It will no doubt seem odd of me to write a memorial of a person who died in 2012, triggered by an obituary of his widow, who died less than two weeks ago. Nonetheless I am moved to do so. Joan’s sister-in-law Margaret Newman in England sent her an email saying that she had just seen in the Guardian the obituary of Ann Clwyd (1937-2023). Margaret knew that we were friends of Ann’s. I was able to find the obituary immediately, and though I thought I had known a good deal about Ann, I learned about several dimensions of her distinguished career that came as news to me. She was for many years the Member of Parliament for Cynon Valley in South Wales, with many native Welsh speakers (like herself) among her constituents. She became prominent during the Blair administration, and a figure in the national news, at the time of the controversy over the Iraq War. The warm obituary in the Guardian includes the following sentence: “In 1963 she married Owen Roberts, a TV director and producer…” This is the sentence that has generated my blog post. Owen Roberts (1939-2012) was a friend of very long standing, beginning during my Oxford years, one of the closest I have ever had. It is true that he was “a TV director and producer,” a datum merely incidental to his being a world-class Mensch.
Many of my life decisions seem have been made rather casually. As a Rhodes Scholar-elect I had to make up a wish-list of my three top choices of Oxford colleges. We had all received a copy of the Oxford University Handbook to help us. I knew nothing of the individual colleges, but Jesus had a least a name with which I was familiar, and its battels charges (food contract) was a few shillings cheaper than the rest. From the Handbook I learned that Jesus was the only Oxford college founded by Elizabeth the First, and that it was especially partial to students from Wales. What I knew about Wales was a rather pedestrian lunch dish, hardly distinguishable from a toasted cheese sandwich, which my aunt called “Welsh Rabbit” and my mother “Welsh Rarebit”. I was soon enough to learn a good deal more. The were many Welsh undergraduates in Jesus, including a sizeable number of Welsh-speakers. The joke was that if you walked into the front quad of the college and loudly shouted out the name “Jones”, every third window would be opened.
Among the first classmates I met was a very appealing, soft-spoken, good-looking guy named Owen Roberts. He was a Welsh-speaker from Llan-something on Angelsey, the large island off the coast of North Wales. He had come to Oxford to read (major in) history, concerning which he already seemed to me to know a prodigious amount. We were destined to become intimate friends. He found my Americanness as curious and exotic as I found his Welshness, the study of which he greatly advanced by inviting me to spend the major part of one of our first six-week vacations in his home. I left the Roberts household knowing a good deal more about Wales, and the ambiguous attitudes of many Welsh folk concerning England and the English, than I would have thought likely. If you have seen the BBC video series “The Crown”, you are likely to remember the episode in which the current King Charles is, as a youth, invested in his full splendor as the Prince of Wales. It is thought prudent by the London powers-that-be that in preparation for this solemn event, it would be a good thing, from the political point of view, if the young prince could learn enough Welsh to deliver a brief speech in that tongue. So he is sent off to live in Wales under the supervision of a distinguished Welsh linguist, who not surprisingly turns out also to be a Welsh nationalist. Poor Prince Charles has a great deal to learn, only part of it linguistic. Owen’s father was in fact a Welsh scholar, among other things. So I was a bit in that same situation, except for the fact that I was greeted only with warm-hearted friendship entirely without any political edge and without the requirement of learning a word of Welsh—though I couldn’t help learning a smattering. The Robertses also fixed me up with my first British girlfriend, a lovely lass named Gabriella, home on vacation from her first year at the University of London. But the distance between Oxford and London, though not very great, proved too great for the relationship to continue. And by that time I probably had already met, or at least crossed paths with, my life-partner. Somewhat later Owen lectured me about this woman, Joan, with a tinge of exasperation in his voice. He told me that it was obvious that I was in love with her, that I might just be lucky enough to get her, but that I had better get on with it. The rest is history.
Youthful friendships are intense and indelible, especially those of one’s college years, filled as they are with a strange amalgam of serious intellectual industry and madcap irresponsibility. Owen left Oxford with his cohort, swept up in the whirl of young professional life. He was destined for distinction as a journalist. He was for a time the head of Welsh broadcasting for the BBC, but he really more enjoyed working for one of the independent commercial networks. I was aware of his marriage to Ann Clwyd, though I would not meet her for many years. Owen had all the virtues of friendship, save one. He was not good at writing letters. Before the age of easy international telephonic communication, that was a serious impediment to staying in touch. And then, far too soon, Owen was struck by the dread disease that he battled for most of his adult life—multiple sclerosis. It killed him only in his early seventies, but it slowed him down considerably for decades before that. I kept up with him irregularly, when I was in Britain; and he made one trip to New York, just to say he had been there. He was already walking with a stick. I couldn’t get him down to Princeton. But Joan and I did have a lovely stay with him in Cardiff toward the end of his life. It was on that same trip, I think, that Ann treated us to a drink in the House of Commons. I don’t get that kind of treatment around here! Eventually the disease did overwhelm him, and he died, apparently rather miserably, in the University hospital in Cardiff. Ann Clwyd, who was outraged by his treatment there, and who was vocal in expressing the view that he “died like a battery hen,” raised the episode in Parliamentary debates about the National Health Service, of which she became a ferocious Socialist critic.
The bitter
taste of that final episode naturally depressed me when I heard about it. But in retrospect it does nothing to cloud my
admiration for a splendid man or dull the luster of one of the great
friendships of my youth. I was perhaps
remiss in not writing about it at the time.
But I am now glad to be able to do so in reflective tranquility. So here’s to my friend Owen Dryhurst Roberts
(1939-2012). Requiescat in pace.
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