RIP Michael Scuffil

[keibat]

Following a serious illness, Michael Scuffil – an assiduous contributor to this forum – has passed away, shortly before his 75th birthday. His funeral is being held on Thursday 13 June, in Opladen, Leverkusen, where he has lived for some fifty years.

[Katharine]

Thank you for letting us now. I met him in Cologne when we went there for Christmas markets. He appeared dressed almost like the caricature of Sherlock Holmes, in the cape with the double layer at the top (can’t remember its name!) and a deerstalker. We spent the afternoon together, as he showed us hidden corners of the city, and took us for excellent cakes! A memorable afternoon.

He’s the only forum member I’ve met because of the forum, I’ve met a few I knew at Hertford, but that’s different!

[Mid A 15]

I am very sad to read this.

Michael had an excellent memory and recall and could vividly transport us back 50 years or more. His contributions to this forum as a social history of CH are invaluable as well as so much more on other subjects.

My sincere condolences to his family and friends.

RIP Michael.

[Katharine]

I should, of course, have added my condolences to the family.

[J.R.]

Sad news indeed.

My condolences to his family.

[brian walling]

Yes, sad news. My sincere condolences to his family and friends. I have really appreciated his contributions to this forum over the years. People like Michael are the ones that make the CH network so great. Pity we can't recognise them in some way.

Although he was a couple of years my junior at CH, in a house at the other end of the avenue and in a different subject, I somehow recall him from CH days. Maybe his slightly 'edgy' name helped the recall. From time to time I have come across his name as translator in books on art or other topics - most recently and surprisingly in an illustrated book on the lives and sociology of orangutans in the jungles of Malaysia (where I live) and Indonesia.

[J.R.]

Sadly, I have just seen that today would have been Michael's 75th birthday.

[rockfreak]

An articulate and informed contributor to the site. I can only add to the general sentiment by re-posting my limerick:

An eminent doctor named Scuffil
Was prone to the pedagogue shuffle.
The theories did flow,
Sometimes just a bon mot,
But he always delivered a truffle.

[rockfreak]

I never quite knew what Michael's specialism was because he seemed to know Latin and history, but I now find out that art was one of his main things. I've no doubt that he's now up there giving St Peter his artistic opinion of the pearly gates. "Rather ornately baroque, St Peter. What about all those stern puritanical Protestants coming up here? Especially those from Christ's Hospital?" He will be much missed.

[keibat]

I was at his funeral / memorial ceremony today, with family and friends. A very Scuffilian occasion - the coffin, with his great broad-brimmed hat, and a birdwatcher’s manual atop it; and photographs all around the chapel of rest, from Michael as a baby to Michael as a grandfather, but also including Michael as a 11/12-year-old in Housey uniform, and marching as a Grecian (which is really ironic, because he was in many ways a principled anarchist who did *not* live his life marching according to imposed rules). His doctorate was in linguistics; then working as a respected translator, he had the great advantage of working closely on texts covering an extremely wide range of topics, including art, as mentioned in several posts on this thread. I will miss him deeply.

[Fidésien]

I was sorry to learn from an Old Blue mailing of the recent death of Michael Scuffil, and to find it confirmed by various appreciative posts here on the Unofficial Forum. We were not quite contemporaries at CH in the late 1950s into the early 1960s. And I didn't know him well as he was at the the other end of the Avenue, and he was a Modern Historian rather than one of Michael Cherniavsky's medievalists. But we certainly knew each other through the Political Study Group and, I think, the Literary Society. My recollection is that he was another serious-minded, left-leaning intellectual, distinctly out of sympathy with some of the ideas and attitudes of the CH Common Room of that era. And I think he was always worth listening to at the then-flourishing Debating Society in the Commonwealth Library. A good guy. I saw him occasionally in Cambridge where he read History at Emmanuel. Is that the correct spelling ? But I got to know him better after Cambridge when he spent a few months in Oxford, and stayed with us in a flat in the Woodstock Road. His was the only name that I recognised on occasional visits to this Forum, and we exchanged a few e-mails last year demonstrating the fallibility of memory. He remembered a night in a pub in Fen Ditton, of which I have no memory. And I 'remembered', quite wrongly, that he had been in Florence helping to clear up after the appalling floods of 1966. And he confessed that he still occasionally dreamed about my then girl-friend Nick. Which sounds like something out of a Jonathan Barnes novella. I was in Brussels at the time and he was not far away in Cologne. I'm sorry we didn't make the effort to meet up. Moral of the story: value old friends, and don't neglect opportunities to rebuild relationships.