John Riddy
Bibliophile who built up a notable library of Indian history
JOHN RIDDY, who has died aged 83, was an eccentric of Falstaffian proportions who worked as a university administrator but made his mark as a bibliophile, building a notable private library on the 18th and 19th century history of India.
At one time his British India collection, based on a large section of the old Bombay Club’s library, most of which was sold off or given away in the 1960s (after the club was closed down because it did not accept Indians as members), was the largest of its kind in private hands. Riddy scoured second-hand bookshops wherever he happened to be in order to enhance his collection.
John Charles Philip Riddy was born on June 21 1934 in Kempston, Bedfordshire. His father was a teacher of modern languages.
Riddy was educated at St Paul’s School where his classmates included Jonathan Miller, Kenneth Baker, Oliver Sachs and Eric Korn. He won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, to read istory, but before going up, learnt Russian during his National Service in the RAF, which was mostly spent on flying patrols over the North Sea monitoring and translating transmissions from Russian spy trawlers.
Riddy was taught at Hertford College by the historians Felix Markham and John Armstrong, who reckoned him to be the cleverest and most quixotic of their students. It was Markham who inspired him with an interest in India and, immediately after graduating, he worked for three years as a factor in Bombay.
In 1961 he returned to Oxford University and became an assistant registrar. In 1965, with his new wife, Felicity Maidment, a scholar of medieval literature, he went to the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria as an assistant secretary.
As one of the few remaining Europeans on the campus at the time of the 1966 Ibo massacres, he was forced to watch the atrocity, and was largely responsible for cleaning up the university grounds. After that traumatic experience the Riddys came back to Britain to take up positions at the new University of Stirling.
While acting as vacation lettings controller, Riddy also taught courses on Commonwealth literature.
He retired early and his wife concentrated on her career which took them to the University of York, where she became professor of medieval English literature and deputy vice-chancellor from 2002 to 2007.
They moved to the village of Wilberfoss, where Riddy devoted much of his time to book-collecting. From time to time he decided that his library was growing too large and would give a substantial part to the Borthwick Institute at York, but after each donation the collection was quickly replenished.
Riddy was a witty, expansive, erudite and generous man. He could be an outrageously Rabelaisian host, sometimes leaving the dinner table to lie down on the floor for a 20-minute snooze.
He had a taste for Havana cigars and kept a filing cabinet of rare malt whiskies in his garage. He had no time to debate whether a glass was half full or half empty; for him the glass always had to be full. Guests had only to take a sip or two for their glass to be immediately replenished to the brim.
In his later years Riddy took to collecting 18th century prints of country houses and satirical cartoons. Occasionally he would tire of a picture and take it to a “lady in Pocklington” who ran a curiosity shop. When, on occasion, he attempted to buy them back again, she would patiently remind him that he had sold them to her.
Riddy never published a book on British India but gave lectures and wrote articles which illuminated various aspects of Indian history, including the 1857 Mutiny and its aftermath.
He is survived by his wife and by his son and two daughters.
John Riddy, born June 21 1934, died April 29 2017