George Huxley Death, Obituary – A tremendous sense of grief has been left in all of us as a result of the news that George Huxley has passed away. We worked together on a number of important projects at Trinity, and more recently, we awarded the Huxley Award, named after him, to the student who turned in the most impressive MPhil thesis. He was a wonderful friend to those studying Classics all around Ireland and beyond, and Trinity was fortunate to have many fruitful interactions with him. Mark Humphries, a graduate of the Classics department at TCD, paid an emotional homage to the professor this morning on his Facebook page, and with Mark’s permission, we would like to share it with you here:
An Irish coworker was the one who brought to my attention that George Huxley had passed away at the age of 90, and I would like to offer my most sincere sympathies to the Huxley family. During his time as a Greek professor in Belfast, which coincided with some very turbulent periods, he became active in a variety of different forms of social action. His most notable accomplishment was freeing playgrounds for use by the children of the city at a time when the self-righteous, self-satisfied, and unenlightened city fathers wanted to rid “the Sabbath” of all sort of joy. Additionally, he was a co-founder of the Hibernian Hellenists along with Gerry Watson (Maynooth), an organization that promoted cooperation beyond national borders and assisted in the development of the Irish language.
As a Hellenist, he examined Greek culture in the broadest possible sense, taking into account everything from the archaic period to the Byzantine era. His focus extended all the way from the beginning to the end of the Hellenistic period. At Trinity College Dublin, where I studied during the 1989–1990 school year, he served as my professor. By putting Archaic and Classical Greek history within a wider perspective that included the Near East, he was able to make his lectures more engaging to his students. In addition to that, each of the handouts was painstakingly handwritten by him. After that, while I was pursuing my Master of Letters, I had the distinct distinction of sitting in on lectures that he gave on Byzantium.
These lectures were really informative and insightful. It was an honor to have him as a fellow honorary employee at Maynooth throughout the time that I worked there (1998–2007). In spite of the fact that he might give the impression of being harsh and frightening, he also had a mischievous side to him (in addition to having a deep interest in railways!). Recently, he has taken a stance against the isolationist tendencies of the Brexit movement in favor of greater pan-European understanding, and at the age of 86, he became a citizen of Ireland. Both of these actions demonstrate his commitment to fostering greater pan-European understanding. I pray that he will finally be at peace and able to rest.