A toast to Tim Beardson

I am in an Eliot mood, not a Keatsian one. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is a surprisingly… mellow poem. There must have been a brief ceasefire between poor Keats and the advancing forces of premature mortality. But I have just heard of the appallingly premature death — by today’s standards — of a fascinating fellow. So it is more a matter of ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn… I had not thought death had undone so many’.

At 69, Tim Beardson died of the ultimate effect of a tick bite, which compounds the sadness. At the beginning of the 1970s, he read history at the House. Although it was one of the few Tory redoubts in either university, the influence of Tariq Ali, Paul Foot and Christopher Hitchens cast a long shadow even there. Academe was also vulnerable because many dons’ intellectual honesty had undermined their self-confidence. They felt guilty because they had read hardly any Marx, and were obviously neglecting an important intellectual movement. So they did not feel able to contradict the young lefties, most of whom had read even less Marx, though that did not impair their confidence.

But Tim was never one to shy away from intellectual combat. While at Oxford, he evolved into a High Tory and High Churchman, ready to contest every left-wing claim to a monopoly over economic and social policy.

Tim had no respect for any conventional wisdom and was drawn to originality. In his first term, this had an amusing manifestation. Wanting to give himself plenty of time for argument, alcohol and other undergraduate dissipations, he economised on work. This was achieved by drawing heavily on Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, which had always been ignored by most professional historians. So Tim would wrest the nearest piece of Toynbee to the subject of the week’s essay, secure in the knowledge that this glorious plagiarism would go undetected.