Professor Anthony Holden

Published on Tuesday 19 May 2009 19:50

University teacher and scholar

Born: 8 March, 1925, in Sidcup, Kent.

Died: 9 April, 2009, in Edinburgh, aged 84.

THE death of Tony Holden deprives Scotland and the broad international community of scholars of one of their most distinguished specialists of Anglo-Norman language and literature.

Born in Kent, Holden moved around during his childhood and youth, as his father, a congregational minister, was called to appointments in Leeds and Torquay.

Though Holden was later to reject the religion of the manse, his upbringing imprinted upon his character traits which his colleagues and friends found enduringly precious, particularly his deep sense of fairness and social justice (traits which help explain his lifelong friendship with the Labour MPs Alan Thompson and John MacIntosh).

Called up for war service in 1943, Holden joined the Royal Navy, serving aboard the carrier HMS Victorious as she alternated between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. He saw very active service, first off the Nicobar Islands (October 1944), then Sumatra (January 1945), and finally Okinawa (May 1945), where Victorious and the other vessels of the task-force attracted the attention of kamikaze pilots.

Once demobbed, he enrolled in King's College, London for a degree in French. It was here, studying the university calendar, that he discovered language students were allowed to spend an intercalary year abroad.

Having, of course, been hindered by the war from making the acquaintance of the French at a young age, he set off to to discover the continent as soon as he could. Aiming to find the most authentic French atmosphere possible, he chose the University of Lyon over the more picturesque and definitely upmarket faculties of Montpellier or Grenoble.

Though Lyon was at that time a grey city in the firm grip of severe austerity – barely resembling the brilliant metropolis we know today – it was here that Holden began his lifelong interest in and commitment to French language and culture of all centuries. It was here also, sitting in those often cold classrooms at the feet of those luminaries Ddyan, Flutre, Moreau and Saulnier, that the future scholar and academic, impressed beyond words by their brilliance, decided their calling would be his own.

Graduating in 1949, he embarked immediately on postgraduate research into Wace's Roman de Rou, but typically impatient to "get back over the other side" (as he termed it), he and his new wife, Gaby Bryson, whom he married in 1950, went as English assistants to schools in Reims, a base Holden used for regular weekly visits to the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris.

After two years there, and a further year as lecteur d'anglais at the University of Besanon, he gained a scholarship which enabled him to spend a year in Paris at the cole des Hautes tudes, the cole Nationale des Chartes and the Sorbonne. It was here that he started up a lifelong friendship with Jacques Monfrin, who later became director of the cole Nationale des Chartes, and editor of the distinguished journal Romania, for which Holden was to write many articles and reviews.

Finishing his doctoral thesis, the young scholar, now with a superb grounding in medieval literature and philology, and a distinguished master of the French language (along with his marvellous sense of fun, one of his trademarks), was appointed in 1955 as a Forbes lecturer in romance philology in the University of Edinburgh, in a department which was already the home to those formidable medievalists John Orr, Duncan MacMillan and Dominica Legge. Professor Orr's confidence in appointing him was not misplaced: Holden's monumental edition of the Roman de Rou was to be published, after 15 years of devoted, inspired scholarship, in its three successive volumes (1970-73).

From 1970 onwards, its first volume achieved immediate international recognition, while its overall importance was handsomely recognised on the publication of volume 3, which received the Prix La Grange, awarded by the Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

It was that work which also prompted the University of Edinburgh to award its own marks of approval: volume 1 was immediately to justify Tony's promotion to a senior lectureship in 1971, whereas the complete edition, and the unanimous welcome the international community of scholars accorded it, were accepted as more than sufficient grounds for his promotion to a readership in 1977.

By now Holden was clearly one of the country's outstanding medievalists. For some time already he had been used to marks of well-deserved recognition and praise at home and abroad. Few, if any, of those marks could, however, have given him greater satisfaction than his appointment in 1971 to a visiting professorship in the University of Clermont-Ferrand, whose French department at that time was arguably the most distinguished outside the Sorbonne.

That in itself was remarkable. But the appointment could never be deemed parochial or complacent, for it could be sanctioned only by a ministerial commission sitting in Paris, which, moreover, had many more candidates to assess than chairs to offer. His two stints (1972, 1973) in the capital of the Auvergne were to be the beginning of a warm, reciprocal understanding that came to an end only on 9 April this year.

It was in large measure the willingness of the French academic world at the highest level to treat him as an equal (a difficult feat even today for anyone who consistently publishes on French literature in French, and one which was immeasurably more difficult 35 years ago) which caused Edinburgh to wonder whether a more fitting indication of its own approval might not be a personal chair. When it came, in 1982, the decision was not a matter for agonising or protracted debate: his edition of Ipomedon, published in 1979, had likewise been greeted on the international scene as a formidable piece of scholarship, and it had shortly afterwards been powerfully complemented by another outstanding contribution in the form of Richars li biaus (1982).

Holden's remaining years in the university were to see fresh and vigorous departures in the field of scholarship (editions of Le Roman de Waldef in 1984, and of Guillaume d'Angleterre in 1988), not to forget his important editorial responsibilities on an international scale.

But whereas these should have been years of unalloyed serenity, they were consistently marred for him – as a demanding scholar and teacher, and as a dedicated defender of humane values – by two developments which he deplored, and all the more bitterly since he had no effective control over them. The cuts and the ensuing contraction, but above the inexorable imposition from outwith of values and priorities which he judged foreign and inopportune, were all met with his vocally unsympathetic response. What worried him just as much was the nationwide retreat from the exacting philological tradition which was now accelerating apace to the advantage of subjects and subject-matter (and pedagogical methods) which he considered to have more style than substance, less intellectual challenge than market appeal.

These were, however, in no way purely visceral responses, but the carefully defended opinions of a highly experienced, committed teacher and scholar whose intellectual standards in all domains – and he mastered many of them – were of the most exacting order.

Retirement in 1990 was not, therefore, the traumatic experience it can be for some. His position as a professor emeritus allowed him to gauge the type and quality of the links he wished to maintain. Unsurprisingly, he chose to privilege the French department's students (among whom he was ever popular) and those colleagues with whom he had forged strong bonds of friendship and affection (usually based on the degree of their commitment to fostering, like him, a solid dfense et illustration of French language and culture, ancient and modern).

Given his own devotion to teaching, he was easily persuaded to return to the tutorial rooms in George Square (1990-2005), where he was entrusted with high-level language classes. But retirement gave him, in parallel, a real opportunity to develop his already extensive knowledge of modern French literature and to concentrate on his scholarly editions: his three volumes of Protheslaus, a sequel to the earlier Ipomedon, was published by the Anglo-Norman Text Society in 1991-93, and the Histoire de Guillaume le Marchal appeared in two volumes in 2002.

His last work (2005), an edition of the life of the colourful 12th-century Eustache le Moine, first a monk, then a pirate, mercenary and warlord, was not just a work of impeccable scholarship but also a monument to friendship: the edition had been started by Holden's lifelong friend Jacques Monfrin during his final illness and left unfinished at his death in 1998. Holden completed it.

Retirement – which immediately saw his appointment to the rank of Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Acadmiques by the French government, a signal mark of approval – meant also the increased possibility of "getting back over the other side", particularly to Clermont-Ferrand, where the Holdens' daughter, Vicky, was married and raising a family.

These years of intense personal and professional satisfaction were, however, marred in 1997 by the tragic death of their son, Mark, a brilliant young bioscientist of considerable promise whose work in the universities of Edinburgh and Leeds had begun to lay the foundations for the second international reputation in the family. Their sadness was, however, offset by the comfort and support of their many friends.

Holden is survived by his widow, Gaby, by his daughter and his son-in-law Mouldi, and his two grandsons, Sofien and Alexandre with whom we all share a sense of grievous loss.