It’s hard to believe that
I’ve known Tim, as a friend, for nearly 40 years – 40 obstreperous, voluble
years.
Until today, there was only
one way I knew to shut him up. And that was to quote the words of my sister, who
as a newly qualified teacher found she had Tim Southwell, aged six, in her very
first class. “Ah, little Timothy, he was such a sweet little boy,” she’d
say, “I can see him now in his little yellow tee-shirt, listening - with big
saucer eyes - to the story of the Little Tin Soldier.”
Well, you can imagine how Tim
reacted, the eyes would bulge, he’d look distinctly queasy and he’d stagger
in mock-amazement at what seemed to him outrageous character assassination.
The Tim that we remember,
grew up to become a character so much larger than life that it’s hard to think
of him as a boy - very hard - but throughout his life, I think, he carried with
him a sense of the child – a fiercely bright boy of such devastating
and precocious intelligence that at times it seemed impossible to know how best
to use it.
To me he was like a Don
Quixote – a massive bundle of intellectual and imaginative energy tilting at
dragons, at windmills, at politicians, at priests, at friends, at anything that
got in his way and – when there was nothing in his way – inventing
something.
He was funny. He had a
coruscating and bitter wit that could be breath-taking. At school he was an
outstanding debater, subtle & skilful in his writing, and strong in his
delivery. To bring on Southwell was to bring on the heavy cavalry, and the way
in which he lampooned the opposition meant he took no prisoners.
Aeons before anyone thought
of the magazine “Viz”, Tim had created an alternative school mag
which he’d called GOS - he reassured a dubious
head-master that it stood for Good Old School. In fact it was a scabrous
and bitterly funny satirical cartoon strip that spared no-one and no
sensibilities.
Tim was also an
impresario of note – a budding Branson who might not have founded Virgin but did
establish “Sunshine Tours”, running charabanc trips to Morecambe,
Bridlington, Skegness, and Southport. Not a lot of sunshine, but nobody dared
ask for their money back. The one guarantee was laughter.
Tim was gregarious and
out-going but it wasn’t empty bluster. He made things happen. All his life he
was dauntingly practical, a self-taught and accomplished wood-worker and
craftsman, who could apply himself for days to making the most detailed and
intricate furniture, complete with hidden drawers and secret compartments.
And that was Tim too.
He always had that strange gift for acquiring arcane information and singular
obsessions.
As a teen-ager he became the
self-appointed spokesman for the Tupamaros guerrillas of Uruguay – a lonely
task in Wakefield, but one to which he applied himself with immense seriousness.
I think.
He was shrewd enough to
realise that it was no walk-over because he didn’t stand on a soap-box or
anything like that, but instead he very cunningly got his Mum to stitch the
Tupamaros insignia onto his many tee-shirts.
In pubs or on buses there was
always one unwary nosey-parker who would inquire, “Why have you got a huge
star stitched to your chest?”
And with a gleam in his eye
Tim would cry “I’m very glad you asked me that”, and treat them to
a formidable history of South America from the Aztecs onwards and the need for
Marxist revolution.
I would say that he won many
converts to the cause in the West Riding, especially around closing time.
Tim’s immense energy
wasn’t simply intellectual, it was physical. Tim always wanted to be hard –
he wanted to look like a teddy-boy, but under that great flop of hair he already
had the distinctive rolling walk that made him look more like a teddy-bear.
Still in his teens, he walked
- bear-like - through the Lake District in the footsteps of Coleridge to climb
Scafell, England’s highest mountain.
And back home many, many
times after missing the last bus we walked through the night the ten miles or so
from Leeds to Wakefield.
And there was never
disappointment in missing that bus - rather it was an opportunity because, for
Tim, walking meant talking, with me or Pozman or Steve Parish playing Boswell to
his Dr Johnson. “Take a note of this aphorism!”
To the alarm of the locals
who were already abed Tim made his night-time progress between the two cities
like a sort of rolling shock-wave of humour and fantastical imagination. It was
a lot of fun.
In 1969 we walked even
further, making a marathon trek across the Cotswolds from the Midlands all the
way to Wales and back. Tim rather begrudgingly found that he liked the soft,
southern Cotswolds very much – so much so that he claimed them in the name of
Yorkshire, annexing them as a sort of honorary South-West Riding. Even today
there are people in Bourton-on-the Water who don’t realise that they’ve been
twinned with Kettlethorpe.
And it was in the same
spirit, I think, that two years later Tim went up to Oxford, affecting to see it
simply as a far-flung outpost of Wakefield’s Public Lending Library – but,
inexplicably, with more books!
At Christchurch Tim was a
great respecter of tradition - especially the tradition of having a good time -
and he was very happy to adopt Oxford’s academic gown and wear it over his
home-made Tupamaros tee-shirt.
He found converts to the
cause of Uruguayan revolution thinner on the ground at Christ Church, but it was
here that he found real fulfillment in his artistic abilities, designing and
painting astonishing stage sets for college productions like Merchant of Venice,
All My Sons, Dog Beneath the Skin and Little Malcolm. For this last one he had
to produce not one but half a dozen convincing copies of Van Gogh’s “Sea
Captain”, one to be destroyed on stage each night. Needless to say Tim
painstakingly produced six perfect masterpieces and took great delight in
watching every one of them torn apart for the audience.
He was also instrumental in
establishing Oxford’s first-ever Rag Week, which led, memorably, to an
appearance before the Proctors after complaints about his jokes in the Rag Mag.
It was an encounter which Tim enjoyed hugely, the Proctors not at all.
At the point in his life when
Tim went up to Oxford he seemed capable of anything. Those who knew him would
have been unsurprised at his success in any field, politician, political
satirist, campaigning journalist, criminal lawyer, international jewel thief
– we knew that Tim would make his mark. But after Oxford Tim, as
always, went his own way; he followed his practical side and took up a
job in housing.
Perhaps it was rooted in the
social conscience that he’d shown while working for Shelter as a teenager, or
perhaps he was simply moved by the plight of those who’d had to share a house
with him in Weston Road.
Whatever, housing was to be
his life’s career - first in Notting Hill, later in Camden and finally in the
Midlands. And to this career, he brought all the grit, the zeal, the
determination and the scrupulousness for detail that he embodied.
It was the good fortune of
the people of Notting Hill, Camden and the Midlands to have Tim working on their
side – but I often wondered if his managers knew what had hit them.
So what was it that drove Tim
so formidably?
He
set great store by his education and was especially proud of his education by
the Jesuits of St Michael’s College - for a humorous man and a pricker of
pomposity he took the religion of his youth very seriously.
Both as a boy and as a man he
had firm and rigid principles – at times, perhaps, too rigid; cross an
invisible line and the unwary would find they’d been “axed” (a
favourite word) cast into an outer darkness from which the return had to be
painstakingly negotiated. But if
Tim could be hard in his judgment of others when he thought it was merited, he
was always much, much, much harder on himself. All his life.
To the world, as Don Quixote,
he presented a shield, a veneer of turbulent, black humour, but beneath that he
was a man of passionate commitments, a huge and diverse bundle of energies,
serious and trivial, that made him very loveable. So what were the things that he
loved?
He loved his family.
He loved Wakefield, he loved Sandal Castle over there across the fields and the
physical sense of history that it embodies; he loved Yorkshire and the
West Riding, he loved Rugby League, Wakefield Trinity and John Smith’s; and -
with the same passion - he loved Jonathan Swift, William Blake and Shakespeare.
And, one glorious summer that
we spent as groundlings at the RSC in Stratford, he briefly and passionately and
from afar loved Dame Judi Dench –
but only because he found that she came from York;
He loved Bob Dylan and he
loved the Stones - he knew their lyrics word for word and he relished them –
as only Tim could – savagely;
He loved Oxford and he loved
Christ Church, although I’m not sure that he felt that Christ Church always
loved him – something about which he was rather proud.
He loved books, he loved
words, and he loved learning for its own sake; he loved conversation, humour and
argument;
He loved architecture - and
he visited most of the National Trust’s houses;
From childhood he loved
Meccano - and, in just the same way, he loved the work that he did, the
nuts and bolts, the minutiae, of how buildings work - and he especially
loved explaining it all, with a perfectly straight face, in mind-numbing
detail…
He loved William Hogarth and
Gerald Scarfe, Aubrey Beardsley and Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Roy
Liechtenstein…
And, of course, he loved Anni.
The last time that most of us were together was for her funeral, which
Tim, in his grief, arranged and choreographed so beautifully. Just two years
later here we are for him.
Tim and Anni met at Oxford
and each found their match in the other, their consummation. They were a
matchless couple, a formidable pairing and they were happy. Together they went
to America, to Greece, to Prague, to Russia, India, Sri Lanka…
But
however far Tim traveled, in the world or in his mind, he always brought
to bear that triumphant wit, an astonishing sense of what I can only call
“grim exhilaration” at the absurdity of life – and of death.
I
called a friend the other day to pass on the news about Tim’s death, Billy
Horrocks, one of the many who had become Friends-of-Tim at one remove, drawn
almost despite themselves into the whirlpool of his imagination.
And
he said sadly, “But I was quoting Tim to my students just the other day”.
What
he‘d been quoting was the maxim that Tim had coined as his watchword,
“Ubique Barnsley”.
It
was once to have been the title of a long-promised musical – sadly unwritten
– but it remains an exuberant collision of ideas that will always sum
up Tim for me.
It
seems very odd to be in the same room as him and feel that someone else, for
once, might have the last word; I’m not counting on it.
In
life he was larger than life, and in the memories of all those who knew
him I don’t doubt but that Tim will prove to be larger than death too.
William Lyons, February 2000