I just joined this forum for the sole purpose of posting to this thread.
I first met Angus over 40 years ago in 1970 when we were undergraduates at Oxford, where I read Modern Languages at Keble and he Jurisprudence at Exeter. We were introduced by a mutual friend named Richard Judd who went on to become a curator of oriental manuscripts at the Bodleian library. After a few seconds of small talk, Angus roared at me,” You have the most extraordinary vowels. How do you form them?” “With my mouth”, I shot back and we immediately became close friends.
With his vast intellect, witty conversation and larger-than-life personality, Angus quickly became a minor celebrity at university. His rooms were a chaotic midden heap of books, ordnance survey maps, tools, pipes and tins of St Bruno flake, overflowing ashtrays and booze bottles in various stages of depletion. The floors were ankle deep in his detritus.
Several chairs were arranged in a circle in one room, and Angus would hold court with several students at any hour of the day or night. All manner of topics were debated, and he would ruthlessly, yet with great humour, demolish anyone on a point of fact or as matter of logic.
He had a photographic memory and could master almost any subject with breathtaking speed. One night, while conversing with a don who was an authority on Anglo Saxon, Angus corrected the great man’s grammar in parsing some ancient poetry, and he was right. Cheeky devil.
As students we drove all over England, admiring Gothic architecture, Victorian railways and prehistoric forts. Angus was especially interested in the engineering of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and we must have visited every bridge, tunnel and building Brunel ever erected.
We both loved to travel. We motored through Scotland (1975), and from Liverpool to Vienna (1976), dossing in his car and living mainly on a liquid diet. Later we drove through Spain (1987) and the Northeasten United States (1997).
After working for years in computing, Angus decided to put his formidable linguistic talents to use and set up his own translation firm. The first contract he landed called for translating into English some highly technical Dutch treatise, and he executed the assignment brilliantly, notwithstanding the undisclosed fact that he knew at the time not a single word of Dutch. Armed with an old Dutch dictionary and his deep knowledge of similar languages (English, German and Swedish) he simply learned Dutch as he went along. Cheeky devil to bid on that contract.
You who met him in his declining years can only imagine what he was like as an energetic young adult.
Angus was of course a consummate sailor. His father, John “Dick” Richardson, in his day one of Britain’s leading yachtsmen, was instrumental in resurrecting off-shore cruising and racing after the war. Angus once joked that he was probably conceived on a boat. The sea was in his blood, and in his younger days he sailed all over the British Isles and Europe. I once crewed with him on some race in horrific weather, and you can imagine the tongue-lashing he gave me when, turning about, I let slip a winch handle into the Irish Sea.
I think he took to footy as an invalid in order to maintain his connexion to sailing, and I know he enjoyed your company immensely. I too received many phone calls at all hours. Thank you for posting in this thread the photos of him and I am touched by the tributes. If anybody has other photos or stories of him, I would be delighted to see them. You may email me at m j o k @ y a h o o . c o m. (I put in the spaces to defeat spiders and spambots - all you need do is remove them.)
Thank you for reading this.
Evil Ogre, I will never encounter anyone like you again. May you rest in peace.
Mason
