Talk:Eric Griffiths (critic)

Personal recollections

As unadulterated WP:OR this is not eligible for inclusion in the article, but I was at school with and a close friend of Eric Griffiths. We lost touch when we left school, and I have only now read about his subsequent career and sad final years. I hope a few reminiscences are not ultra vires here. I didn't know (and am not sure I believe) the family was Welsh-speaking, but it was certainly conspicuously religious. As a teenager Eric was a member of the British Humanist Society, though obediently attending Sunday School at his mother's insistence. I think he was an only child. I was at his house fairly often and met his parents, but never a sibling, and I think there weren't any. In our hormonally-filled teens most of us were bursting with either heterosexuality or homosexuality trying to erupt, but Eric seemed to rise above such things, and I had, and have, no idea if he was straight or gay or whatever. The article touches on his interest in popular music, and he had a brief passion for The Sound of Music in the 1960s, but I'd add that he was even as a teenager remarkably well informed, and insatiably exploratory, about a wide range of classical music from Gilbert and Sullivan, which he loved and knew encyclopaedically, to Bruckner and Mahler – seen then as tough meat for ordinary concert-goers. He was always of an academic mind. My mother, who taught English in a secondary modern school, was amused to see that when Eric, aetat 10 or so, came to see her school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream he brought with him, and followed the performance in, a Complete Works. At our grammar school I remember him in school plays: as a formidable Eck in Osborne's Luther, and a rollicking Dame Carruthers (we were a single-sex school) in The Yeomen of the Guard and I have a cherished photograph of him with me (as Elsie Maynard) in that production. He loved drama, and would improvise scenes with me or other accomplices at the drop of a hat: "You play so-and-so, and I'll do xyz". He wrote poetry, an activity viewed by most of us as a mild eccentricity, and the few lines of it that I can recall five decades later seem to me rather good. He was clearly quicker and cleverer than most of us, but I can't recall his making any of us feel dim or patronising us. (The story of the student from Essex in the article seems out of character unless he changed a lot over the years.) I am glad to have run across this Wikipedia article, and am sorry to read of Eric's sad last years. Requiescat! – Tim riley talk 15:00, 28 March 2021 (UTC)