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Charming Beast taught old to young

September 14 2002

Godfrey Tanner, Emeritus professor of classics, University of Newcastle, 1927-2002

No longer does "The Beast" stroll the streets of Newcastle. Never again will the mercurial scholar baptise a rugby field or rowing shed with a spray of Toohey's New and a splash of Latin verse. No more will Newcastle shopkeepers hear a timely gem from Aristotle or Tacitus when they pass back the change.

Godfrey Tanner, emeritus professor of classics at the University of Newcastle, is dead.

Newcastle's Christ Church Cathedral had not room enough for the several hundred mourners at Godfrey's funeral. After filling the pews, they stood along the aisles, in the doorways, out and down the steps.

Most were solemn during the two-hour, High Anglican service, but there were also emotional displays from young students who knew Godfrey as a mentor; as a bridge to an academia where knowledge of the ancients is both a source of virtue and a weapon against the amnesiac mythology of an age convinced of its uniqueness.

These students, bloodshot with grief and Scotch, represented generations of budding scholars who passed through Godfrey's tutorials since his arrival in Newcastle in 1959. Godfrey had the quality of making his students - particularly, given his bent, the men - feel personally valued, and he astonished many with his ability to remember their names, interests and idiosyncrasies, even years later.

Informing and inspiring the young was a vocation to Godfrey, and, while not averse to an enthusiastic but largely platonic admiration of "shapely bottomed youths", he truly felt that an individual's desire to learn and to understand the world he or she has inherited deserved every opportunity to flower.

To that end, Godfrey was a prodigious philanthropist, selfless with his time and money to the point where he was occasionally exploited. He helped a legion of friends and acquaintances with money in hard times, donated rowing sheds and other facilities to the university, and established the Godfrey Tanner Scholarship Fund to help the poor gain a degree.

To support the scholarship, the Hunter Valley vineyard Tyrrell's Wines offered a Godfrey Tanner selection of chardonnay and shiraz. The most popular drop, and the wine to which Godfrey leant his heartiest endorsement, was sold as Sanguis Bestiae, "the blood of the beast".

The Beast, as Godfrey was affectionately known (his house on the hill was dubbed the Bestiary), was born Ronald Godfrey Tanner in Brisbane. He was an only child to parents of whom little is known other than that a number of the artworks hanging in the Bestiary were painted by his mother and that his father was apparently disappointed by Godfrey's pursuit of the classics over geology.

Godfrey attended Melbourne Grammar through the war years, before continuing his education at Melbourne University, graduating with a first-class master's degree in classics in 1950.

Godfrey completed his tuition at Cambridge in 1953, where he was awarded first-class honours in classical tripos, a program encompassing the anthropology, language and philosophy of the ancients.

He returned to lecture at Melbourne University, and then in 1957 moved to NSW to become senior classics master at The King's School, Parramatta. In late 1959 he moved north to become senior lecturer in charge of classics at Newcastle University College, then a provincial branch of the University of New South Wales, with its arts degrees awarded by the University of New England.

Godfrey took to Newcastle and although often frustrated by a widespread suspicion of higher learning, he found it a town tolerant of eccentricity. In his view, it was a rough but fundamentally caring industrial city where even an Aristotelian sodomite such as himself could become one of the locals. Godfrey was teaching there for barely more than a year before he was leading "freedom marches", demanding that Newcastle College be granted autonomy as an independent university - a wish fulfilled in 1965.

Godfrey opposed the war in Vietnam before it became fashionable to do so. He suspended his Liberal Party membership for the war's duration and gave sanctuary to draft dodgers, secreting them in the Bestiary and helping finance their run from duty.

The draft dodgers would have shared digs with Henderson, a ghost haunting the Bestiary whom Godfrey considered most unpleasant company. Henderson, Godfrey believed, was the spirit of the house's first owner, a sea captain apparently involved in the "wretched business" of ferrying Kanakas to Australia.

Henderson, in turn, objected to Godfrey's lifestyle and would admonish him mercilessly. An exorcism quietened Henderson somewhat, but the bothersome ghost never completely departed.

Godfrey was a Christian, a believer in salvation and religious tradition, and although his open homosexuality made him an unlikely lay official of the Anglican Church, he was a long-standing member of the synod. He made headlines as a synod member in 1970, when, concerned about the "alarming rate" at which young people of all persuasions were choosing to live together without the church's blessing, Godfrey suggested the church recognise unorthodox cohabitations, including homosexual unions, and consider giving its blessing to "trial marriages" for under-21s.

While Christianity held its central importance to Godfrey as the supreme institution of his religious faith, he also believed the church stood at the core of Western civilisation, providing a bridge between the ancient era and our own as the chief custodian of classical virtues which could otherwise vanish.

Yet, like all of fallen humanity, Godfrey's aim often fell short. He revered the teachings of the Stoics while having many an indulgent whine. He venerated the ancient Greeks' correct ordering of the appetites, yet outdrank many a robust young engineering student.

In fact the diminutive but sprightly Godfrey was of such good cheer at the university bar, enjoying a decent chat over a glass of red with decades of students, that the University Union eventually named the bar after him. The Tanner Bar is decorated with his portrait.

Godfrey retired from most of his duties in 1993, teaching only Sanskrit from that point on. He marked the occasion by installing his first telephone in the Bestiary.

The same year Godfrey made the front page of the Central Coast Express sporting a black eye sustained in the defence of two female students against some "young swine", as he termed the assailant.

"I shouted to him that I would put the evil eye on him," the Beast told the newspaper.

In January last year, Godfrey suffered a major stroke, but recovered so quickly that many of his friends did not realise how seriously ill he was.

While his balance remained a little off, and he began using a cane when he walked, Godfrey's mental powers were undiminished and during his last 18 months he travelled the country on behalf of the University Convocation, broadcast the weekly Godfrey's Gripes on the campus radio station and completed his term on the university council.

Godfrey Tanner died at the age of 74. He never married, nor sired descendants other than an innumerable host of intellectual and social debtors.

Matthew Thompson


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