Family
Peter Venables
Brother-in-law, and Emeritus Professor, University of York
I first got to know Eric some 70 years ago as the elder brother of the girl (Ness) who was to become my wife. As an only child I was delighted to able to spend part of Christmas celebrations with the Hawkins family. Part of the tradition was to sing carols and songs around the piano in the evening, the songs usually drawn from the Scottish Students Songbook. Eric, of course, was unusually musically gifted and was hardly able to understand that other mere mortals were not so endowed. He used to say, while sitting at the piano you sing this line and you sing that and you sing the other, little realising that there was no way that we could connect the note on the stave with the sound that we were supposed to produce. So that the result was Eric's beautiful tenor accompanied by various rumblings lower down. He was always asked at the end of these doubtful performances to sing "Tom Bowling" which he did with great emotion bringing tears to our eyes. Whenever I heard the song later as a cello solo at the Last Night of the Proms it had the same effect and recalled Eric. And of course the talented but envy-inducing man could play the cello, the clarinet and the piano... I ask you, is life fair?
Eric was a keen outdoors man and, we have to admit it, Ellen was not so enthused. On one occasion when we and our sons were due to camp together Eric made a special tent with a square opening into which he could back his estate car. This was so that Ellen could sleep in comfort in the back of the car. Unfortunately he made the tent out of rather thin canvas. We had torrential rain on the first night and I distinctly remember his tent filling with a green mist as the rain came through. That was the end of Ellen's camping, but not of Eric's enthusiasm of the outdoors, he was a great walker and climber.
Most importantly I remember Eric with very grateful thanks for a deed that enabled me to follow the career that has occupied most of my life. Being younger than Eric I had not gone to University before the war. When I emerged from the Navy I wanted to go to UCL to study Psychology. At that time Psychology was an Arts degree and one had to take four subjects in the first, intermediate year, two of which had to be languages. So it was Psychology, Economic History, Latin and French. No problem with the first three. (I loved Latin, a beautiful structural language that fitted my ideas well and was suitably dead.) But, French. I had not studied or talked French since pre sixth form school and the lectures at UCL were in French! I failed and was chucked out with the possibility of a resit in November. (Added to which I had just got married to Ness.) So I worked to try and pull myself up for the resit. About a month before this examination was due Eric came down to London on a Friday night and spent Saturday and Sunday teaching me French as it ought to be done, with Ness feeding us while we worked. When we took him back to Euston to catch his train I said to Ness, "there is no problem, I feel confident, Eric has given me a different perspective". And I passed and went on to be a psychologist. Thank you Eric, I have said it before, but Thank you, you were an inspired teacher.
Later, when we were both at York we saw more of each other, Eric at times somewhat bemoaning that although Eric James has set up the Language Teaching Centre that departments were not so keen to make use of its facilities. To get him going I used to say to him "never mind Eric, English is the language that everyone speaks so...!" And off we went he knowing that I was pulling his leg.
In his final years we used meet regularly at a pub halfway between us to chew the fat over the state of the World, the Universities, about Science versus the Arts and with he quite often having read the latest paper from the psychological literature, for instance on the representation of language in the cortex, which I had not seen but was supposed to be able to comment on as a Professor of Psychology, Heigh Ho. Would you like another glass of beer Eric? Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.