Eulogy for John Fletcher on 4th June 1992.

Ben Haneman.

I stand before you uneasily. But I can hear John saying to me "My dear fellow, you can do it easily" and dear friends, speaking well of John Fletcher, is so very very easy.

Like everyone here, I hate the horrible necessity to be here at all. John suffered cruelly. But his suffering has now ended. We, who mourn and grieve, all of us who loved him, will ask "why?". So there will be this terrible interrogation as each of us searches his or her beliefs and religious convictions or even our agnostic uncertainties. Of Course I have no answer, but yet!

One of the most beautiful prayers I know is said by mourners amongst my people. It has no mention of death but rather a majestic affirmation of life and of an unshaken trust in God. I know my catholic friends will not be at all offended after all, we have exactly the same God, if I say four words in Hebrew -Yiskadal vyisKadash shmai rabbo- which is the beqinning of a line that says of God, "Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world which he hath created according to his will".

It was also Gods will to create in John Fletcher a wonderful man big in frame, big in heart, big in mind, rich in friendship abounding in understanding and scholarship.

My acquaintance with John was through books. Friends, let no one tell you that bibliophily is a a selfish solitary pursuit because we all know it to be untrue. The man or woman who loves books also loves people, loves the world in which we live, loves knowledge and has a tremendous capacity for understanding different people from diverse walks of life. He or she more than anyone else loves his or her fellow human being.

John served God through his goodness to family and friends and students, naturally we would class them as friends, and his kindness even to strangers too, indeed. We all know his infinite patience, his dogged persistence, his great generosity of time and thought, his selflessness, these and other characterietics are of a person who loved his fellow man.

I recall the evident pleasure with which he explained to me the origin of a word's meaning in German or English. I loved the way he spoke German. (that remark of mine might be clearer, if you knew my name, after all "Ich heisse Haneman!") We shared the same respect, even reverence, for books, the deep interest in their provenance, in their contents and of course we both enjoyed the excitement of the hunt for books. So often, if we had not seen one another for a while, he would ask a warm and clearly sincere question about any new acquisitions to my collection. He was forever friendly and thoughtful. One of the nicest things about him was that never, ever did he in any way let me feel the tremendous difference in our respective status ss scholars, yet you all must know that compared to John, I am an enormous ignoramus. I recall as do you all, the beautiful preparation that he put into any talk he was to give, the painstaking research that went into his bibliographic work and best of all the wonderful way he chaired meetings of the various societies which seem to blur into one another but had John as the sustaining, life giving, guiding and driving force. Actually, I think I met John through Friends of Fisher.

May I stop after saying two more little things. Many of us would have loved to see John as president of the David Scott Mitchell club and I hope, still, that he will be commemorated in its structure.

The very last thing I want to tell you about is that there was a dream, John and I shared, that had he been spared, we would have gone together on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the north of Spain. Can you imagine such gloriously incongruous Christian pilgrims? But in truth, he had made his pilgrIMAGES already to Wolfenbuettel where he worshipped God through his commitment to learning, to culture, to every man and to this great world that God created according to his own will. I have far too much respect for John to wish to attribute to him, religious beliefs he may not have had. But I know that his work was his prayer and his love for all of us. There is a Spanish teaching "Serve God and love your fellow man" He did both.

Fellow mourners- be quite certain, it will be many years, before we see his equal, and we may not, in our own lifetimes ever see his equal. But each of us while we live, will carry in our hearts and minds magnificent memories of him and we will be spiritually and intellectually richer and happier for having known and loved John Fletcher.

Ben Haneman

Eulogy for John Fletcher on 4th June 1992

Brian Taylor

John Edward Fletcher was a wartime baby born to his soldier father and millworker mother in the industrial city of Bradford in Yorkshire .on 18th January, 1940. He was and remained their only child. I think he once told me his mother was of Irish origin, while his father was of long Yorkshire pedigree and was born in Ripon which, John reminded me with pride a number of times, is Britain's oldest city.

John attended Thornton Grammar School, where he ended up Dux of the school, its captain and captain of its Rugby team. It was already here that the most important characteristics of the John Fletcher we all got to know later were laid down, above all his impressive scholarship and his immense sportsman's fitness. To me John often seemed to walk like a rugby player making his way down the field with the ball usually in the shape of a manila folder of notes tucked in his hand ready to be thrown into a line out.

From Thornton Grammar School John went on scholarship to Queen Mary College at the University of London where he did his BA under some famous German scholars, such as the mediaevalist Leonard Forster and A. T. Hatton, a fact of which he was always very proud.

Then came his Diploma in Education at the University of Durham, which meant that later John became one of those relatively few university lecturers who have been trained as teachers.

After doing his Dip.Ed. John returned to Queen Mary and did his Master of Arts under a Dr Rock, who had abandoned Nazi Germany before the war. John's thesis was on the 17th century German Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher, who was one of the universal geniuses of the Baroque period with a command of umpteen languages, an enquirer into every known branch of science and scholarship of his day -Egyptian hieroglyphics, music, astronomy, etc.and the producer of huge volumes on these subjects. John's thesis must have modelled itself on Kircher's volumes because it ended up a huge tome itself of over 900 pages. These day here at Sydney he would have got a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, but then at London he received only an MA, which seems in retrospect to have been rather unjust.

John had met Elizabeth before completing his MA: in 1966 and had decided to come to Australia to marry her. He got a position that year as a Senior teaching Fellow at Monash University, and two years later, in 1968, he was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of German at Sydney University as its first specialist in the German literature of the Baroque period.

John continued his research into Athanasius Kircher all his life and became one of the world's foremost authorities on this Jesuit scholar. But already at Monash he had become interested in researching connections .between Germany and Australia. In fact. my first acquaintance with John came through an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald where he was appealing for anyone who possessed pre-1800 German manuscripts to let him know about them. I happened to have a German letter from the 1700s and wrote to him about it, not yet knowing that he was soon to come to Sydney as my colleague.

After John and Elizabeth and baby Rachael, whom we all know as George these days, moved to Sydney they lived briefly in Newtown, where Tom was born., and then in Five Dock, who my family and I already lived. I got to know John and his interests pretty well on the top deck of the many double Decker buses that took us to the University and home again over the years. But eventual1y John got sick of being to far from the University and his beloved Fisher Library and moved himself and his family to their present house in Toxteth Road, Glebe.

John made all sorts of impacts in his new environment. including a visual one. He never forgot his working class origins and reminded others of those too by always wearing a navy singlet and shorts around the house and the suburb. On the first day in Toxteth Road the family cat got out and ran off with John in hot pursuit and full cry. When one elderly lady looked horrified at this figure in singlet and shorts bounding through her front garden, John tried to calm her by calling out: "It's alright. I'm Dr Fletcher."

On his way to University and walking around the campus itself in short sleeved shirt, shorts with long socks on the coldest winter day as well as the hottest summer day, John was and will remain an unforgettable and unforgotten figure, "like a ship moving along in full sail." as the Professor of Australian History at our University, Brian Fletcher -no relation to John- described him recently.

At the university itself John made more than just a visual impact. As a teacher he was considered outstanding by his students, and one of his former students said to me resently that to have a class with John Fletcher was an overwhelming experience. John could often be seen walking up and down outside the room he was about to teach in "psyching himself up") as one colleague put it, for the , performance he was about to give. He was always well prepared and really threw himself into his teaching, so that if he left the door open he could be heard for quite some distance. That's why so many people can claim with authority what an impressive teacher he was. He taught, indeed he did everything, "with panache", to use one of his own favourite words.

As a scholar, John was prolific, both in the breadth of fields he covered and the amount he published. He covered everything from German Baroque, and Romantic literature via the history of science to bibliography and German-Australian connections- I have so far counted 17 books and bibliographies that he wrote or edited and 24 book chapters and articles he wrote, and I still have not found everything.

Surprisingly, considering this output. John never to my knowledge laid a finger on a typewriter key in his whole life. He wrote everything out by hand in a script that reduced every letter to its absolute minimum form. The wad of near Cyrillic pages was then passed to his typist Wilma Sharp, who in turn rendered them publishable. I've. been reading some of his stuff lately and I am astonished not to have seen a single misprint in two whole books that J have been through. John was what the Germans call an "acerbic" scholar. One who is well-organised and is intent on absolute accuracy.

John wasn't one for writing about modern topics like post- structuralism, or even structuralism. His heroes, I know, were not only famous scholars like Father Kircher or Sydney University's brilliant but tragic Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and poet Christopher Brennan, but also the little German schoolteachers of the 19th century who, working away in their local library with its old books and manuscripts, investigated their contents, published them and generally made a whole host of material available for other scholars, including those of the 2Oth century, to work on that would otherwise hare remained hidden away and unknown.

That's the sort of thing John liked doing, and he dug away in Australian libraries and in overseas libraries. famous ones such as the Vatican Library, the British Museum Library -or British Library as it's now called, and in obscure local libraries. But above all in the wonderful Duke Augustus Library in the lovely old north German town of Wolfenbuettel. John spent periods of leave there often, sometimes with his family, occasionally on his own. He had become an institution there and is still vividly remembered.

We can only guess at the bitter disappointment that John experienced when he finally learnt of the seriousness of his illness. For a time back in January it looked as though h he might have beaten the disease or at least could look forward to a longish period of remission from it, he had begun to publish a series of books based on the diaries of Germans in 19th century Australia. The one on Hermann Lau had appeared and he was a ready working on another chap named Muller. Also, he and Elizabeth had planned a year in his beloved Wolfenbuettel. But all these hopes have come to nought.

With John's passing Glebe has lost one of its real identities and the University has lost one of its most vital, energetic and best loved teachers and one of its most prolific researchers Iand publishers. In these respects the Department of Germanic Studies will never be able to fully replace him, as his Professor said this week. But it is his family that has lost the most.

However. John was never one to be maudlin, and he would have liked to think we ended on the note that he was a great bloke to know and to work with. And he had a fantastic sense of humour . When he'd recovered from his own first bout of treatment and came to visit me at home in January after I'd had a bit of elective surgery he found I wasn't there because a minor complication had kept me in hospital. My wife rang me up that evening and said: "You're lucky you weren't at home. John was his old self again and you would have burst all your stitches laughing with him."

Brian Taylor.

Given at the Faculty of Arts meeting, September 14th, 1992.

Tribute to the late John Fletcher, Senior Lecturer In the Department of Germanic Studies

Brian Taylor.

To those of us who knew John Fletcher It would have been hard to conceive at the beginning of First Semester last year that this big, healthy looking man so full of energy and vitality whom Professor Brian Fletcher -no relation -has described as "moving, like a ship in full sail" across the campus, would nave been stricken by serious Illness by the end of that semester, and it would have been totally unthinkable that he would be taken from us by cancer on 1st of June this year.

John Edward Fletcher was a wartime baby born of working class parents in the Industrial city of Bradford in Yorkshire on 18th January, 1940. There he attended Thornton Grammar School of which in his final year he became dux and school Captain.

John went on as a scholarship holder to read for his BA degree at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he studied under such famous scholars of German as the Mediaevalist A.T. Hatto and the Renaissance and Baroque specialist Leonard Forster, Later Taylorean Professor of German at Oxford and a lifelong friend of John's.

On graduating he moved on to the University of Durham to do his Diploma of Education And then back to "Quean Mary" on a postgraduate scholarship intending to do his PhD under a Dr Bock on the 17th century German polymath and polyglot Father Athanasius Kircher S.J. His first task was to come to grip with Kircher's vast body of writings on most branches of learning of his age, for example: mathematics, astronomy, music, oriental languages -including Egyptian hieroglyphics, which Kircher was certain he had deciphered, but of course hadn't -and so on. The second task he and Dr Bock set him was to edit the immense correspondence from and to Kircher. Both tasks were daunting. since virtually all of Kircher's writings were not in German, the language John had been trained in through at his secondary school life, but in the much more difficult Latin language, which John had only begun learning in the last couple of years of his schooling.

Despite the difficulties, John attacked his subject with gusto and succeeded by 1966 in producing an extremely erudite thesis of over 900 pages somewhere around the size of many of Kircher's own publications. Unfortunately for his academic intentions, John moved that same year to Australia to marry a young Australian woman he had met on her travels, Elizabeth Walker. As a result the planned edition of the huge Kircher correspondence was not done by the time he left and he was not vouchsafed the title of Doctor erroneously ascribed to him the agenda for today's meeting, but only the degree of Master of Arts. I personally regard that as a miscarriage of academic justice, particularly when I think of some of the not especially inspired theses of not very much more than a hundred pages that earn their writers PhDs at this University these days. I believe the case of John Fletcher points up the danger in the academic life of giving too much credence to the value of testamurs without regard to what their holders have really achieved.

On arriving in Australia John took up the position of Senior Teaching fellow in the Department of German at Monash University. Almost immediately he began to indulge his lifelong passion for books and bibliography.

In 1968 he took up the first full lectureship in German Baroque Literature in the Department or German at our University and was promoted to Senior Lecturer a few years later. Throughout his time here he continued his research on Kircher, on whom he was rocognised as a world authority. His study leave was spent often, in the British Museum Library , but more often In the Duke Augustus Library in the charming little north German town of Wolfenbuettel with its magnificent collection of 16th and 17th century books. Much of his research here was funded by the award to John of the highly prestigious post-doctoral Alexander von Humboldt scholarship. He was also invited to organise the Library's International conference on Kircher and to edit the resulting book. So the academic authorities in Germany well knew the worth of this Master of Arts.

Back In Australia John Fletcher worked particularly hard on books that threw light on all sorts of Australian-German contacts, especially of the 19th century. Amongst other things this led him to take part in the setting up of the Christopher Brennan Society, a literary society devoted to researching and publishing on the life and times of that brilliant but tragic figure in this University's history who had studied in Berlin around 1890, was famed as a poet in his own rights and who, as Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, lectured on several ancient, mediaeval and modern languages and literatures untill he was sacked by the Senate for adultery and/or drunkenness in 1925. Brennan's breadth of scholarship like Kircher's did, I am sure, influence John in seeking greater breadth rather than excessive specialisation in his own scholarship.

Over the last few years he had begun publishing studies of Germans in 19th century Australia and published one also on the Tasmanian Frederick Sefton Delmer who was a university teacher in Germany at the turn of the century. In the more, purely Australian field he, as one project, doggedly collected all the poetry publications other than anthologies that had appeared in New South Wales between 1950 and 1980 and he published a comprehensive catalogue of these in the process he also created a collection of poetry books that is the envy o public and university librarians throughout the country because, as our own Librarian Dr Neil Radford has said, no library can possibly have certain of these books, since they never went on sale anywhere. To get them John had to advertise in newspapers, follow up leads by writing to someone somewhere that he had heard had published a slim volume of his or her own poems and so on. In many cases it was the first time any other person had shown any interest in the volume, and John showed me some, of the letters filled with almost pathetic gratitude that he received from some of these people.

There is much more I could say about John Fletcher's publications- his 20 odd authored or edited volumes his more than 30 articles and book chapters -, about the thousands of dollars in research funding he received from the old ARGC for his part in the Early Imprints Project, about his great popularity with generations of German students because of his entertaining and immensely stimulating classes, but I would like to close on the note of service to the wider university and the wider community that he rendered.

Soon after his arrival in Sydney John joined the Friends of the University Library and as a committee member, its Treasurer, Secretary and, at the time of his death, President he helped it raise thousands of dollars for books the library could otherwise not have afforded. He was long a member of the Book Collectors' Society of Australia and was at his death its President and Publications Editor, having produced his own last book in their series of Studies in Australian Bibliography between two bouts of his final illness.

He took great care of Frederick Delmer's daughter in her last years, and Indeed the Department of Germanic Studies has received a bequest of $50,000 from Miss Margaret Delmer to create a traveling scholarship, as may be seen in the papers for this year's March Faculty Meeting. This generous bequest the Department very much owes to John Fletcher.

John was also a loyal worker for the Society of St Vincent d. Paul and spent a lot of his spare time visiting and helping the poor, the Sick and the dying of Glebe, including those dying of AIDS and of cancer, the disease that finally killed him. And he was helping in other ways that none of us knew of till after he died. One example will suffice: a few weeks ago an elderly pensioner came to the Language Center saying that he needed someone to translate the rules, etc, of some German board games that he wanted to adapt for use by deprived children in the Sydney area. "John Fletcher used to always do it for me," he said, "but I'm told he can't anymore. Can anyone here help me?"

At a time when colleagues and graduates from some professional faculties are pushing the line that no one should be expected to give their expert services free to anyone but should always be fully recompensed for any service they render, I personally think it is salutary to reflect that it is we in the humanities who may need to remind our fellow academics and the academically trained that there are times and circumstances where we should put our skills and knowledge at the disposal of those who sorely need them without having to be monetarily rewarded for our efforts. John Fletcher had his price for services rendered, but only expected it when he knew the beneficiary could afford it, otherwise they were rendered freely and free.

In conclusion, Mr.Dean, I would ask the faculty to extend it's deepest sympathy to the family of our late colleague John Fletcher, to his wife Elizabeth and children George and Tom, on the tragic loss to them occasioned by his very untimely death.

Brian Taylor,

Department of Germanic Studies and the Language Centre.

14th September, 1992.

A short John Fletcher Bibliography