Another tribute to Mervyn
REMEMBERING MERVYN GOULD by Prof. John Lucas
My relationship with Mervyn, which stretches back thirty years, began in 1979 when he was appointed Theatre Manager to Loughborough University’s Department of English and Drama — or, as he was soon calling it, Department of Anguish and trauma. Not long after our first meeting I went into the Senior Common Room one morning and found him turning out his pockets in a search for money for which to pay for a cup of Coffee. “Do you lack the visible means of support necessary for your sustenance, my good man?”, I asked, and to my delight, Mervyn replied grandly , “Officer, I never leave home without four pence in my pocket.” He knew, you see, as I suspect few others did, that four pence was what in the interwar years a possible vagrant needed in order to satisfy a policeman that he had the wherewithal for a night’s lodging.
Mervyn knew many things, and over the years, as our friendship deepened, I came to rely on him as a possible source of information on, among other matters, church and vernacular architecture, canal and railway history, Anglican Hymns, Edwardian, or as he pronounced it “Edvardian” society, the poetry of Jean Ingelow, music-hall artistes, and the early days of Cinema. In recent years I was also grateful to him for the annual gift of a Christmas Pudding prepared according to a recipe of his mother’s, whom he plainly revered, and which he labelled “Old Gould’s Ingoldsby Pudding.”
But it was his knowledge of the history of theatre lighting, of sound and of special effects, in all of which he was prodigiously learned, from which I most profited. So, I should add did the University at large. He not only gave some wondrous public lectures on the history and various techniques of lighting, he taught by example. So greatly admired were his skills that he was asked to provide the lighting arrangements for the obsequies of a vice-chancellor who had died in office and whose inter-denominational funeral was to be held on campus. Mervyn agreed, but insisted on a dress-rehearsal. “Thank you, darlings,” he said, after the various dignitaries had gone through their paces. “Can we take it again please. And next time” — and the implied rebuke was magisterial — “a little slower.”
On another occasion, I came across a reference to an 1878 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Drury Lane which ended with the battle on the plains at Philippi, at which point, so I read, no fewer than a thousand arrows criss-crossed the smoke-shrouded stage. “How on earth was that managed” I asked Mervyn. And Mervyn said, “Well, petal, if you have half-an-hour I will explain all”. And he did.
He could and would explain such matters to enthralled listeners in public bars and other watering holes. He was also an invaluable guide to students, more than one of whom was helped by his knowledge and of course contacts into gaining work in the professional theatre. This made him enemies among a few academic colleagues less gifted, less knowledgeable, and far more egotistical than he ever was, and who were warped by sour envy of the unpractised ease with which he acquired friends and admirers. Because what made Mervyn so cherishable was that he had nothing of guile or calculation about him. Quite without self-interest, he was, I think, a deeply innocent man, someone whose storehouse of knowledge was filled for its own sake and never for the sake of reputation or advancement. The MA that he gained at the City University in the early ’90s was achieved for its own sake rather than for “career enhancement”, that dread phrase of the worldly-wise, of management consultants, professional advisers and be-suited administrators, those types of whom Mervyn went not so much in dread as in genial contempt.
Even his histrionics were self-deprecatingly and hugely comical. Dickens, who created the sweet, wide-eyed goodness of Mr. Toots and Herbert Pocket, would have loved him, and would have delighted in Mervyn’s ability to act out a role as blessed compendium of Dick Swiveller, Wilkins Micawber and Vincent Crummles. In fact, Dickens’s description of Mr Crummles receiving Nicholas Nickleby “with an inclination of the head, something between the courtesy of a Roman emperor and the nod of a pot companion” strikes me as bearing more than a passing resemblance to Mervyn’s way of greeting a friend. There were, as I say, many of these friends, some of whom are here today, others who can’t be. But all, I’m sure, would agree that Mervyn was a uniquely loveable person, I mourn his death but rejoice that I knew him.
John Lucas
Footnote- In the letter accompanying the above Eulogy that he read out at the Funeral, he pointed out that he arrived as Professor and Head of English and Drama at Loughborough University in 1977 and was therefore one of the committee that appointed Mervyn to his post (which he notes was one of the best appointments he ever made). He left the University a year after Mervyn retired as Emeritus Professor and became Research Professor at Nottingham Trent University, where he invited Mervyn to talk to his Students who were as enthralled by him as their earlier counterparts at Loughborough had been.