The Queen's College Record 2023

Obituaries
both gentle but inevitable, rewarding as well as necessary. Under his leadership
the College, which had become known for a certain amount of insularity and
idiosyncrasy, became a vastly more enterprising and friendly institution. On a local
level this was achieved through Alan and Susan’s generous hospitality, offered
unhesitatingly to academics, staff, and students here, and to colleagues in other
colleges and the University, and to many visitors from elsewhere. At such social
events Alan would talk and listen to people from all walks of life and flatter them
with his attention and interest in their passions and their problems. The breadth of
his knowledge and interests was quite something to behold; he was intense and
thoughtful even at his most relaxed and gregarious. Conversation with him was very
rewarding and never idle.
On a wider stage Alan’s opening-up of the College was accomplished through the
creation of an office devoted to alumni (or Old Members, as we call them) and fundraising,
over which he took direct control. The fund-raising in particular cost him a
lot of energy and caused him a good deal of stress. He used to say to me that for
all the socialists the College had far too much money and for all the capitalists it
had not nearly enough, and both groups were therefore unwilling to contribute to it.
He described these excuses as “feeble” and could write memorably brilliant letters
urging people to put their hands in their pockets, and memorably terse ones when
they didn’t. In doing so he laid the foundations for an enterprise which became very
successful and the College’s relations with its Old Members were utterly transformed.
Alan of course knew that this was a long game, and he used to say to me, with a
mischievous smile, “some lucky Provost will take all the credit for this in the future”.
But everyone knows, or should know, that it all stems from what he did, virtually
single-handed at times.
Being the head of an Oxford college is a strange job. You are responsible for almost
nothing and yet blamed for almost everything, and you have to lead a large and
unwieldy group of exceptionally difficult people. Alan was not a revolutionary but he
was certainly a reformer, and reforming a college is like trying to push water up a
mountain with a sieve. He once strode into my office and announced, in frustration,
“There is no point whatsoever in being the head of a college”. But he also once
said “I’ve never let anything in my life beat me, and I’m certainly not letting Queen’s
College”. And he dealt with the thankless exasperations and frustrations of the role
with great humour and delicacy. He would approach each challenge as a problem to
be solved rationally, sometimes with a smattering of economic analysis, sometimes
not. A lovely example of this analytical thinking is his comparison of evening dinner at
the High Table with Central Park in New York. Take your friends, said Alan, otherwise
you will get mugged.
A list of his achievements would be long. I can mention only a couple of them.
A particularly powerful one was the attention he gave to the academic endeavour and
achievements of the College. He was instrumental in setting up an interdisciplinary
98 The Queen’s College | College Record 2023