Professor George Huxley
Classics scholar and mathematician who became unwittingly embroiled in Bloody Sunday
PROFESSOR GEORGE HUXLEY, who has died aged 90, was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who subsequently held chairs of classics and mathematics at three Irish universities; for many years he played a prominent role in the affairs of both the British and American Schools in Athens.
His 21 years as Professor of Greek at Queen’s University, Belfast, coincided with the height of the political violence. Huxley, a devout Catholic, was acting chairman of the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association in January 1972 when NICRA organised the march in Londonderry known as Bloody Sunday, during which 14 unarmed civilian demonstrators were shot dead by a unit of the Parachute Regiment. His devotion to minority rights led to the Paisleyite jibe that Queen’s “thought they had caught a Huxley but had landed a Fenian”.
George Leonard Huxley was born in Leicester on September 23 1932; he was the son of Leonard (later Sir Leonard) Huxley, a physicist, and the historian Ella Copeland. The family were cousins of the writer Aldous Huxley and the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Andrew Huxley. George was sent aged eight as a boarder to Blundell’s School in Devon, and in 1949, at 16, he remained in England while his parents and sister emigrated to Australia, where his father had been appointed professor of physics at the University of Adelaide. Huxley saw his mother once in the following 18 years.
After school, Huxley’s two years of National Service were passed as a
2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. In 1951 a scholarship to Magdalen College seemed to launch him on a brilliant Oxford career. He had inherited his father’s outstanding ability in mathematics, although he graduated in 1955 with a congratulatory first in Greats. At Magdalen he had broken with family tradition by converting to Roman Catholicism, to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life.
One of his first All Souls lectures was on “Christopher Wren’s Geometry”, and he then published, in short order, four books on ancient Greek history and poetry. Huxley had a warm and impulsive nature, but with a pugnacious streak that regularly led him into controversies. It came as a shock, none the less, when his Prize Fellowship came to an end in 1961 and All Souls failed to offer him a permanent research appointment.
By then he was assistant director of the British School in Athens and in 1956 had joined excavations at Knossos in Crete. In 1962 he also became director of the Gennadius Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and this led to an archaeological collaboration with Professor Nicolas Coldstream on the island of Kythera.
Their excavation uncovered a settlement bordering a natural harbour that dated back to 2500BC. These discoveries confirmed previous theories about the true extent of the Minoan empire in the Bronze Age, specifically its links to Sparta and the Greek mainland.
Huxley’s devotion to the island and people of Kythera lasted for the rest of his life and was shared with his wife, the archaeologist Davina Best. They had met “in a tomb at Knossos” when she was a student, and he had proposed to her when they were caught in a violent storm while sailing in a small boat between Hydra and Lerna.
In 1963, in his second year at Queen’s, he founded the Hibernian Hellenists, a cross-border lecture series open to classicists in all the Irish universities, with guest speakers from all over the world. One of his first lectures was on the history of Babylonian astronomy, reflecting his continuing interest in mathematical theory. As part of his new life Huxley learnt to write and speak Irish while cultivating his exceptional gift for friendship.
The first seven years of Huxley’s time in Belfast were relatively peaceful. But he soon started to play a prominent role in the civil rights movement. Finding that the children’s swings in Belfast playgrounds were padlocked on the Sabbath, he set out one Sunday with his small daughter armed with a hacksaw to cut the chains. The police were alerted, and father and daughter arrested and taken for questioning. No charges were brought but the incident was widely publicised, and the Sunday locks were subsequently removed.
Huxley was arrested on another occasion after confronting a Paisleyite preacher who had been heckling his lectures and punching him on the steps of the student union. On this occasion he was convicted and fined. The Rev Ian Paisley improbably denounced “Hacksaw Huxley” as “the cause of all the troubles in Ireland”.
Huxley joined the executive of NICRA early in 1971, and on a committee that had been infiltrated by the IRA, and included at least one communist, he played a moderating role that kept NICRA focussed on peaceful protest.
Following Bloody Sunday, Huxley gave evidence to the Widgery and Saville inquiries in which he emphasised that NICRA had organised a legal demonstration. “Nobody,” he wrote, “could have been expected to foresee that UK troops would fire aimed shots at unarmed persons who, whether they liked it or not, were subjects of the Crown.”
But he privately questioned his own unintentional role in the tragedy and remained disturbed by the outcome for the rest of his life. As the level of violence grew throughout the province Huxley received death threats, and two of his colleagues on the NICRA executive were murdered.
In 1981 Huxley was among those who argued, unsuccessfully, for the exclusion of Anthony Blunt from the British Academy after Blunt was exposed as a long-standing Soviet agent. In the same year he accepted an offer of early retirement from Queen’s and moved to Oxfordshire.
But having taken up appointments as adjunct professor of both classics and mathematics at the National University of Ireland and as honorary professor of classics at Trinity College, he frequently travelled to Dublin to lecture. In 1996 he was among the founders of the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies in Athens, and he endowed it with a large part of his vast personal library.
His sharp pen remained busy in Irish affairs. In 1998 he launched an energetic campaign opposing the decision by Queen’s University to close its Greek, Latin and Classics departments, having described its new vice-chancellor in The Irish Times as a man whose “personal qualities would seem to be better suited to the careerist commercialism of a business school than to the civilities of university life”.
George Huxley remained an active member of the Royal Irish Academy to the end of his life. He became an honorary Irish citizen in 2018, fulfilling a long-standing desire that “had been greatly increased by the follies of Brexit”.
George Huxley’s wife died in 2020. He is survived by their three daughters.