RECOLLECTIONS OF

THOMAS BRAUN  (1935-2008)

by David Harvey

Tom Braun died in hospital in September 2008 as a result of injuries caused by an appalling road accident.  Family and friends gave eloquent tributes at his funeral (his brother Christopher) and at his memorial service (John Lucas and Jasper Griffin).  I knew him quite well, but I could not claim to be one of his closest friends. Still, now that I have fallen into my anecdotage,[1] it seems worth adding my one and a half obols’ worth[2] of reminiscences to the talents’ worth provided by others.

I first met Tom when Peter Brunt invited four postgraduates – in alphabetical order, Glen Bowersock (now a Roman historian; and he translated the Old Oligarch for the Loeb Xenophon), Tom, Gerry Fowler (later an MP) and myself – to his flat to enjoy a bowl of cherries that he had bought in Oxford market.  That must have been in summer 1961.   Then a group of us made the first moves towards founding a society, called The Deipnosophists, for postgraduates working on classical topics, because we were very aware that such students were isolated and often not even aware of each others’ existence.  (Things are very different today).  We drafted a constitution, one clause of which debarred anyone who got a job outside Oxford from membership.   Tom and I were founding members, but by inserting that clause we excluded ourselves.   I believe the society flourished for a while, but quite soon became defunct.[3]

We both applied for a post in the Classics dept. at the University of Leicester, and Tom was quite rightly appointed.   Over morning coffee there Tom pointed out among other entertaining things that white coffee is in fact brown, white wine is yellow, and white people more or less pink.   After our interviews we visited the city museum, where Tom was so fascinated by the exhibits that despite my anxieties we missed the last train back to Oxford (‘Tom had a talent for missing trains’ [I quote Tomfoolery[4] p. xi]), but fortunately we managed to hitch a series of lifts.  Tom told me that the way to make motorists stop was to travel with a girl and a sack.  Put the girl in a sack, ask her to jump up and down, and motorists would stop in amazement.  Though sackless and ungirled, for the final stretch we were able to flag down a scientist travelling to Harwell, with whom Tom conversed intelligently and fluently about black holes and the like.   I was very impressed by his ability to do that, especially after a long and tiring day.

The next thing I remember about Tom is an evening when over coffee he told me a string of anecdotes about bishops.   He was an astonishing and marvellously entertaining raconteur.   Most of us know one story about a bishop; Tom knew at least a dozen, of which I now recall only those about the hotel and the school sermon.   I’ll save them for some other time and place.   A true (I hope) story that Tom told me years later was about his great-aunt’s (I am open to correction on that) search for lodgings in Vienna.  She was a concert pianist, and at one house an elderly lady said to her:  “I’m sorry, but my grandmother advised me never to let rooms to a musician, because she’d had dreadful trouble with one once… a Mr van Beethoven, it was.”   That’s not quite the angle from which Beethoven’s biographers tell the story; it does sound too good to be true, but if you reckon by generations, you do indeed get back to the 1820s.

After I was appointed to Exeter University (1962) and had become secretary of the South-West branch of the Classical Association (1963), I invited Tom down to give us a lecture.   He never did – though it was advertised — because he was in Delhi at the advertised time.  Mrs. Mortimer, the Bishop’s wife and at that time President of the branch[5], told me that he had sent us a telegram.   Headed FLAMINGO CLUB NEW DELHI, it read, after profuse apologies, SUGGEST YOU INVITE NICHOLAS RICHARDSON INSTEAD.  Until recently, I felt sure that Tom had followed that with the words STOUT FELLOW, a characteristic piece of word-play, since Dr. Richardson is pencil-slim — but I seem to have made that up.   I was equally sure that E.R. Dodds had regretfully refused a similar invitation to lecture at Exeter, writing ‘I am too old to undertake such engagements.   Try me again next year.’   But when I came across Prof. Dodds’ letter recently, I found that there was no such second sentence.

To return to Tom: he did come down to Exeter some time later, and he gave us not a lecture but a private performance at the piano of the Victorian song ‘The Galloping Major’, straddling the piano stool  as he did so.  Unfortunately the stool was less robust than Tom, and suffered from one weak leg thereafter.  My wife hastily patched that up with glue, and we lent it to the Exeter Bach Society for rehearsals in St Stephen’s Church.   Rather alarmingly, John Mingay, our pianist at the time, suddenly disappeared from view during one rehearsal: that wonky leg had given way.  Our chairman Ramon Yeo later repaired it with superior glue.   What St Stephen did with the stool I have yet to discover.

Jane Barraclough (now King), at that time a third-year student and President of the department’s Classical Society, was one of the few who heard Tom’s performance of ‘The Galloping Major’, and some years later Tom asked me what had happened to ‘that girl with the golden tresses’.   I told him she was married and had three children, two of them twins. He replied wistfully and rather improbably ‘If only I had married [cf. Tomfoolery xi].  I might have had a pair of fair-haired twins’.

Tom spoke about Greek and Roman bread at the conference on food in the ancient world that John Wilkins and I organized In London in 1992.  Some ten or fifteen minutes before he was due to speak, he was standing outside the Library in Gordon Square bewailing the fact that he had not completed his paper.   Then “there were these three Scotsmen”, he said, “called McTavish, McGregor and – oh dear I can’t remember the name of the third one.”  “I think you should be in the Library finishing your paper”, said my wife more than once and with increasing concern, as Tom cast about for the missing name.  Yet he appeared on the dot in the lecture room and delivered a polished performance.   If there really were any gaps in his paper, he must have extemporized without his audience being aware of it.   He began with some entertaining remarks about the responses of examination candidates to the question “Were the Greeks snobs?” (and how heartening to discover that many of the candidates didn’t know what the word meant).  The audience was delighted; but these paragraphs do not appear in the printed version of his paper[6], so I assume that they were part of the improvisation(s).

 We both attended the Herodotus conference in Nicosia in 2003 (I was invited to speak only because Tom had kindly suggested it to the organizers).   We were treated to an enormously generous[7] dinner by the Leventis family, and on the way there in a minibus I chatted a bit about their connection with Exeter.   Tom gave a brilliant after-dinner speech of thanks, into which, to my amazement, he effortlessly worked in all the information that I’d just given him.

A few years ago I went with Tom to an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Ashmolean Museum.  Tom discoursed learnedly on the content of some of them – I remember in particular his telling me about seventeenth-century methods of testing for pregnancy and (in some detail, now alas forgotten) about Dutch imports of carpets from the Near East.  He was not speaking very loudly, nor, to be honest, very quietly either; still, we were both surprised to find that a small group of visitors had gathered round him, under the impression that this was a special lecture laid on by the Museum.

Once Tom invited me to watch his television while he phoned his elderly mother.  (He used to have a lengthy conversation in German with her most evenings, I believe; cf. now Tomfoolery xiii).  I was watching ‘Doc Martin’, mainly because of its Cornish setting, when Tom came back into the room. ‘Who is that appallingly repulsive man?’ he asked. ‘He looks quite remarkably unpleasant.’  I explained that the actor was Martin Clunes, a cousin of our friend Jane’s husband.  ‘Oh well, if he’s a friend of yours, then I take it all back’, said Tom, quite sincerely I thought at the time, or did he — uncharacteristically — intend a tinge of sarcasm?

I once pointed out (by Email) that when you filled in forms, you were given very little space for your ‘title’; there is usually only room for Mr, Mrs, Ms or Dr, but none for the Queen or the Pope to write in ‘Her Majesty the’ or ‘His Holiness the’ (or should it be ‘My Majesty’ and ‘My Holiness’?).   Tom replied immediately:  ‘Congratulations’, he wrote, ‘on finding something else to grumble about!’.

The labels that I use to seal envelopes read ‘Warmest greetings from’ followed by my name and address.   Tom once asked me if I had a graded series of them, right down to ‘Tepid greetings from …’   I remember that now every time that I use them.

The Times obituary, reprinted in Tomfoolery (vii), mentions Tom’s astonishing linguistic skill.   At the time when we went to Cyprus it was possible to cross the Green Line at the checkpoint that separated the Greek and Turkish sectors of Nicosia (I believe it still is), and we did so several times.   We needed to pick up a chit on the Greek side to display when we entered the Turkish zone; I was very impressed that each time Tom chatted for a while to the Greek guards in fluent Greek, crossed over and immediately chatted to the Turkish guards in equally fluent Turkish, without any apparent change of gear.   He was sensitive too to any incorrect use of English, perhaps because he was not a quite a native English speaker (he started to learn the language at the age of three[8]). For example, he disliked the use of the possessive ‘their’ in the sense of ‘his or her’ rather than as a true plural, though Fowler is happy with it.   Thus he was always annoyed by the recorded telephone message ‘The caller did not leave their number’.  An English person might have guessed that he was not a ‘native’ from something in his intonation that I can’t quite pin down.  It went closely with his patient way of explaining things.

            But that takes us on to his courtesy and kindness, which others have written about more eloquently than I can.   In retrospect I am surprised that we got on as well as we did, since Tom was streets ahead of me[9] in knowledge (including knowledge of the byways of English and European history), intelligence and wit.   It is less surprising when I stop to think, and realise that it is true not only of myself, but of pretty well everyone he encountered.

This has been no more than a collection of reminiscences; I do not pretend that it is a properly rounded picture.   For example, I’ve said nothing about Tom’s scholarship, nor about his frequent and extensive travels.  Others, fortunately, have done, and I urge you to read what they have written.   I’ll end instead with something which is more or less in Tom’s spirit, though it lacks his skill and ingenuity (and the jokes):

They told me, Thomas Braun sir, they told me you were dead.

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remembered how sometimes you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

…..

Still are thy prose and verses, Tomfoolery, awake,

For Death he taketh all away, but them[10] he cannot take.

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