Manchester Grammar School Research Articles

Incunabula at the Manchester Grammar School

The article describes copies of three early-printed books at the Manchester Grammar School, which have not previously been noted in the bibliographies. These are the Missale Romanum (Venice, 1494), De Re Militari (Rome, 1494), and Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (Cologne, 1501). Two of the books have Hungarian connections, as is shown by inscriptions in them. They appear to have been at the grammar school since the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but their detailed provenance remains obscure.

Tribute: Gerald Burton Green

Gerald Burton Green was born in London on 16 January 1935. He moved with his parents and younger sister Valerie to Sale, Cheshire, as a small child. After attending Manchester Grammar School, he received his Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from the Victoria University of Manchester. He then performed his national service in the Royal […]

Lloyd Meynell Norburn

Lloyd Meynell Norburn gained a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School; a single child to his wonderful headmaster father and mother. He injured his arm in a mountaineering fall and was deemed unfit for national service, and so completed his …

John Edgar Dalby

John Edgar Dalby attended Manchester Grammar School and studied medicine at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps for two years after the war. Later, he...

Charles Denis Boak (1932–2015)

Denis Boak, Professor of French at University of Western Australia from 1975 to 1995, died peacefully in the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth, on 5 July 2015 after a quiet but lengthy struggle with failing health. He was in his eighty-third year, and is survived by Estelle to whom he had been married for forty-nine years. Those who knew Denis will remember him as a scholar of exceptional erudition and intellectual range. He was, for many, a living illustration of the virtues of constant reading, and we are the poorer for having lost the scholar with his learning, and the man with his insights, his curiosity, and his irreverent wit.Born in 1932 in Hazel Grove, near Manchester, England, Denis attended Manchester Grammar School on a scholarship from 1943 to 1950. After a year of national service with the Royal Artillery he went on to Clare College, Cambridge. Graduating in Modern and Medieval Languages in 1954, he proceeded to a year's study as a French Government scholar at the Sorbonne before returning to Cambridge to embark on a PhD. completed thesis was later to become his first major book, Roger Martin du Gard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). From Cambridge, Denis went on in 1961 to his first full-time academic post as Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Hong Kong.It was in Hong Kong that the formidable range of Denis's reading began to take centre-stage in his teaching and research. In addition to courses in French and German language and literature, he taught a comparative course in European literature covering Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Kafka, Mann, Dostoevsky, Proust and others. Never one to accept confinement within the constraints of a single field, Denis would subsequently give free rein to his comparative interests. Alongside his studies of major twentieth-century French authors, he would go on to write on French-Canadian literature, on Realism in the nineteenth century and beyond, and he would develop an unparalleled knowledge of the literature of war and deportation in its broader European context. And he was as happy to write on Han Suyin, T.E. Lawrence, and Don Charlwood, as on Maupassant, Malraux, or Sartre. His last published paper, The Mimetic Imperative: War, Fiction, Realism, in Romance Studies, 30: 3-4 (2013), 217-28, was an immensely erudite piece that combined a number of these separate areas of interest in a fascinating overview that, in Denis's inimitable style, pulled no punches.Denis returned to the UK from Hong Kong when he was appointed Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Hull, starting in 1966. That same year, he and Estelle married (they had met in Hong Kong some five years earlier). Through Estelle, who worked in the University Library, Denis became friends with Philip Larkin, whose unsentimental view of life was one that he instinctively understood. During his time in Hull, Denis wrote and published his second book, Andre Malraux (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). However, in 1969 he was invited to take up his first Chair of French. He and Estelle moved to the University of Calgary, remaining there until 1975. During the six years of his North American career, Denis completed his third book, Jules Romains (Boston: Twayne, 1974).In 1975 Denis was offered the Chair of French at University of Western Australia as successor to James Lawler. He held this post until 1995 when he became a Professorial Research Fellow until his retirement in 2000. During his twenty years in the Chair, he served thirteen as Head of Department. He also served with distinction as Editor of Essays in French Literature (as it was then called) from 1975 through to 2000. This was a crucial period during which the journal developed its international profile, while its range of contributions - particularly through the inclusion of increasing numbers of articles on francophone literatures outside France - reflected changing notions of what constituted the discipline of French studies. …

In Memoriam: Dr Graham Jackson, 1947-2016.

In Memoriam: Dr Graham Jackson, 1947-2016.

Aaron Isaac Goodman

Aaron Isaac Goodman (“Ronnie”) was the eldest son of workers in the Manchester garment trade. Despite spending two years in a fresh air home for “unhealthy” city children he won...

John Fixsen (1934 to 2014).

John Fixsen, who died unexpectedly on 14th August 2014, was one of the foremost Paediatric Orthopaedic Surgeons of his generation. After Manchester Grammar School he was due to go to Magdalene College, Cambridge, but beforehand undertook National Service in the Royal Navy, where he learned Russian

Sidney S Rose

Sidney Rose was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School, where he distinguished himself. He went on to study medicine at the University of Manchester and would often...

OBITUARY

OBITUARY

In Memoriam, George Milner, 1918–2012

In Memoriam, George Milner, 1918–2012 Paul Geraghty Professor Emeritus George Milner, well known to Oceanic linguists as the author of Fijian grammar and Samoan dictionary, as well as numerous articles, passed away peacefully at his home in South Petherton, Somerset, England, on July 7, 2012, at the age of 93.1 He was born George Bertram Milner on September 9, 1918, and received his early education in Lausanne, Switzerland, before moving to Manchester Grammar School in England. Bilingual in English and French, he would later publish a number of scholarly articles in French. In 1937 he was awarded a scholarship to Christ’s College Cambridge to study Modern Languages, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1940, whereupon he joined the Army Intelligence Corps and served with the Eighth Army in the Western Desert and Italy. Like many who served in the war, he preferred not to talk about it. After the war, he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, having been awarded a scholarship to study Fijian, culminating in a Master of Arts degree in 1947, after which he became lecturer in linguistics at SOAS. His research in Fijian, and subsequent fieldwork, was commissioned and supported by the colonial government, feeling perhaps that the most recent grammar (Churchward 1940), though a good reference grammar, was not suitable as a primer (Milner 1971a:405, Schütz 1972:76). During this time, he first came into contact with Josua Bogidrau, a native of Tubou, Lakeba, Lau, who had previously worked with Arthur Capell on his compilation of a new Fijian dictionary, and was now seconded to SOAS for sixteen months in 1946 and 1947. Bogidrau was, incidentally, the grandson of Melaia Lutu, who had been one of Arthur Hocart’s principal informants for his classic study of Lauan culture, The Lau Islands (Hocart 1929). After acquiring the rudiments of Fijian from Bogidrau, Milner prepared to go to Fiji to carry out fieldwork, under the guidance of G. K. Roth, a senior colonial administrator who had done anthropological fieldwork in Fiji (Roth 1953Roth 1973), and who was considered at the time the authority on Fijian culture. Roth arranged for Ratu Sukuna, then Secretary of Fijian Affairs and also an authority on language and culture, later to become Fiji’s leading statesman of the mid-twentieth century, to write for George a sketch of the dialects of Fiji, to guide him in his fieldwork (Scarr n.d.:425). Milner and Ratu Sukuna were to become firm friends, and Sukuna assiduously read the manuscript grammar and [End Page 265] recommended hundreds of amendments during a visit to London in 1953. The historian and bibliographer Philip Snow (1998:62) commented that Milner would have made an excellent biographer of Sukuna, “combining scholarship and personal knowledge of a high order.” Fieldwork lasted 14 months during 1948 to 1949, most of the time being spent in the village of Vatani in Kaba, to the south of the island of Bau, considered then to be the basis of Standard Fijian, though some time was spent in Ba and Nadroga in Western Fiji (Milner 1952, 1971a:412). Ever the keen observer, Milner was taking copious notes as he watched the villagers of Kaba build the house he and his wife and their new-born baby Michael would stay in, and these resulted in a unique study of the language of house-building in Fiji (Milner 1953a), which remains the only one on this topic. When I carried out fieldwork in Kaba in the 1980s, some people still remembered George fondly, and referred to him as Tamai Maikeli (‘Michael’s father’), following the naming custom of that part of Fiji. From 1949 to 1950 he also visited Tonga and the Solomon Islands to conduct linguistic and anthropological fieldwork. The resulting publication, Fijian grammar (Milner 1956), was acclaimed as “perhaps the first complete grammar of a Melanesian or Polynesian language to be written by a professional linguist” (Biggs and Nayacakalou 1958:80), and “the most important work on Fijian” (Schütz 1972:75); for other reviews, all positive, see Buse (1958), Capell (1959), Carr (1958), and Robins (1958). At the...

Alan W Johnston

Alan W Johnston was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School. He studied at Christ’s College Cambridge and University College Hospital, London. He was involved in establishing …

J V Forbes Catto

The son of a local general practitioner, J V Forbes Catto grew up in Manchester before qualifying in medicine at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and UCH, London. Together with Manchester Grammar...

Robin Francis McNab Jones

Robin McNab Jones moved to Manchester as a child and was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Dulwich College. He graduated from Barts in 1945 and served in the Royal...

David Howard Casson

David Howard Casson (“Dave”) was born in Didsbury in Manchester, son of a general practitioner. He attended Manchester Grammar School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, before postgraduate studies at St...

Michael Alan Casson

Educated at Manchester Grammar School, where his sprinting earned him the name “twinkle toes,” and Manchester University, where he was selected for a BSc in physiology, Mike spent time in...

Alan Hamer Jarrett 1925–2007

Professor Alan Hamer Jarrett, former Director of the Boyden Observatory in Bloemfontein, died on 28 January 2007. He was born on 2 February 1925 in Manchester, United Kingdom, where he attended Manchester Grammar School until 1943. He obtained a BSc at Leeds University in 1946, an MSc at Manchester University in 1949 (under P.M.S. Blackett) and a PhD at St Andrews University in 1952 (under Erwin Findlay-Freundlich).

Peter Viggo Egebjerg Jensen

Peter Viggo Egebjerg Jensen was born in Manchester to Danish parents. His Danish heritage was of immense importance to him. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School. He proudly used...

Brian Brendan Hickey

Brian Brendan Hickey was educated at Manchester Grammar School, University College, Oxford, and The London Hospital, qualifying in 1933. He was part of the neurosurgical team at the London, …

The Glory of Motion: De Quincey, Travel, and Romanticism

ABSTRACT Thomas De Quincey's essay, 'The English Mail-Coach', is a unique and richly-textured meditation on the means and meanings of travel in the early nineteenth century. The opposition it sets up between pre-industrial and industrial forms of transport is inherently unstable, and its lament for the golden age of coach travel is complicated by the fact that De Quincey's mail-coach itself symbolizes the social and historical forces that brought about its demise. Exemplary of Romantic resistance to industrial culture, the essay's progressive withdrawal into purely intrapsychic self-transportation also offers a limit case of the Romantic internalization of the travel genre. ********** Thomas De Quincey may seem an unusual choice of subject for a collection of essays on nineteenth-century travel writing. Unlike his father, Thomas Quincey, who published a Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England in 1774, and unlike many of his equally or more famous Romantic contemporaries, he never produced a single work recognizably in the genre of travel, exploration, or topographical literature. Still more worryingly, perhaps, his actual travels, in the course of a long life (1785-1859), were extremely modest: with the exception of two trips to Ireland in 1800 and 1857, and a possible excursion to Boulogne in 1824, (1) he never set foot outside Britain. Other members of his family spread their wings impressively: his brother Richard, for example, ran away from school and went to sea, was captured by pirates off the coast of Peru, and eventually disappeared on a hunting expedition in Haiti; while his son Horace, who joined the army, died on active service in China. (2) As for other writers, compared with, say, William Wordsworth's Continental walking tour of 1790, the peregrinations of the Shelley circle in the Alps, or Mary Wollstonecraft's astonishing expedition to Scandinavia, De Quincey hardly seems an outstanding representative of an age of rapidly expanding recreational and aesthetic travel, in which travel writing was, according to one anonymous contemporary reviewer, next in popularity to novels. (3) Yet De Quincey does have undeniable claims to attention in any survey of the literature of travel in this period. This is not on the basis of the account of his first visit to Ireland contained in his autobiographical 'Sketches' of 1834, interesting though this is. Nor is the fascinating description of his wanderings on foot through North Wales in 1802 (having absconded from Manchester Grammar School), and his subsequent opiated night-walks through the streets of London, in his famous Confessions of 1821, the main plank of his case for inclusion. (4) It is rather his late essay, 'The English Mail-Coach', which stands out as a unique, richly textured, and deeply ambiguous meditation on the means and meanings of travel in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is the focus of the present essay. One of the best-known and most admired of his mature pieces, 'The English Mail-Coach' was first published as two separate papers in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in October and December 1849, and later amalgamated. I shall consider both the literal and metaphorical planes of expression in the essay before assessing its significance in relation to popular concepts of Romantic travel. Perhaps inevitably, literary criticism of De Quincey's essay tends to be drawn to the last of its four sections, the 'Dream-Fugue', as the section most accommodated to the psychological, rhetorical, and aesthetic perspectives generally of interest to scholars of English literature. It is historians who are more likely to address the earlier, more literal or factual sections, 'The Glory of Motion' and 'Going Down with Victory', usually within an investigation of developing technologies of transport and communication in the early industrial age. These sections, which introduce the mail-coach from a variety of autobiographical, narrative, and historical standpoints, are, however, fundamental to a consideration of De Quincey's peculiar intervention in the discourse of travel. …