WINE, WORDS AND WISDOM

I went to St Catherine’s College Cambridge on Saturday to a Memorial Symposium in honour of friend who’d been a Professor of History. I wasn’t sure if “Sir Christopher Bayly and the Horizons of History” would be a bundle of laughs “Don’t hold your breath” warned a friend who knew about such things.
And yet I was blown away. These academics, all eighteen of them, started and finished on time….none of those laggardly, bad manners you so often see from lawyers, politicians and businessmen at such events. They engaged, entertained and inspired us.

I hadn’t realised just how eminent Chris had been. He had helped rewrite the way history is studied and how people think about the world as a whole with a rare ability to zoom in and out from long shot to close up, thrilling people with the new clarity this produced. He certainly thrilled Professor Jürgen Osterhammel who said of one of Chris’ many books: “it would have been a very good book even if all the facts had been wrong.”

Most of all Chris was obsessed by the music of words and the way that good writing could change people’s minds. Facts alone don’t do it. The narrative itself has to engage and thrill. He weighed words like a miser.

He wrote with precision and with sparing tautness.

He had exciting stories to tell, focusing as he did on India and then developing from that the way in which global events interlinked and resonated against each other.  Like a good CEO he was able to handle and dissect the detail and see the bigger picture too but unlike what his commercial counterparts so seldom do, was then able tell this story in a significant way.

He was evidently a great teacher. He could listen and prod so his pupils’ vision was expanded and changed.
Professor Richard Drayton put it nicely: “he’d listen hard and then tell us what he thought we were trying to say”

And he was not just an academic. His love of wine was legendary and charming. But it served a purpose. He used wine to lubricate and expand the minds, ideas and laughter of those around him. He shared ideas and developed ideas over a glass or two of claret. If we all did more of that we’d be better off and better humoured.

Wine and genius are seldom distant from one another. Handel it is said at one of his many dinner parties would from time to time rush out to ostensibly record a new musical idea but in fact to take a surreptitious swig of a fine Burgundy he’d stashed away.

Bayly and Handel. They’d have got on pretty well.

One of his younger PHD students, Rachel Leow described his special kind of astonishing cleverness when she said:

“He’d cover whole areas of history in just one sentence”

I realised then how much I’ll miss him. A clever man and a very nice one too.