George Sutherland

Born: July 12, 1921;

Died: July 23, 2015.

Dr George M. Sutherland, who has died aged 94, was a core member of Glasgow University's French Department during the post war years, when it was being developed by Professor Alan Boase.

Generations of students of French will look back with affection at their memories of Dr Sutherland who was a Renaissance specialist.

He lectured on Ronsard, Du Bellay, D’Aubigné and Montaigne, but also ventured regularly into non-specialist fields, notably eighteenth-century thought and the history of ideas.

George was born in the Black Isle, in the small fishing village of Avoch (the pronunciation of which he took great delight in sharing with others).

After his secondary education at Fortrose Academy and service with the Seaforth Highlanders in the Second World War, he embarked on his undergraduate career at Glasgow University, graduating with a First Class Honours Degree in French and Latin in 1949.

There followed postgraduate study at the Sorbonne, where he completed a Doctorat de l’Université on Ronsard’s Latin poetry. Paris was to foster more, however, than his academic career: it was there that he met his future wife, Margaret, at one of the Scottish Country Dance evenings organised by the Scots Kirk.

They married on April 3 1951, becoming parents in due course to Ruth, Alan and Susan. Appointed to Glasgow University in 1953, he lived through the extraordinary expansion of French Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, French at Glasgow becoming one of the largest non-collegiate departments in the United Kingdom.

Increasing deafness brought early retirement in 1981, by which time universities across the land were just entering a period of contraction and austerity. After retirement, George moved first to Edinburgh, then to Dartford and eventually to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where he died peacefully after a short illness.

George will be remembered as a scholar, as a teacher and administrator of the highest calibre, and as a witty, kindly and generous human being.

As a scholar, George engaged primarily with the nature and status of proper names in poetry, arguing that ‘symbolic utterance is in essence totally non-discursive, non referential’. In support of this he tirelessly quoted in conversation two lines from Villon’s poem on the vanished snows of yesteryear, the ‘Ballade des dames’: Dictes moy ou n’en quel pays / Est Flora, la belle Romaine…?, suggesting that identifying the ‘real’ Flora was to engage in a fruitless exercise, as the poem contained within itself all that we need to know, namely, that Flora was beautiful, but that her beauty was no guarantee against mortality.

The important poetic facts are that the urgent question receives no answer, that Flora is now unknowable, irretrievable, swallowed up in the anonymity of death. These issues were given their most forceful and controversial expression in his article ‘Proper Names in Renaissance Poetry’, published in the Boase Festschrift, The French Renaissance and its Heritage (London: Methuen, 1968, pp. 267-86).

As a teacher, George was a man apart, always brilliantly treading the road less travelled. In his first lecture, at the beginning of a new session, he would startle students with his opening remarks, delivered in his trademark, no-nonsense, Scottish voice: ‘Can everyone hear me, including the naked lady in the back row?’ There was of course no naked lady in the back row (Manet’s Olympia was visible on the back wall), but the question did arouse and sustain interest. He was the only lecturer we knew who allowed students to chat for a five-minute break after the first half-hour - George no doubt having absorbed all of Montaigne’s humane views on education.

As an administrator, George made an immense contribution to the University at large, serving for many years both as an Adviser of Studies and as Admissions Officer to the Faculty of Arts.

It is, however, for his wonderful humanity and humour that George will be best remembered. He had a sharp eye for picturesque detail and a superb command of expression, his discourse regularly peppered with Latin and allusions to antique culture in which he was so thoroughly steeped.

He faced his deafness with remarkable fortitude, all the harder to bear as it cut him off, at least to some extent, from the classical music that he loved. Remarkably, having listened so closely to his favourite music over the years, he found that he could still replay much of it in his mind. ‘Paradise lost, but also preserved’ was the memorable phrase he applied to his predicament.

Despite his diminishing short-term memory, he remained the naturally sociable person that he was, enjoying long walks on what he called his ‘infantry feet’, distributing over-generous tips in the cafés he visited (‘well, they don’t earn very much, do they?’), reading poetry, and above all seeing his family.

He was predeceased by his wife Margaret in June 2003, and is survived by Ruth, Alan and Susan, and his grandchildren, Kirsty, Kit and Isobel.

Angus J. Kennedy