Identity area
Reference code
Watson/7/5
Unique identifier
Title
Date(s)
- 1959 - 2013 (Creation)
Level of description
Subseries
Extent and medium
1 file; photographs
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
George Grimes Watson was born in Brisbane, Australia, on 13 October 1927. He was educated at Brisbane Boys' College and the University of Queensland, where he graduated in 1948 with a degree in English. He secured a scholarship for a second degree and received an English degree from Trinity College, Oxford in 1950; he worked for the European Commission as an interpreter before becoming a lecturer in English at Cambridge in 1959 and a Fellow of St John's College in 1961. He remained at St John's until his death on 2 August 2013.
Watson edited 'The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature'. As well as producing wide-ranging literary and cultural criticism, he was involved in leftist politics, campaigning as a Liberal candidate in 1959 and 1979 and working as Editor for the Unservile State Group; his political writing often critiques socialism from a liberal perspective.
Repository
Archival history
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Content and structure area
Scope and content
This subseries contains thirty-five photographs, mostly unlabelled and undated and grouped by the cataloguer as below.
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PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHS
Thirteen black-and-white portrait photographs of George Watson, some of them duplicates
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GEORGE WATSON SOLO
One photograph of a lecture
Six holiday/travel photographs
Three poor printouts of a digital photograph taken in Watson’s rooms in St John’s
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GEORGE WATSON WITH OTHERS
Ten photographs (identified companions: Peter Beal, Patricia Coales, Francisca Cruz Rosa Fiorentino, David Hickey, Hilton Kelliher, Emma Manas, Steve May)
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OTHER PEOPLE
Two photographs from Australia, presumably of members of George Watson’s family there. One, signed by and featuring ‘M.L.W.’, was taken in Milton Park, Bowral, New South Wales on 10 October 1971; the other, taken at ‘the St Bart’s do to open the hostel for frail aged men’, and mentioning James Henry Richard Watson in its reverse inscription, was taken on 19 March 1995, and features ‘Ro’, ‘Fi’, ‘Jane’, ‘Elizabeth’, ‘Ann’ and ‘Mary’.