One of his pupils, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, says that Philip Hobsbaum was the teacher who taught him about politics. These were the years of "The Movement" when Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and others were demonstrating cooler, more everyday poetic forms. His father, an electrical engineer in the East End of London, had Philip taught boxing at an early age, to cope with the bullies he had suffered from himself. A GPO management job took the family to Bradford where Philip, after doing badly in his first four years at Belle Vue Grammar School, suddenly did so well that a scholarship took him to Downing College, Cambridge. Here, reading English under F.R.
Philip Hobsbaum - poet, critic and servant of the servants of literature in Belfast and Glasgow - died last week, a day before his 73rd birthday. His ancestors were among those adaptable, intelligent people driven out of Eastern Europe by anti-Jewish laws and prejudices around the end of the 19th century. "To sum up," she chirped, "for peace and socialism - the Communist ideals."David Burke. Philip Dennis Hobsbaum, poet and English scholar: born London 29 June 1932; Lecturer in English, Queen's University, Belfast 1962-66; Lecturer in English, Glasgow University 1966-72, Senior Lecturer 1972-79, Reader 1979-85, Professor in English Literature 1985-97 (Emeritus); married 1957 Hannah Kelly (marriage dissolved 1968), 1976 Rosemary Singleton (n?Phillips; two stepdaughters); died Glasgow 28 June 2005. Both Hilary and Letty were popular in the local labour movement and in 1985, following Hilary's death, Bexley Trades Union Council established the "Hilary Norwood Trophy" to be awarded for the best piece of writing on trade-union history in local schools.
Hilary had been a popular teacher and in 1993 one of his pupils, by now a professor of chemistry at the University of Greenwich, named the university's new laboratory the "Norwood Laboratory".With the collapse of Communism in 1991 Letty Norwood's dream of a Communist future for humankind dwindled She remained, however, a committed socialist. An avid supporter of The Morning Star, she told me in the week before her death that she was still anti-war, anti-racism, against anti-Semitism, pro-nationalised transport, pro council housing, pro the Co-operative Movement, pro good state education, pro trade unions. She was active in local politics and in 1979 protested against the Tory-controlled Bexley Borough Council to turn Erith School, a successful comprehensive where Hilary was a chemistry teacher, back into a secondary modern and a grammar school. In 1967 she recruited to the KGB a civil servant codenamed Hunt who for 14 years provided extensive scientific, technical and other intelligence on British arms sales.She retired from the BN-FMRA and the KGB in 1973 and rejoined the British Communist Party. In 1960 the KGB offered her a pension of £20 per month, which she declined.