.
Mr. Taskmaster. If Israel didn't put any demands on me in my first year CV instead of using them for esoteric Hollywood,
Gary Copley was already one of those titans who I had come to know as a graduate student by reading all of his books,
beginning with our combined interest in the 19th century history of Palestine.
But Derek, fluent in Russian, brought an entirely different angle to the study of Palestine,
looking at Russian interests in Palestine and the rest of us,
even with easier languages like French and English, for looking at British interests or French interests or American interests in Palestine.
And so there was something in already the first work of Derek Hopwood that was
completing our understanding of the 19th century Arab policies of the Ottoman Empire.
But given the opportunities that arose from his job here at Sit Out his college in the 1970s, the place that he called his home as man and as boy,
Derek was able to broaden his horizons, both in terms of the geography of the region,
working on both Africa, on the Middle East, on the countries of the Gulf.
Working across time for such diverse periods as Russian theatre,
right up to the colonial era and the independence struggles of Jordan, Egypt and Syria.
Derek was one of those polymaths and no student of the Middle East could go through their studies as an undergraduate.
Ask this to your doctoral student without reading.
And so you could imagine often was as a 30 year old, about to turn up in Oxford and be confronted with people like Derek and see as your colleagues.
Those were very big people to compare yourself to as a colleague and to impudently enter into first name basis with.
Hello Derek. Quite serious, but you learn to accommodate because you're holding together sun rays.
He was one of their psychological allies and they set a culture to this community,
which I think is he says is a function tenaciously that we have a sense of the community of scholars who come together
to encourage each other to advance ever further with the work that we do to take our students to a higher place.
We've inherited these ideas, these attitudes from those who came before us,
and of those who didn't belong to our community, the people we are here today.
Derek Hopwood and Simeon are safe places such as they truly were pillars of the field of study in parts of the East are shrinking from that point of,
say, that this College of University of Oxford and of that small part of the College of the University, the Middle East.
So in our presentation today, we are welcoming all of you back.
We'll have an opportunity to hear reflections from those of you who have known Derek and Celia over the years as staff,
students, as colleagues that as their students themselves.
So I would like to hand the floor to our warden, Roger Goodman, to get the process for the functions.
Thank you, Jane. And thank you to you and your colleagues for for hosting an event such as this,
which is this is a fabulous opportunity to to remember reflects on two of our really beloved and already much missed and Tony and colleagues.
Now Eugene has asked me to to say a few words from the viewpoint of the college.
And people sometimes ask me to explain what is a college.
And as an anthropologist, I generally say the college is best thought of as a kind of extended family.
As we say to anyone who has been a member of the college, a student or senior member.
Once again, Tony and Boyz II Men to me, and I'm one of the special features of, I think,
Oxbridge colleges is how closely they keep in touch with those who have technically retired.
I say retired in quotation marks because I don't think either Sealy or Derek retired from being an academic.
They just stop receiving their salary from the college.
And that's quite interesting because the last time I saw Steve, it was, I think less than a week before she passed away.
She was up in the senior common room in the hill, the best of times,
and she was on a Zoom call at a conference discussing some technical aspects of Turkish grammar
with something which she then tried to explain to me all of the things called particles.
In Turkish. I think it's atomic physics. But anyway, she says, I have no idea.
It sounded unbelievably arcane. She could not have looked happier.
I can only assume whoever was giving the talk was getting it right or not.
I saw Terry less often in recent years, but he did come into college when he could.
And like everybody, every time I met Eric, I couldn't stop asking him how did he always look?
Exactly the same as he had when I first met him in 1982.
I could not tell if that pictures from 1980 to 92, 2002.
In 2002, he never changed. It always looked like that.
I actually spent a lot of time with Derrick, especially during the summer in the early 1980s,
because we were both members of the students in his cricket team. It's not.
Sydney's have a rather famous cricket team in the early 1980s.
It was the only college cricket team that had two international players and don't get too excited.
One Israeli male cricket player was played for the Israeli international team that time known for its cricket prowess.
And the other, even more interestingly, was a Dutch international female cricketer.
Also not learnt that much was cricket,
but she that was a woman called Secret Code who is the current finance minister and deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and Derek Knight.
Later when he came to us because Derek was a medium pace bowler with an incredibly consistent line,
you think you've no idea what the particles particle was.
You could on cricket, you're going to have the positive spin. He was a decent batsman, although he had a unfortunate tendency to run out of a place.
I speak with some feeling about this out more than once, and he was an extremely good rescue, confused [INAUDIBLE] Fielder.
I remember he couldn't avoid playing matches. This was about the early 1980s.
Had just arrived as a graduate student. He could have always played because Maxwell was on Wednesday afternoons.
That was supposed to be when all the sports are taking place and he had to go to governing body meetings four times the term.
I cannot believe that. Of course he did. I remember thinking that going to a governing body meeting started all the glamorous.
He assured me it was not. He was right.
Derek's other great love was music. He reckoned he performed in college concerts, which only ever seem to take place.
It's announcing his fundraising purposes.
When the college got into another financial crisis, in that sense, in the 1980s, in the 1990s, the college had a lot of crises and a lot of concerts.
One of the mainstay, he was a superb pianist, I mean, of really good years, but he's also a composer.
And I particularly remember somebody else coming into this one concert where he sent a piece of poem written in French,
which the student for some reason decided she would like to see.
It was brilliant. And I think to me that sums summarise very well to summarise, sometimes it's.
Derek holds many important roles in the college, but perhaps most memorably, he was subordinate in the era of Ralph Meredith.
At that time, there was an expectation, or at least a temptation from above to handle that the support.
We should have raised college wide events as a way of engendering college collective identity.
Derek did a series. He was supported for two years. He did a whole series of events.
But the most memorable one by far was the one he arranged with Ted Heath, the former prime minister.
I do remember the total Ted. He came and talked about why we should enter the Europe that day.
That's a different Conservative party. Didn't want it to be. Derek chaired the session.
The only part of the talk I remember was Heath,
or somebody pretty much calculated in whatever year that was in the mid 1990s that if you took £1 off the UK and
then travelled through every of the European countries and then changed the money into every currency for the euro,
you would end up with 13 people. The only thing I remember, I never checked it, but that's what he claimed, that that's why we should enter the euro.
But I also make it very late to describe the hour before the talk when he had
to look after taking to the right erm as to quote the longest hour of my life.
Heath apparently did not do small talk. He said the only thing he could think to ask you that wasn't political was how often did he go to dinner.
Such did help with the against the dinners.
To which he replied, somewhat bizarrely, he did not have to pay for a meal since he'd become prime Minister TV.
I only could remember.
There's one other thing for which the colleagues history has to acknowledge Derek, and that was his role in bringing Marion Golding to the colleges.
So this was a long process to the point of order.
And when the governing body had whittled down the list to just two candidates, Derek acted as America's champion in the crucial electoral meeting.
And I have no doubt it was his persuasiveness which tipped the balance and.
Celia also played many key roles in the coalition.
She fell two of the key college posts. She was both senior tutor and she different missions during much of the 1990s.
She was also a vital member of key committees in the Faculty of Oriental Studies,
where generations of students and perhaps even more importantly generations of academic colleagues had particular reason to be
grateful to her for her detailed drafting of the grade of examination regulations that everyone seems to to focus students.
Where you place the comma. It can change a whole student's experience.
As we were here, I have no doubt Celia was a scholar of the old school.
She said, very high standards in her teaching and research for both herself and for others.
She was unhappy and she was misled as much by what she saw as the dilution of the undergraduate degree in Turkish, which she oversaw in the 1990s.
But at the same time worrying that the applicants would be good enough for such a rigorous programme
once applicants were determined that she would do everything in their power to get them through.
And she was simply delighted to see the resolution expressed as such when she won a well-deserved teaching award nominated by the students.
And that is a fantastic and that's something we all want to know. And I do know how deeply delighted to see that.
She expressed the same level of concern for the students at the college because she did not teach senior was is a
private person and I'm sure we would learn things we didn't know about her from others who are speaking today.
But let me end by sharing the story that Eugene I only heard for the first time yesterday from Celia's a good friend, Ruth Alston of the New Fruit.
This year three shared this story with us. It's a story.
Story. In the mid 1970s, Celia was warden for the Newport Lodgings on Huntington Road in Cambridge,
which was directly opposite the Newport College itself, with about a dozen or so student residents.
One night, she became aware that a man was trying to break into the hostel.
So Stephen got up, challenged him and told him in no uncertain terms to go away.
You can picture her. He accordingly and sensibly did so.
A few days later, Celia was visited by the Cambridgeshire Police, who told her that Faith and the intruder was none other than the Yorkshire Ripper.
The Yorkshire Ripper was never seen in Cambridge. Indeed was never seen south of Yorkshire again.
For me, that story sums up Sylvia. But she was formidable enough to chase off the Yorkshire Ripper as too modest to ever tense us that
she very fancy to stand for all that is best about the extraordinary community that constitutes.
It was a privilege and a pleasure for us all to have known them over so many years.
They were already much missed, and I look forward to hearing much more about them over the rest of this afternoon.
Thank you again, Eugene. Thank you again, colleagues. Bringing us together to share memories.
As you will see in the course of the afternoon, there is a certain amount of trying to clean Celia and Derek.
The water just it's a shame to see in the name of the college before the Middle East centre edges this growing struggle.
I would like to welcome someone who has the highest claim to Syria of all people.
Her sister, Rosie McGregor. Rosie, could I tell you. Which is.
I don't know. How many of you are aware of the circumstances of Syria's decision to read Turkish at Cambridge?
In the course of carrying her house. I've come across many letters and diaries that it gave me a new insight into her life.
I knew that she'd gone to Cambridge to read history. Having failed to get into Oxford, which was her first choice,
I also knew that the reason she had failed the Oxford exam was because she never finished an exam paper.
She didn't finish exam papers because she was too thorough and too conscientious and couldn't
convince her extensive knowledge into the answers required in this for young people.
And it was this conscientiousness that was almost her undoing at Cambridge.
After just a month senior, it was drowning in the reading requirements of the history syllabus and was heading for some kind of a breakdown.
Her diligence was her downfall. She was incapable of speed reading or taking shortcuts.
There is no reference to her emotional state in her 1965 diary, which is entirely practical and factual by nature.
Though I remember our parents being very exercised about it.
But the first week of November entries gives us the bare bones of the change that took place Monday, November the first, 430.
See Miss Parker with essay plan. She advised me to change to Oriental Studies.
Tuesday, November the second Saw Miss Duke in the morning spent a day considering Oriental studies,
moral sciences and English rang out mom and Dad in the evening.
Decision to change to Oriental Studies. Wednesday.
Thursday. Various interviews with potential tutors. Friday, November the fifth, 10 a.m. interview with Ms.
Skinner took evening decision to do Arabic in Turkish, and she never looked back.
Despite being her sister. I never felt I knew Sylvia well.
One of the many unsettling aspects of her death has been to hear the descriptions of her by her colleagues and friends,
which seem to portray a person I never met.
One inevitably feels remorse at a failure to understand or appreciate someone when it's too late to address it.
I I'm it is the only good thing to do.
And by the time I was old enough to have any awareness of how others in the family were spending their time, she was committed to her work.
It seemed that she worked all the time, permanently closed the doors in her room, only appearing for meals.
But that clearly wasn't the whole story. She played various sports at school and excelled in the gym.
And can we have the next one? I don't suppose you've ever seen the point.
You know, she played the piano and she sang in choirs both at school and in Cambridge.
She was keen go guide. That's actually probably a Robin Gill guide, but I didn't have a girl guide picture, unfortunately.
But that's with my other sister in.
And her diaries are dotted with reference to church parades and camping and campfire songs, all of which seemed a source of enjoyment.
And there was the odd sports day and expert of the three legged race.
Our childhood was serious business. There was enormous pressure on all three children to be successful academically.
And great significance was attached to school reports and exam results.
My mother once said to me when I was planning a day out with my children and their grandparents, Dad doesn't really do fun.
Which I believe was fundamentally true. I'm not sure that kid ever shook off that burden of expectation, which saddens me.
She was always dutiful, diligent and caring of others.
I would have liked to see her be carefree or even occasionally self-indulgent.
My mother observed ruefully, not long after Sylvia had started spending her vacations in Turkey,
that she felt Sylvia was more at home there than in her family home.
I think she felt liberated there, nurtured by her relationship with you, live and free from the perceived judgements of her parents and others.
The last time I saw Celia was a fortnight before she died.
She had a family gathering at my house the last weekend in January.
She took great delight in the antics of my two two year old granddaughters, and we all joined in making marmalade, which we labelled three sisters.
She was in good form and showed no sign of ill health.
So the terrible shock of the death is at least counterbalanced by the fact that she was operating normally until a few hours before she died.
I think it's an example we'd all like to follow. Jose, thank you and so glad you were here with us.
And I think you've told us things about Celia that no one else is going through and you back it up with images to prove it.
I'd like now to get back to the grubby business of cleaning Sylvia and Derek and invite
my cherished colleague Michael Lewis to come and speak about our cherished colleague,
Derrick Humphrey. Mike. Thank you very much, Eugene.
I've been asked to say a few words about Derrick as a scholar, which I'm I'm delighted and honoured to do, as many of you will know.
Derrick was an undergraduate here in Oxford at Fraser's College in the 1950s,
where he read Arabic, and then he returned to complete his doctorate here in 1962.
He took only three years to write it. 30 Dphil students Please take note.
Three years is what the university really likes, and their introduction very popular with the university.
He went on, as I think we all know, to become a really prolific scholar, wide ranging in his interests and in his knowledge.
During his career, he wrote no fewer than seven books himself and edited a first seven of collected volumes, all on quite different subjects.
And as somebody who's fairly kept a fairly narrow range of subjects,
I'm quite in awe of somebody like Derrick, who was able to write on a range of topics.
They stretched from his first book, The Russian Presence in Syria in Palestine, 1843 to 1914, which was published in 1969,
and based on the doctoral thesis he had written under the supervision of Albert Hourani here at the Middle East Centre,
and went all the way through to his last book, Islam's Renewal The Former Revolt that appeared in 2018,
just just a couple of years before he passed away.
So quite a whole range of periods.
In between time, there were books looking at parts of Middle East as diverse as Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan,
the Arabian Peninsula, and on topics as diverse as Arab nationalism, Britain, the empire, and of course, even sex and empire.
He made a truly remarkable and enduring contribution to scholarship and understanding of the region.
Now, Derek and I never actually overlapped as fellows of Middle East Centre.
Derek retired in 2000.
I took up my current post in 2004, but I think my sort of awareness and engagement with Derek Scholarship stretched back much earlier than that.
Two of the very first books that I read on the Middle East were actually written by Derek as a young recent graduate In 1990.
I bought and read Is Egypt Politics and Society 1945 to 1984.
Now, at that point I knew very little about the Middle East, but was very keen to learn more.
And therefore I was delighted to find in this book one that set house and explained a country as complex,
as important as Egypt in such an accessible and readable way.
And in fact, I liked it so much. For the matter of weeks later, I went out and bought a lovely book to keep Syria, Politics and Society.
1945 1986. The NSC bookshop did very good business for Derek Cope with in the early 1990s, and I found again a book I found similarly enlightening.
Both books impressed on me the value for academics to write for a broader readership beyond the specialists in a particular field,
to engage with people like me. When I bought Derek's books who knew little but wanted to know more.
And I think indeed, Derek dismissively stated in the introduction to both books,
but no prior knowledge of the countries was needed in order to meet them.
And in this way, Derek's writings undoubtedly contributed to my own decision to enter academia,
to be able to read and be able to engage from a very low base.
And there were both books that hugely influenced me and gained by my interest.
I was very pleased to come across Derek Scholarship again once I myself began to be involved in
academia and with his work on the part of Middle East that I came to focus on in my own academic work,
the Maghreb region of North Africa. Derek's biography of Habib Bourguiba, published in 1992, remains the only biography,
to my knowledge, in English, of this remarkable individual, the founder and leader of Tunisia.
It's a book I've drawn on from my own research and still use today.
In fact, just a couple of days ago, I read a student essay, but widely quoted because this is a book that has longevity to it.
I eventually got to meet Derek in person in the mid 1990.
First time here in 1997, actually in Oxford, at the annual conference held by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.
Burisma's. As most of us have been involved,
of which Derek was a strong supporter and actually one of the founders and was president for many, many years of business.
Having just completed my Ph.D. I was flattered, and I have to admit slightly starstruck to have Derek approached me at the end of a panel.
You asked me about my research, which at the time focussed on Islamism, and we had a very good conversation.
Now, Jane, this conversation Derek used an absolutely fascinating analogy to explain the phenomenon of Islamism,
which I found incredibly useful and insightful and so useful, insightful.
But I actually use the analogy myself in my own teachings.
And as I began to think about Islamism. Now, intriguingly, the analogy was to butter.
Yes, but now if you're wondering quite what Islamism and butter have in common, well, I'm afraid I can't help you,
as I sadly, no matter how I wracked my brains, I have absolutely no recollection of what that did not do.
If there's anybody here who remembers Derek's analogy between Islamism and butter.
I would be very pleased to hear it, but I remember being very impressed with it at the time.
However, I think it is typical of Derek's ability to take a complex subject and make it understandable in a very everyday sort of way.
And that backstage, I mean, that was my first discussion with Derek and it stayed with me by next,
probably for Derek when I started my fellowship here in Oxford.
And he made a point of coming to see me and congratulating and welcoming me, which I very much appreciate,
as has a junior scholar coming in, as Eugene mentioned, to have a senior scholar welcome you in that way.
It was wonderful. And thereafter he would he would drop by regularly to chat and he said he was particularly
pleased to see someone working on the Maghreb in the centre of my own focus of work,
which he thought was very important. And he had tried to expand focus on when he was doing his time as a fellow in the Middle East centre,
he had chosen to write his biography of Bourguiba. I referred to earlier explicitly to expand English language scholarship on the region,
which he felt had been still heavily dominated by scholarship in French.
Indeed, Derek described the biography of Pohiva as dipping my toe in this French Sea.
I remember telling Derek that I was very pleasantly surprised by the amounts of
books and material we had in the Middle East Central Library on the Maghreb.
And I remember being rather disconcerted when Derek looked at me rather askance and disapprovingly when I made that remark,
and he said, You shouldn't be pleasantly surprised.
So I was a bit concerned, but he said, You should be absolutely astonished.
I worked very hard to build that place, and indeed he had that.
And I think it's appropriate, therefore,
to say a few words about the remarkable contribution Derek made to the amazing life we have here in the city centre.
As most of you know, Derek was originally appointed as the University Middle Eastern bibliography in 1964 under
the encouragement of Al Tehrani before he eventually became a university lecturer here.
He was thus responsible for the great expansion and development of the amazing collections we have here at the MDC.
Now, Derek's contribution to libraries went, however, way beyond Oxford, indeed the UK.
Something I must confess I only fully became aware of through the centre's current library and very underrated have been together for.
Thank you for letting me know about their contribution that Derek was one of the founders I discovered in the Middle East Library Committee.
Malcolm, together with Professor James Douglas Pearson, venues who've been librarian so as in London,
and Malcolm held its first meeting in 1967 to provide a forum for personal contact,
discussion and exchange of information and ideas amongst which Middle East library specialists made biographies on academics.
A dozen years later, Malcolm UK branched out to other Middle Eastern librarians in Europe, and Malcolm International Association was born.
And I think it was a fitting honour for Derek in 2017, 50 years after Malcolm's first meeting.
But he was invited to give a paper on Malcolm's history on the occasion of the 39th Annual Conference of Malcolm International,
when both Malcolm and UK International joined forces to celebrate the 50th anniversary.
Real tribute to the work that Derek had done in really founding and building this incredible organisation.
I think probably most of us in this room have benefited through through the libraries and with these functions that Derek built up.
So Derek's contribution to Middle East studies and also I must of course, as Maghreb studies, was enormous on all levels.
And therefore it's not really any surprise that Derek was awarded an OBE.
E for services to Middle Eastern studies in 1998.
Thank you. Michael, thank you so much.
And of course, as we all try to claim the legacies of these great scholars to centre Derek,
particularly in his contribution to libraries, it's really good to see Martin and Colin and M.V.
Welcome back. As well as Maria Luisa keeping that tradition going for which Derek will long be remembered.
And I thank you for putting that into the perspective.
I mean, I think one reason why you were so nice to you, Michael, is you have a great British accent.
There was a certain regret with which Derek watched the Middle East being taken over by the Americans,
his own successor, like me, speaking with a broad American accent.
Walter, what can we do? But, you know, in the end, I think having Michael, having Philip Robbins balancing the Atlantic relationship,
kept the Middle East centre just tolerable to Derek.
But as we talk about the successors to Lower Dominion fell the task of trying to fill the very large shoes that of course,
they had established in the teaching of the Turkish language and literature and in the research into
the subject that he has done so in a way that she herself would only have taken great pride in,
is reflected in the warm collaboration that they enjoyed at the time since the Hall joined us.
First, when he stood in for Celia while she was on sabbatical for a year,
and then when he was appointed to her post as the head university lecturer of now the professor of Turkish.
So please join me in welcoming Naomi. Thank you, Eugene.
This is going to be a completely different accent again.
So it was unavoidable,
perhaps that moment when I was asked by Eugene to write a tribute to Celia and to contributions to the field of Take Your Studies.
I started suffering from what in French we call known was the real anguish of the white page writer's block.
Not because I did not know what to write, but because I did not know where to start.
This was not least because I am very conscious to this day that I would never have managed without serious help and support.
When I came for my first stint in Oxford in 2009,
whenever I had felt at a loss about how to deal with what seemed to me and still seemed to the rather arcane practices of our faculty,
she had always been ready to help with patients with empathy.
Two of her qualities that I know many people in this room will have experienced.
So there is so much to say. Thankfully, our warden, Roger Goodman,
tributes on the college website and the many moving testimonials of students and colleagues
published in the latest issue of the review of the British Association of Turkish Area Studies,
an organisation senior Chad have facilitated to my task and allow me to focus on the lasting contributions to the fields of Turkish studies.
One of the major challenges of a position such as the one Syria held in Oxford University lecturer in Turkish between October 1998 and 2011.
Is the expectation was the expectation that she covered the whole ground in Ottoman and Turkish studies over the years.
She trained courses as varied as Ottoman historical context, advanced Turkish grammar and Turkish language politics.
And these are only three among many, many courses that she taught,
but she taught all of them with a dedication and expertise underlined by all of the
students in the messages that they wrote on the Middle East centres and to colleges,
social media, seniors, breadth of knowledge and above all, the ability to share it.
And these are abilities that are not necessarily the expected of academics in other fields of the humanities.
So these abilities, breadth of knowledge was also reflected in her research and publications.
As some of you will know, her Dphil dissertation was a critical edition and a translation of large parts of the same name in the same city.
Now being a 16th century text concerning Sultan Selim the first and this dphil was in an area
quite different from the area where she was going to make major contributions and leave her mark,
namely the study and analysis of the grammar of the Modern Turkish Language Survey in 2005.
This year, together with a slew, Goodsell published what is perhaps the magnum opus,
namely the 600 page Turkish Comprehensive Grammar Review, A full forum for modern language studies described it to us.
I quote an indispensable volume In such a presentation, the review wrote,
The complexity of Turkish becomes something exciting and fascinating now to have the ability
to turn complexity into something exciting and fascinating is indeed a very rare gift.
This systematic and comprehensive description of the structure of contemporary standard.
Turkish is a milestone in the history of comprehensive parameters of modern Turkish written in a foreign language.
A standard reference which is in our days as significant as have been in that time, for instance, dissolved in 1921.
Neal that I don't you I think it was my look or letter.
In 1956, Andre Nikolayevich called on the Russian language grammar of the contemporary Turkish literary language.
Now CBS following book also calls that with absolute good said Turkish an essential Grammar.
And the first edition was published in 2011, was not simply a shortened version of this major work that I had just mentioned.
The main aim of this book is to present a concise and accessible description of the grammatical structure of contemporary Turkish,
taking into consideration the needs of learners with an Anglophone background.
And it is an essential reference word for all students of Turkish in the English speaking world.
Now, in an age when the university is deeply involved in discussions about the need to decolonise and diversify the curriculum,
I would like to make the case that CBA was the pioneer and proposes the path to follow.
Of course, her path is not about slogans and symbolic measures, but it is about work, ethics and academic honesty.
Her writings on modern Turkish literature are a good place to start.
If you look, for instance,
at any of the numerous contributions that she wrote for the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam or any of her analytical pieces of literature,
you will see that she systematically engaged with and referred to the scholarship written in Turkish.
So scholarship written in the language of the region that she was studying.
Indeed, she did not simply see the Turkish language, Turkish literature, and Turkish history as objects of study.
She knew that colleagues in Turkey and colleagues in Cyprus were also producing studies in Turkish on the subjects that interested her,
and she duly acknowledged them and their work. Of course, critically when needed in her English language publications.
Now this should be self-evident perhaps, and good scholarly practice, but it is unfortunately not always the case.
But above all, I think this is an expression of respect for scholarship in non-Western languages,
and it is where any decolonisation of the curriculum should start.
Now,
her extensive Turkish language library that has been donated to the Bosnian is a testimony to how closely she followed the publishing world in Turkey,
both the literary production, but also scholarship, which, with it seems to me.
But this is a very impressionistic opinion that she would not have approved of.
I think with particular attention to pay to women authors.
And indeed she translated, I said it was against the Urdu,
which was published by the Women's Press in 1988 with the title of the prize giving in 1988.
Now, 1988 is the year she took her position at the University of Oxford and became a fellow of St Antony's College and of the Middle East Centre.
So no doubt that the struggles of the main character of this feminist novel in a male dominated world were not unknown to see.
She became one of the very few female academics of the Polish governing body and the sole female academic of descent.
And so in these matters too, I would argue Clio was indeed the pioneer,
as senior scholarship flowed naturally into her teaching and to teaching into a scholarship.
It might well be that there are treasures hidden in the notebooks of generations of students that she formed in Edinburgh and here in Oxford.
So perhaps for her former students, this is a good moment to leave through those notebooks and to see his voice again.
Thank you. The thing about us is that what we came to know, Celia and Derek, they were already established titles in their field.
But one of the fun things about the community is that we do really have the depth to go back and talk to people who were here.
When Celia first entered as a doctoral student.
Syria joined us from 1978 1968, and then the future came just one year after that in 1969.
And so in a sense, we proved time travel to talk about I don't know whether it was a carefree Derek,
a carefree Celia, or indeed a careworn Derek and Celia, given the burdens and higher research pose for all of us.
But I would like to invite the description who I would single out as someone who
was a real intellectual mentor to me in my own graduate student days as professor
of modern Middle Eastern history at Villanova University and one of the rare
leaders of the study of the history of modern Syria in the 19th and 20th century.
And one of the sort of driving forces behind the Syrian Studies Association.
So a real daughter of Albert Ferrante commenting on the other colleagues that gathered around the illustrious group of Beverly Centre fellows.
Please welcome Linda Schultz. You're back to her centre and to this point.
Since I left the field of Middle Eastern studies in the early 2000, I had very little contact with any of the.
Is any of my good colleagues. In fact, this is my first time.
This was for me. New. I'm thrilled and very honoured to have been asked to be here.
And I'm also glad that my son Albert could come.
Thank you very much, Eugene, for inviting us. I hope that what I have to say is not too ignorant or inappropriate.
First off, I must say that I never got to know Celia.
I can only make remarks about her. So I'm very keen and have been very keen to hear about Dirk's life and career
subsequent to my intense contact with him and about his legacy and that we've seen.
My time here was when Albert were only four as we secretly referred to him.
How big was the charge at that time?
It was required a very pleasant walk from the college grounds here, where we students were housed with surrounding Victorian houses and catered.
Great show in the basement dining hall of the old building.
A quiet walk to the centre on the back, very red dirt, built the library to an impressive level, already all on the back of head.
There was such intimate contact with him there in that library, though Dirk did seem to be shy, very busy and a little mysterious, maybe even bemused.
Let me read to you what another contemporary student, the Arabist and historian of Middle Eastern Christianity, Hilary Kilpatrick.
Wallenberg has sent me from Switzerland to read out to you.
Hillary writes. When I joined 17 year old student in 68, Derek was already occupied and expanding the library in the Middle East centre.
At that time, the centre was still in a large Victorian house on the corner boundary route,
and I have memories of Morning Coffee at 1030 and cheered for the beautiful first floor.
Sara Derrick was regularly there as a discrete presence beside Albert, her Ronnie, Roger,
Erwin and later Robert Temple, Elizabeth Monroe, who was engaged in setting up the Middle East Centre archive,
frequently joined in direct support of the various activities of the centre, seminars, lectures with constructive interventions and discussions.
He did not talk much about his own work with the library, but he was always helpful and he never seemed to be pressed for time.
It was only later that I realised how much he achieved in building up the Middle East lecture.
Hillary continues after the Middle East centre migrated south to 68 Woodstock, Route 78.
I had much less contact with the North Star. I had already migrated to continental Europe,
but I sought to extend another connection as a founder founding member in 1990 and second president of Uranus,
the European Coordination of National Middle East Studies Associations.
I was a representative of the Swiss Society. This is not me.
This is going to be your interest still exists and fulfils an important role in circulating information about conferences,
research projects and so on. Dirk's other coordinating activities starting in the sixties was to Macomb, the Middle East Librarians Committee,
bringing together librarians in different British institutions with Middle Eastern book archive holders.
It's hard to imagine now with internet and digitisation, what an immense step forward coordination pre libraries.
The second half of the 20th century was continuous.
It was easy for me to take this presentation during choice of thesis topic.
The Russian presence in 19th century Syria Palestine may have seemed at the time rather exotic, but the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the opening of pre-revolutionary Russian archives and the resumption of research on the
contradictions between Orthodox in Greater Syria and Russia have proved in this studies,
Henry concludes. What I only discovered too late to my great regret was the Dirt was also musician and composer, as the Russians say, and sing.
Yet no, you cannot, which translates as eternal memory.
So that was him. As for me, by the time I was leaving Oxford already in 73, and if I remember correctly,
Albert was stepping down and the famous triumvirate of own Mother and Hopwood took over.
John Gurney had moved to Wadham College. Eventually, Roger left for Harvard and Robert to head the energy industry here in Oxford.
This was more than a little disconcerting for me because I hadn't yet submitted
my thesis and I was otherwise fully engaged elsewhere with two because frankly,
I no longer felt that I fit in. Incidentally, with my heroes gone and everything so changed at both ends.
But another contemporary professor, Paul Loft, now retired professor of Iranian studies.
You sustained contact. You would have loved to have been here, but it's too much of a journey for him these days.
They told me on the phone how much he admired Derek and also that Derek was to both German and Russian, something that I certainly had no idea of.
Both Hillary and Paul said the regards to all the friends who are here.
And I, too, of course, hope to be able to talk to old friends later on.
And there are so many happy memories from that era.
Invitation to one of our deals, wonderful dinners at the ranch and further out the Woodstock route where so many interesting people came and went.
Even one of the Sex Pistols with a deal organised last year, a compartment on the train to London the next day.
Though I didn't have a clue who he was, the gathering was at the members where I spilled the whole glass of red wine on their pale carpet.
And Judy taught me the soft drink to save the day.
Sitting at meals across from Margaret Macmillan with her gorgeous long blonde tresses surrounded by the
walls adorned by the equally gorgeous planes Joan Gurney had carefully assembled in pre-revolutionary row.
The ever surprising Ursula Irwin, sculpting the extraordinary head of the economist Bob Sutcliffe,
and thinking me, thinking, Well, that's one way of dealing with a great mind.
Sinking into the opposed to chairs in a new cauldron.
Then, while watching Roger Irwin attempting to tame his toddler Kate, as she jumped on the furniture.
You may be, well, wondering this time, but what does all that have to do with Derek?
Well, that's exactly my point. He was absent from all that.
I'm seeing something that's so different from everyone's said up to this point.
But I'm talking about a prior era, something I only realise now as they put these remarks together.
And no wonder why that was so. Could it be that like Abby, Derek was a bit sceptical of other religious left issues?
Like Habib. Did he have a kind of subterranean Byzantine resume to learn about Middle Eastern history?
Or did was Derek, as we saw, many scholar librarians print, simply take precedence to precedent?
I'm listening. Scholars are notorious for taking librarians for granted.
So I come from that era when there was still just the library.
So. So to conclude, I'm afraid I'm going to tell you a poem I draft in Dirk's honour, which is the best I could do given the speculations.
It's the first draft, she says, in self defence by Stoker, until Dirk's memoirs are published.
I call it same world Parallel Universe in honour of Dirk.
Why do certain individuals search, translate, study and write?
Trying to capture the whole deal. Why do they even try?
Is it? Curiosity, altruism, faith, ambition, escapism, hate.
Certainly the list is long. But this is so like the motivations of those who not only think, read and write, but also act.
Everything from the publishers, the demonstrators to the campaigners and lobbyists, some getting elected,
all of them including the generals, generals, kleptocrats and dictators, supreme drawing motivations from that very same list.
Can you imagine the Liberian scholar watching the news of the Middle East with a depth of knowledge and insight file shelved and reserved,
watching the arrogance, the assaults the Putins in the.
Torn between insight and pathos, empathy and revulsion.
Okay. The scholar of the tiger can both make history.
Both can have long term and widespread impact.
Certainly far beyond that. Librarian chair. I think we all sense that depth dart, his grasp and discrete motivations.
It was his generation who knew firsthand the consequences of the histories of this world, but would begin by burning books.
With dirt, there's a quiet, kind certainty which can rally in the end and probably triumph.
Linda, thank you. Not just for taking us back in time to a middle East centre that predates this incarnation,
but to restoring the complexity to the character of Derek Hopwood that in the tributes that we made
to him may not do him justice for trying to paint only certain aspects of his life and contribution.
And there was such complexity to clear to Derek as there is to all of us.
And I think it's an important part of remembering, as well as the complexity of this community and how the parts of it fit together.
But I would like to get back in the time machine and go back even a couple of years earlier than the 1969.
When you first put in your appearance in 1965,
which falls right between the period when Derek entered to do his doctorate here, and once he did, came to do hers.
And at the helm of the time ship, this time will be our dear colleague and friend after the showing of it before the jury.
Thank you very. Thank you very much, Eugene.
And thank you all for sharing this.
Very interesting, very friendly and very sad occasions.
I think both Derek and Sylvia are with us in the spirit, but also they would be always in our memory as a friend,
as a academic who devoted themself to the Middle East centre, to the college, to the Oriental faculty of that time and the university.
Now, I met Derek in 1963.
I was just joined the college here and worked for Rodney, asked me to come to see him at the Old Beauty Centre in Bulgari Road.
He said, Come quarter to 11. So I did.
And we had a chat about the college, about what I'm going to do.
Then he emerged at 11:00 and there was Derek introduce me to Doty and of course he sent out of that time knowing that 11:00 is the coffee time.
But Albert was doing not the Turkish, not the Greek, but Lebanese coffee.
That was absolutely essential that you should have that every morning at 11:00.
I enjoyed meeting Derek. Derek took me to the library and showed me all the shelves.
You know what they are. And if I need any help, he will be ready to order any books I want.
In addition to my research on 19th century travellers, European companies in this regard.
Now, I was a frequent attendee to the Friday seminar of the Middle East Centre in the old library.
At that time it was, as I said, who cared about me, and Derek was always there helping in the organisation of the seven US,
as well as welcoming people, seeing that tea and coffee out there as well as the others.
Albert, Elizabeth Monroe, Roger Allen and Farley Schwab was always there.
Two taking part up. One important function of the Middle East centre of that time is the annual gala barbecue.
It drew not only the staff member of the centre, but also all the specialists of the Middle East from the Oriental faculty.
Occasionally we had diplomats, including James Craig,
used to come and Cindy and Armitage and any friends of the Middle East Centre who attended Saturday night sometimes are invited.
And this is an annual thing. There's a lot of wine consumed in this party as well, a lot of meat that was sent to that.
You know, he was really great organiser of these events.
After I completed my visit in 1965, I went to Sudan and to spend five days of teaching.
But in between I used to come here during the summer and renew my contact with the Middle East centre and stuff.
In the early seventies. That's the first time I was asked by Derek to contribute and I'm not sure.
But one of our colleagues here remember Monash University in Australia asked the Middle East specialist, particularly in virtual Iranian Derek.
They want to establish a department in Islamic Studies and they wanted recommendations of books for their service.
So all the illustrious colleagues of India, the centre of Turkish, Persian, Arabic, myself, I was asked to recommend some hopes on anthropology.
The conference was held in Cambridge and our hosts in that time in Cambridge was Martin Hines and probably Bidwell.
We had a really two days and that was with us and it was really a very interesting time we had and the book came out and edited.
Of course, Derek was central to all this enterprise.
The book was published by Derek and Diana Grimwood Jones and subsequently three supplements.
Monash Pastoral was also edited by Derek Jelinek, which was.
When the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies business was formed, Albert asked me to become a fellow.
We had to come and give you that. So I did. And later I was elected as chairman of the conference committee and member of Council.
During that period of five years, me and Derek, my collaboration with Derek were really very, very important aspect of that.
I'm very glad to see some of my colleagues at that time,
but I believe from the Open University and been hailed from that time that we moved to ourselves and Turkey and back again.
So I'm very grateful to you that you've come here to share this occasion with us.
I arrange five conferences with Derrick Help all the time, and our colleagues, Geoffrey Lewis and Syria.
The turkey side is absolutely essential, and I think Michael said yes, and he wasn't so us, the librarian.
So we acted as a small community at that time.
But it's nice now. I don't know how many hundreds members, but then we are about 60 or 70 maximum.
So we did a cooperative idea and organised five conferences with them Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Durham and the last one in Exeter.
I must tell you something and listen to dedicate myself the Cambridge Conference.
Our host was Robin Bidwell, and the venue was at King's College, Cambridge, and Peter Avey was our supporter for that.
What happened that I was going to London and there was a rail strike at that time.
So I took the bus and a very nice woman sat next to me and as we left Oxford,
she got involved in a conversation with me and she asked me what I'm doing.
So I said, What are you doing? She said, I'm a belly dancer. She's appeared on BBC two days before.
And I said, Well, how do you go to London? She said, I ran a school in London for belly dancing.
So I said, Who are your customers? She said, Oh, lots of other rich out of young girls would love to dance.
No male, just only women. So I said, Oh, for coming to ten degrees.
She said, What are you doing? I said, Reverend, in your conference, for all the specialists, all Middle Eastern.
And we wondered whether you would like to come and give us some demonstration.
She said, I would be absolutely delighted to have you.
So I said, But I'm afraid that we don't have enough financial resources to pay.
Said, Don't take it like this. We've come in my car, I bring my costume and I bring my tape recorder with the tapes.
So I said, Certainly we put you up in King's College in a very nice suite for two nights.
We paid that and hospitality perfectly. So when I came back, I went straight to work today.
I said, Do I need your help? So he said, What is it?
I said, Two people have to be contacted. One is Sir Geoffrey Arthur, who was the master of Pembroke College.
He was the president of residence at that time.
And the second is to telephone Peter Avery, because it's the first time in the whole history of the place that you don't see.
You know, it's unheard of. I thought to have a belly dancer is too alive in the usual academic year.
Something to talk about. So, Derek, thinking of the rank of Geoffrey Arthur, Geoffrey was very enthusiastic.
Peter Avery said, Of course, of course. Put it in the library.
That's famous Library of King's College came the day of the conference.
Derek was a bit sort of we don't know what the reception would be.
So I said, do don't worry. She she is really very good dancer, apparently.
And that was it. And drawn to the library.
She went and she changed into costume.
Derek put the tapes and then music thing and then all of us and Peter Avery whilst there Geoffrey Arthur blossomed
and she came absolutely wonderful performing I think three pieces and just the rapture of reception to her.
She was so good, in fact, that day.
So perhaps we should have after the dinner some we had dinner and we had some incident.
We must have a video. We about that after dinner.
Peter eventually said she realised the whole history of the college.
You have change now. We have belly dancers.
What makes it so that that is really very important, you could say,
is a coup against the main traditional sessions of the heart to see that Turkey, Iran, Arabic, Egypt.
Sometimes we have that and of course Malcolm came after this and I have, you know, sort of feel and I do want to say something about that later.
Now, I came to know Syria as one of the people who advised me on Turkish speakers, and I'm very grateful to her.
Not only she's a colleague, but also she is a very knowledgeable.
Some of my colleagues said she's really a valued Turkish specialist.
And also I'd like to thank my colleagues about from Derek, but also Bill by and also Carl Hillenbrand in Edinburgh in the audience.
Is she a bit to see you kind of thing and Jennifer Scarce Jennifer shares Geoffrey with Syria, Bill Hale and John North and sadly he's not with us.
He passed away. I had a pretty interesting conference.
I just had the Cambridge conference, but the one in Durham, which I organised to say, what do we do after the Cambridge Belly dancing?
So I thought of two things. One is to exhibit some of Gertrude Bell photographs which University of Newcastle have has all the collection.
They were housed in the Department of Archaeology. So I went to see the head of the department.
He said. Of course we didn't provide all the exhibition material and choose whatever you like and put them,
and we do all the captions for all these photographs.
So we did that. And the second thing I thought, right, that is some Wellington Hall.
I don't know whether anybody has been to Wellington Hall in Northumberland is a Sardinian home and Wellington
Hall has a small the Museum of Middle Eastern objects collected by the Libyan fund from all over the Middle East.
So I went there and I said, We're having a conference and we went out.
We have one afternoon for the Middle East.
They said, First we do that for you. And also we would ask Mrs. Jenkins, she isn't from India and she plays the Northumbrian back,
but not the Scottish, but the small one, which she does, you know.
So people came from Durham by county, so we had to get photographs and we went to Wellington Hall and people enjoyed it enormously.
We drove to one of the cottages. She doesn't live in Wellington Hall, she lives in one of the cottages because the House of National Trust,
we went there and I said, Lovely clotted cream, lovely tea.
And suddenly Mrs. Jenkins got up and played, you know, somebody in our class.
So that's a game is something they said what perhaps we should really, if we do something like this in the future for any Christmas conference.
So it was a success and I'm very glad that this is an important contribution to future conferences of Christmas.
Now, another collaboration with DETI and that's very important is to go to access to credible and reliable.
And was a friend of and back to Iran. Danny and when he said that he came and saw me, he said,
how about having a joint conference between the Middle East centre, Maziar Frances here and X?
So I said, What about it? He said, There are specialists on Sudan index and they are willing to come to Oxford.
So I said, Well, let us go and see the Major Francis to see whether they could host it.
And they did. They agreed to that and they agreed to put the speakers.
There were three of them who came from. We had a number of British specialists on the Sudan and it was very successful.
The book was published and it is a landmark.
It's a collaboration between French and British Sudan specialists Out of the Blue Show and Christiane Del.
They asked. I said, well, perhaps we should have a reciprocal what Derek was there.
So I said, fine. I would go to X and explore.
So I went to X and Ana Lucia and he took me to a very nice monastery, which is of course Baraboo,
and I saw one of the others and he showed me the rooms and he said, Yes, welcome.
We will do whatever you ask us and we'll arrange it for you.
Unfortunately, Harvey Rousseau fell ill and had to retire, so the whole enterprise was put on hold until the present time.
One of the things Derek asked me to do is he was supposed to put to give a paper on the history of the United States from a political point of view.
But he couldn't. So he asked me whether I could read this on his behalf.
He briefed me on what kind of question they would ask and what kind of answer I have to ask.
So the conference went very well and he was very pleased.
Lastly, I want to say, and that is on the social side, after the retirement of Mustapha Badawi,
as well as the party and tradition was established that on Sundays we have lunch and participants have to bring a dish.
Our contribution was a roast chicken. So if you please have an excellent red wine produced by Derek and Mustapha.
But it was alternate one week and I think I see Robin also Robin also doing this on one of these needs that
was really very important occasions went on for Sandhya unfortunately ceased after the death of Mustafa.
So no more of this. Finally, I do miss really very clear.
There were not only academic colleagues, but they were valued friends.
I'm grateful for their help and cooperation over the years.
They'll be much missed by many, and they will always be remembered for their kindness and their dedication to the institution.
And. Jon Stewart. I missed them. I missed their warm greeting and smiles.
That's very important. May they invest in peace.
And thank you. But thank you so much.
I think we could all be forgiven for thinking as we travelled back in time
with you that they had more fun in the 1960s and seventies than they do today.
Maybe you really Centre has lost some of that early panache, that lead belly dancers and bagpipes, a standard feature of the entertainment.
So thank you for that. Of course we remember our colleagues,
but their legacy will be most enduringly engraved in the students that they worked with and supervised in the course of their research.
And if we add together the number of students, undergraduates, masters,
doctoral students who were taught and supervised and generally influenced by both Celia and Derek,
we're dealing with the scores into the hundreds of people in the course of their long career as a rich contribution to our community.
Now, we were going to get them all to come. Let's see a little work.
We figured that would take us deep into next week.
So we have just filtered down to our last two speakers who will share with you their reflections on what it was like to work with Derek.
It was clear. I would like to invite Demetrius Antoniou from Columbia University to come and speak about Caesar.
Thank you, Eugene, for organising these, and thank you to all of you for coming in.
A big thank you to the College for organising this meeting.
When I first came to the college in 2001, I met with Eugene Logan and I told Eugene that I had already started learning Arabic,
and Eugene suggested that I should learn Turkish and I should work with Felix.
And at that time, of course, I couldn't possibly imagine that we've worked so closely for more than ten years.
As those of you who know nuclear but understand, Syria was expecting excellence.
Syria was expecting hard work all the time.
And Celia was very tough and very fair at the same time.
And when I started learning Turkish, I was really, really struggling.
And of course, she knew. So she would call me in my room almost every day.
She would say, Hello, Dimitris, this is ridiculous. I'm just calling to check, see how you're getting along with your homework.
And I thought that it was a good idea at the time to lie and say, Oh, that's fine, I'm done.
This was really, Really. Yes. So it was.
Okay, So I'll send you some more. And you have this incredible way of testing half the turkeys grammar.
In a couple of sentences, you would ask me to provide the translation of three or four sentences, which is almost impossible to translate.
And I would wait for for my Turkish friends gawk at you to animate them and mathematically to comment and and save some.
Seven years later, I was about to submit my different theses and Celia was well, she did something that I don't think she had done ever before.
She cleared her program for four days and postponed her classes.
So for four days I would go to her office at 8 a.m. she would go, and we'll work together for 12 to 14 hours.
Celia And this was a thesis that Celia must have read at least 20 times.
And she would go through every single line and whenever she wasn't sure, she would read out loud the text to see if it flows.
If there's anything wrong with the text and this was it, But I guess we'll have to change that sentence.
And that went on for four days. And after that I said, I think it's quite good.
So after my five on the external examiner approached me,
he said something interesting is this is this is a great thesis, but there's something truly remarkable about the text.
I mean, the text itself is great, but there are no titles at all.
What do I mean? It has no title, not a single place.
And don't get me wrong, I mean, you would remember Celia as an incredible grandma and grandma and expert linguist and especially security studies.
But for me, I couldn't have called for a better supervisor to advise me on a thesis that combined Oriental studies, but also socio cultural topology.
Because Celia was the definition of the close reader, Celia would be asking me all the time,
How does this thing that you mention on page 16 connect to what you mentioned on page 268?
And then she would say, Why? Why is this important? Why should I know about this?
How does this connect to that?
And I would gradually became apparent to me that it is not enough to simply tell the story off of an island built mosque.
Not this. Even though I thought that it was very interesting at the time.
But I really have to think of the bigger picture.
And gradually, as we were working together in dialogue with if I was able to see all these instances of failed architectural projects,
of failed state initiatives, not those instances exactly of government failure,
but as very productive vantage points to consider the productivity of that which
remains unrealised and start thinking these and build mosques in very different ways,
in a more abstract manner, in a theoretical way. And this is something that I very much hope to see after I submitted the thesis.
Of course, like so many other scholars of my generation, I couldn't find a permanent job right then.
So. So I was just moving from one place to another.
Well, I keep on asking Celia to submit letters of recommendation, and whenever I wouldn't be offered a position,
Celia would send me the kindest of messages to make sure that I keep on track, since that was her incredible, incredible dedication to her students.
When. When I found out that Celia passed away, of course I was.
I was absolutely devastated because then I think you will relate to that.
What I'm going to say, because this was an instance where you feel that you can no longer derive any comfort from the knowledge that your mentor,
your your your advisor, your teacher, someone who has made you really a better person is there for you, you know, an email away or a phone call away.
But now that some time has passed,
I look back at all the time we spent together with Sylvia was with a big smile and immense gratitude because Sylvia not only made me a scholar,
but also because she truly made me a better person. And I owe this to see Weakest Link.
Her memory will live on. That's Americans at Oxford, but also in all these other places at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford.
And let's see where her students are now teaching turkeys, teaching Middle Eastern studies.
And I come. Thank you, Eugene. And I can't thank the college enough for organising this meeting.
It really means a lot to me to be here and share these reflections with all of you.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Demetrius, we thank you.
You went to such pains to ensure that you could be here for today.
And there were so many of serious student centric students who wrote to say how much they wished they were able to be here.
I think observation on who? Another student of seniors that I had the pleasure of working with as well,
who had very much hope to be able to schedule his summer travels to be able to join us.
But you did, and we're so grateful to have you here with us. And there are things I wish you hadn't said.
I think you're perhaps raising expectations among doctors today about what I think seniors understand that I would not personally wish to be held.
And I think the other thing we're going to draw from our expectations is making our students better people.
We just don't expect that. Thank you so much to because it was very touching to say and as you would have it, Gina,
I'd like to give you the last word to get the last word on Derek Hopwood, the last word on memory of pain and joy and how we go forward from here.
So Gina Roland, the student who came to study with Derek in 1985 with the positive injuries.
Thank you very much, Eugene, and thank you for asking me to make these comments today about Derek.
Just on the belly dancing thing, if I could start with that.
And the Middle East barbecue. Oh, yeah, Yeah. When I was here, there were a number of students who engaged in the belly dancing tradition.
And there was one particular girl from Egypt who is really, really good reason.
Reem inside. She was amazing. She was amazing.
Yeah. And so at the Middle Eastern barbecue, inevitably someone would put on the music room.
It started. And then I think I might have joined up a couple.
Don't remember. I remember You did. Did. Okay. So it has it has continued so good that you went.
Yeah, I did my dphil thesis here at St Anthony's a number of years ago.
When I think of Derek Hopwood, I think of him as someone who was the scholar that we've all acknowledged today, his that precise the mind.
He was like a chiropractor for the mind. You go in as a as a dphil student into his office, kind of feeling like you had a crick in your back.
And Derek, who can you stand up straight and walk out clarified and he had that he had that ability.
He was amazing. But for me, Derek was also a stroke of luck.
Having him as my supervisor was a stroke of luck.
He had all of this enmities, but there was a particular event at St Anthony's that allowed me to see a slightly different angle on Derek,
which has actually been mentioned by some people here today.
So you'll, you'll see where I'm going with this is this goes back to 1989 when the then warden of St Anthony's was Lord Darren Dorf and he
was turning 60 and he decided that he would hold the bash of the century at a college and invite all 800 of his closest friends,
all of whom seem to be very highly placed and very well-heeled.
So, you know, no pressure.
And a group of us at a group of students here decided that we would put on a cabaret to mark the event and a pigeon hole in our pigeonholes.
There came a note saying, If you want to be part of this, come to the buttery at such and such a time.
So Derek showed up. It was all the students and Derek and he participated and came to all the rehearsals.
He didn't just show up on the night. He was on keyboards and he pitched in.
He got the show on the road, He looked at the rehearsals, and then later that night on stage, he was completely in his element.
And then so we went through all the rehearsal process. And now I think that well, I'll just say on the on the night Derek showed up in his costume,
and I think a number of us here remember those velveteen jackets everybody wore in the
seventies and the time between the break up of the Beatles and Vivienne Westwood,
everyone was wearing these things. They were usually black. I wore mine so much.
Carol, you'll remember this, who wore mine so much, it developed its own personality.
So you just left one day. But in 1989, Derek still had his and it was bright purple.
He showed up on the night, bright purple, velveteen jacket and completely deadpan look, you know.
Yes. I'm a fellow at the college and I'm wearing a bright purple jacket, deal with it.
And so we did. And he he got up on stage and I remember seeing him on stage and he was smiling.
He was thoroughly enjoying himself. And I remember watching him and thinking, well, yeah, that's how you live.
That's how you come by the life of the mind with complexity, wanting to do other things, seeing those, those real life prisms.
And Derek knew how to navigate that. He had so many facets of himself.
I didn't see that facet until himself on stage in his bright purple jacket.
And he went from being Dr. Hoffmann to Derek after that, I think.
And then this became important to me because and here's the embarrassing part.
I got involved in drama while I was here at Oxford, but I did a number of plays and so I kind of went beyond that three year limit.
And Derek never went his finger at me. He should have, probably, but he never did.
He was interested. He wanted to know about what I was doing.
From that point on, whenever we had had a meeting about my thesis and we discussed the thesis things.
We closed the meeting and then he'd say, So what are you doing now?
Hmm? He wanted to know. And we talked about it, and.
But the really important thing to me was that he came to my place.
He didn't come to all of the them. I'd see him in the audience or he mentioned it afterwards.
And it's just he came to my place, and most of the other cast members were hiding from their tutors.
And I'd say, Oh, my, my supervisor was here last night. They'd say, What?
And I. I thanked him at the time, of course, but it wasn't until years later I realised how much that meant to me.
You talked about how he made a difference and what kind of person you were.
That's. That's. That's how it was for me. He. I don't know.
I don't know why that meant so much to me, but it did.
And it was something that took years for me actually, to process and.
I never. I never took the opportunity to tell him.
How much it meant to me. I really wish I had. But when when Eugene asked me to make these remarks, it was an immediate yes.
Because although I've never I never said this to Derek, I can say this to you now and put it out there.
He was that kind of person. He wasn't just I mean, what he had as an intellect and as a mind was important.
But he also had a kind of humanity, a kind of generosity.
And that made all the difference to me. And that's what made me different.
And. It had an effect, funnily enough, on my thesis because.
Because he accepted that part of me anyway. Way finger. He never told me to, you know, When are you going to finish this?
Everybody else was saying you never asked.
You just wanted to know about the place. And it had an effect on the way I wrote my thesis.
Because in the end, and I have such good memories of this place in the end,
I wrote the thesis that I wanted to write and that I believed in, not the thesis that somebody else wanted me to write.
And in a way, Derrick had everything to do with.
So. Thank you. There are conflicting.
I didn't think it was going to be a quickie, but there was a lot of ground to be covered, and I feel we covered it richly.
As a community, we weren't going to rest easily,
having lost Garrick at the height or just actually at the start of the lockdown during the COVID pandemic.
Having all clear at the dawn of 2023,
I'm sure we'd have the opportunity to bring everyone together when Times Healing had had just a little bit of time to help.
It seem less of a nerve to talk about our colleagues that we lost and to remember them with with joy and admiration and share some stories.
And part of that done for me by the people who have come to the podium and then for the rest to we continue that over a glass of wine together.
We don't have any surprises. There are no belly dancers.
There are no vampires. But bubble show for a drink and encourage you to stay on and have a little chat with this wonderful assembly of people.
We are the fellows in the centre, the fellows at the college.
So enormously grateful to all of you for just showing your love for Derek and Celia
by having made the effort and taking the time to come and be with us here today.
It is really your presence that has been the greatest tribute to Derek and Senior that we could have hoped for,
and to see this all filled with so many different friendly faces from over so many years has been really.
The moving aspect of remembering Derek and see you today.
It's the best thing about having a memorial and see who turns out to.
So my thanks to all of you who shared your memories with us tonight.
My thanks to all of you who have come to join us for tonight.
Let's have one last vocal positive. And that's good.