James Morwood
Wide-ranging classicist who taught Benedict Cumberbatch
JAMES MORWOOD, who has died aged 73 while swimming in northern Greece, was a classicist at Wadham College, Oxford. His publications ranged widely across Greek, Latin, English Literature and the ancient world.
James Henry Weldon Morwood was born in Belfast on November 25 1943. His parents met in New York in 1939, and sailed to Britain after war was declared. His father, James, a doctor, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and they moved around the country until 1943, when Field Marshal Montgomery took over the division and banned wives. James’s mother Kathleen, then pregnant with James, went to Belfast to stay with the Morwood family, taking his older brother Bryan with her. After the end of the war the family moved to Oxshott in Surrey.
James won a scholarship to St John’s, Leatherhead, followed by an exhibition to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1962. He read Classics for Part I, supervised by Ted Kenney, then English for Part II, with Anne Barton.
After taking a Dip Ed at Merton College, Oxford, Morwood found his “dream job”, teaching Classics and English at Harrow. He served as school librarian, and regularly put on plays, in which capacity he inspired a stream of students, including Richard Curtis and Benedict Cumberbatch, whom he cast as Eliza Doolittle: “It didn’t work – he acted everyone else off the stage.”
As head of Classics at Harrow from 1979, Morwood became a key figure in the teaching of the subject nationally. He was a vital part of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, and taught at their annual Greek summer school virtually every year from 1970, often acting as director. This was central to “the Cause”, his expression for the promotion of classical study as widely as possible.
In 1996 Morwood was appointed to the Grocyn Lecturership, the position in the Oxford Classics Faculty that organises the teaching of Greek and Latin. The post was associated with Wadham, and Morwood was a great success, both at the college and in the Faculty. With Andrew Hobson and a team of others he provided seven years of students with a fine foundation in the ancient languages.
Though he retired in 2003, he continued as a fellow of Wadham for another three years, serving as Dean and Steward of Common Room. Convivial and wise, he was stern with those who treated others badly, but willing to be indulgent with those who had made a mistake.
Typical is the story of the normally well-behaved student who got summoned to the Dean for stealing lunch from the refectory: he was totally distraught, paid the money to the college and apologised profusely. None the less, he was terrified about getting sent down. When he disappeared into Morwood’s office, his friends waited nervously nearby. Two hours later, the student emerged grinning, having discussed, not his canteen crime, but Portuguese literature and a year spent in Brazil, all over a few glasses of sherry.
In retirement Morwood was a model Emeritus Fellow, never interfering but keen to help out – editing the college Gazette, teaching, or buying Twiglets for a party. He continued to produce a stream of publications and the list of books he wrote or edited includes primers, readers, grammars and dictionaries for both Greek and Latin; translations of Euripides; commentaries on Euripides, Propertius and Virgil; guides to Greek tragedy and Virgil; a biography of Hadrian; and studies of the comic dramatist Sheridan.
Retirement allowed him to travel widely, regularly to Europe for opera, art and good dinners, often to the US, once to Australia – a visit that encouraged some of the school students he taught to apply to Oxford and Cambridge.
Though Morwood never married, he was as generous and inspiring to his brother’s family as he was to his friends.
James Morwood, born November 25 1943, died September 10 2017