My mother’s only surviving and much younger brother was an occasional part of my and my sister’s childhood. He was a childless widower, his wife having died early on in their marriage. He used to visit us in Devon, riding to Tavistock from Sutton in Surrey on his BSA Bantam. On the day of his arrival, the pressing question always was: would Uncle Dicky cross the moor from Moretonhampstead, or take the longer, less exposed route via Okehampton? If his visit was in the summer, then he’d cross the moor and arrive looking like a tightly-wrapped, red-faced, camouflaged parcel. He was not a tall man. I think I’d reached the top of his head by the age of 14 or so. However, the energy contained within his small frame was boundless. He’d cram any number of rounds of golf and hands of bridge into the short time he was with us, before jumping on the Bantam and disappearing over the hill bound for his Sutton home.
What did I know about him? In childhood, not a great deal. His house had a brass cover to its front step which I used to polish when we went to stay with him. He had a housekeeper called Mrs Jones. Sometimes he had to ring her half way along a road out of London to ask her where he was going. (An absent-minded professor type for most of his life, he veered into dementia in his mid-90s). He took us to The Wizard of Oz and we went backstage because he knew the Tin Man. Or was it The Lion? Whoever it was, it was a supremely exciting meeting. Uncle Dicky masterminded London for us country bumpkins. He had a friend who was a writer with a mulberry tree in a Chelsea garden. In boat race season my sister and I were conflicted because Uncle Dicky had been at Oxford and our father at Cambridge. Our loyalty was mainly for Cambridge but we could equally well celebrate if Oxford won.
I knew he taught economics and economic history which was not, for me, exciting in any way at all. But my elder sister Jane appreciated Uncle Dicky and went to live with him so that she could study at the London School of Economics. I remember taking in the information that Uncle Dicky was something called a socialist which disturbed our grandparents. His sister, my mother, didn’t seem to think it mattered very much, but she was unhappy about his address: a socially undistinguished number 110 in a very long road of indistinguishable suburban houses. In the 30s, she said by way of explanation, many undergraduates were so left-wing they became communists. I could have learnt more about his views had I been up for it. In timid compromise between upbringing and inclination, I voted Liberal when I was old enough to vote. The schoolfriend who I shared a flat with was working for the Liberal Party and asked me to think of a slogan to print and place in the back windows of cars. Go with the Liberals! I suggested. Goodness knows what Uncle Dicky thought of my job as an advertising copywriter. Too capitalist for words. But he never indicated a shred of disapproval of his flighty younger niece.
Today he’s back with me, freshening up my memories, despite dying many years ago. This is because I’ve got down from the loft a huge great volume of ancient newsprint which I acquired from his second wife. It is a collection of the daily editions of The Times for a whole year: 1793. It measures 14 inches wide by 20 inches in height by three and a half inches deep. Within scuffed cardboard covers its layers of crinkle-edged pages look like the strata of mouse-coloured sedimentary rock. They smell mousy, too; yet they are amazingly unnibbled. I, and my predecessior owners, wrapped the volume securely. I will be able to extract nuggets of information about life in 1793, as reported in the Times, my unrealised intention for the last 10 or more years. This year my ideas have at last crystallised into the framework of a novel, which I’m calling HARRIET, NOW AND THEN. ‘Now’ is nowadays. ‘Then’ is the reign of George III, 1760 – 1815. Uncle Dicky’s volume, which he probably inherited from our mutual Mellersh family in Godalming, is coming into its own as background material – just so long as I can see the print clearly enough through a magnifying glass. My eyes could similarly date from the 18th century, judging by the difficulty I have in deciphering complete words due to macular degeneration.
However, the reason I’m writing this post does not lie in the volume itself. It comes from a cutting tucked between the first two pages. It’s from a 20th century newspaper and headed Men & Matters. Under the title Economy class, the writer (by-line “Observer“) describes Uncle Dicky on the occasion of his retirement after 30 years as secretary of The Economics Association. It starts: “The spread of economic literacy in Britain owes a great deal to Dickie Phillips.“
It continues: ….”An Oxford boxing blue and former teacher, he joined the Association in 1951 when the ‘dismal science’ was allowed in few British schools. The Association itself had only 100 members – mainly teachers interested in stimulating economics education.
“We had a lot of opposition at the start from some of the universities,” says Phillips. “They thought economics was too difficult to be taught in schools and were afraid that bad teaching might spoil the ground for them.“
...”Under his cheerfully eccentric but efficient administration the Association has exerted a growing influence in the educational world.”
Cheerful, eccentric, efficient – what a great combination. I think there may be many economists today who owe a lot to my uncle Dicky. I send salutes to him from today’s more understanding distance. I have no idea what he thought of my novels, but I can guess: he wouldn’t have bothered to read them. Fiction for him was a waste of time. The books on his shelves were all non-fiction, so he might have approved of the way I presented the family letters exchanged during World War Two. And I’m sure he would have been glad that the massive, mouse-grey volume of the Times of 1793 is about to be used as a vessel for research, even if it is in aid of fiction.
