St Mary’s Mappleton
Joel 2:28-29, 32a
John 14: 1-6, 25-27
We gather today to say our farewells to Robert Alexander Holt Methuen, 7th Baron Methuen, husband, father, grandfather, uncle, great-uncle, colleague, friend. It is very hard to believe that we are doing this. Less than six months ago, Dad and Margrit were in the Canaries, taking 6 km walks, and Dad was exploring cave systems, getting his hard hat knocked off into a river in a tunnel. He was complaining of being tired, of being out of breath, but he was 82 after all, and I think we all thought he was just slowing down. But instead it was a degenerative lung disease which took him into hospital, made him dependent on piped oxygen, and unexpectedly revealed itself to be fatal – and all too rapidly so. Even in May, not so many weeks ago, Dad was sitting in his hospital bed in Derby, making a case for being allowed to continue his House of Lords committee work by e-mail. He continued to read and sometimes even to answer his e-mail until just days before his death. Committed and dedicated, passionate about the things he did. That was my father, and he remained that way until very close to the end.
“Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.”
It was on 3 June that he – and we – were told that he had just weeks to live, and that weekend I came to Derbyshire to visit him. That Sunday was Pentecost, and this reading from Joel was that set for the day. It made me think – immediately – of Dad. He had a deep sense of the things he wanted to do, and that it was worth working hard to do it. My father was never exactly a visionary, but he certainly had vision, and he did dream dreams.
Since he died, it has become very clear to me that I was not the only one to have found my father’s deep sense of commitment a model and an inspiration. Colleagues and friends have written to us of his passion for his first career, as an engineer, with Westinghouse, IBM and Rolls Royce. Dad spent much of the seventies in IBM, latterly working in Ian Nussey’s team on computer process control applications. Ian says he was truly fortunate that Dad agreed to work for him – “as much, that is, as someone who always was his own man ever worked for anyone. Almost every job he took on was a first of its kind, characteristically tackled with relish and excellence, overcoming technical and human problems.” Fred Ollerenshaw, a colleague at Rolls, writes: “It was a real privilege to work with such an accomplished engineer. The experience and expertise he brought to us at RR moved the way some of us worked to a much higher plane there.” He was at the forefront of the field, working on the interface between hardware and software. I recall him coming home one night with a pile of work: the data storage had moved everything up half a byte, and he had to work out to get it to move back again. He loved to share that passion with us: I vividly remember him teaching me maths on our playroom blackboard when I was 4, or possibly 5, and then being most put out when maths at infant school did not include binary numbers. And he took us to engineering sites and me to the main IBM computer room in Birmingham (the mainframe was about as big as this church and did an awful lot less than our mobiles do these days). Geoff Alderman remembers that he was proud about the work he did on the environmental monitoring system at Rolls, which ensured that the conditions in the main computer room were maintained at a safe level which allowed the computers to work properly.
Dad worked for IBM and then for Rolls Royce from 1968 to 1994, when he retired. Well sort of. Soon after leaving Rolls, in August 1994, Dad’s elder brother John died, and Dad inherited the title. In 1995, he took his seat in the House of Lords, where he remained for nearly twenty years. Here too he showed himself dedicated and committed, focussing on detailed committee work. So many people from the House of Lords have written to us of his wisdom, modesty and dedication there, of his dedication to the committee work he undertook and the insight he brought to it. Nick Clegg put it like this: “Robert was a dear colleague and friend to many in the Liberal Democrats, and was a hugely respected and liked figure across all parties in the House of Lords. He brought much wisdom – as well as hands on experience – to the deliberations of both the Liberal Democrat Group, committees of the House of Lords and indeed to the chamber as a whole on a range of issues, especially in the science and technology fields. He will be greatly missed.”
Alongside his passion for engineering – and probably feeding his expertise in it – Dad had a very creative side to him. Kittie remembers how she loved watching him working with wood in his workshop, and particularly the puppets – marionettes – he made for us so painstakingly. The LGB layouts he built in the garden at Stoneycroft, where we grew up, or the attic at Knabb Hall, where he lived with Margrit, were beautifully and carefully constructed. He was a perfectionist: the right tools for the job; boxes of carefully sorted nails and screws, always to be turned to for help in putting up curtain rails and hanging pictures when Kittie or I moved into a new house.
Dad was a perfectionist, but sometimes his perfectionism meant that he could be so focussed on the task that the team, the people could be forgotten. Dad’s people skills could leave a lot to be desired. Perhaps his family saw this side of him the most. I remember dinners when he could not think of anything to say, so would say “humph”, or “so”, or hum an aimless little tune – or just go to sleep. Or those evenings when he would talk incessantly to Margrit or to Kittie or to me, repeating stories we seemed to have heard so many times, but never quite getting round to asking us about what we had been doing. Dad often found it very hard to talk to those to whom he was closest. But his family was very important to him, and he was very proud of Margrit, of his daughters and granddaughters, and deeply fond of his nieces and great-nieces, and of my mother. He was clearly moved that so many people came to spend time with him in these last months, although he also worried that he was inconveniencing us. And one of the gifts of the final few weeks, when he no longer had the energy to tell his stories, was that we got beyond the stories and could – and did – sit together, talk to each other, listen to one another.
They were great stories though. Dad had an extraordinary life and he could – and did – talk about it with great verve. He was born on 22 July 1931, the youngest of four children: Richard, John, and Elizabeth. His father, Anthony Paul, was the second son of Field Marshall Lord Methuen, who had had a patchy record during the Boer War, and at school my father would be teased (historically unfairly, in my view) for being “the boy whose grandfather lost the Boer war.” Dad’s Uncle Paul was an artist and a fellow of the Royal Academy, and Dad’s colleagues at the House of Lords remember him showing them those of Uncle Paul’s paintings that hang in the Palace at Westminster. His mother, Grace Holt, came from a Liverpool shipping family, a descendent of the nine Potter sisters, one of whom was Beatrice Webb. Grace’s heritage gave Dad his sense of belonging in the great Liberal tradition of British Politics and shaped his allegiances when he took his seat.
Grace’s father owned a shipping company, the Blue Funnel line, and Dad remembered Christmas lunches on the company’s ships in Liverpool, and amazing sea journeys: being so sea-sick round the Orkneys, aged 7, that he wanted to get off, and in his early twenties working his way out to Japan and back in Blue Funnel ships. He had a life-long love of ships, and of trains, and of industrial archaeology, which he loved sharing with his family and friends: Kittie and I have wonderful memories of outings on steam trains, to the tramway museum at Crich or to Ironbridge, and of many holidays on the canals. But he was fascinated by archaeology as well, and he and Margrit travelled a lot together, exploring new places (often on riding holidays): one of their last trips was to Petra, which Dad had always wanted to visit.
Dad was an independent thinker. Despite – or perhaps because of – his independence of thought he could be difficult to live with. He was not a patient person. I think he never lived in a house for more than a year, or at the most two, without wanting to move somewhere else, and having to be talked into staying. First by my mother (who kept him down to 5 houses), later by Margrit (I think they lived in seven, but I might have missed one or two). He was a starter but not necessarily a finisher, which could be very annoying indeed when he started things in the house and didn’t finish them. Perhaps that is why he loved his LGB so much, for a railway layout is never finished. And perhaps it is why he was a good computer engineer, for computer systems can always be improved. Even at the end he was not patient: having embarked on dying he wanted to get it over, with the least possible inconvenience to all, himself included.
As well as all this, Dad could be very silly. Not long after my parents married, Dad wired up a friend’s car to the electric fence. “The car bit me,” said the friend’s sister (whom my father did not much like). “Don’t be so stupid,” said the friend, reaching for the car door handle… When his grandchildren were given a trampoline, Dad had to try it out, bouncing around “like a stick insect,” as Kezi memorably put it. He was in his late sixties or his early seventies then. And then there that photo of him sitting in a large box with a tea towel on his head. Why? He was in the doghouse… At the beginning of June, having been given weeks to live, he called us all in to discuss his will and his funeral – and in the midst of the sorrow we knew was to come, we sat round his hospital bed, and shared these and other stories, and laughed.
But there was a sadness there too, not far below the surface. Dad’s life was early marked by tragedy: his eldest brother, Richard, died of a brain tumour when Dad was just 18 months old. My aunt Elizabeth remembers: “Robert was a treasure to our mother after Dick died.” Perhaps it was Richard’s death that gave a fragility to all Dad’s relationships. It certainly gave Dad a fear of death that he could not always articulate, but which shaped him very deeply. He was very afraid of to die, although at the end he wanted to; and it was my sister, Margrit, and my mother who ensured that – as he had wished – he did not die alone.
The last time I saw Dad alive, knowing I would not see him again in this life, I blessed him: “The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your body and soul unto everlasting life.” And both my mother and I read to him the nunc dimittis, which he asked us to have sung at his funeral in Latin. (Why? He had always told us that he had hated learning Latin!) “Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace: your word has been fulfilled.” He was not brave, he said, and he desperately wanted peace. Our reading from John’s gospel, which Geraldine read with him in the last weeks of his life, promises that that peace will be given: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. … Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
In John’s gospel Christ promises too that a place is prepared for us: a place in which we will all be reunited, in which we will come together in joy. I believe that Dad is there now, no longer afraid, no longer in pain, reunited with others who loved him, waiting for us when our time comes. We had to let him go. We will miss him – very much indeed, in ways that we will only slowly understand. But in our sorrow let us hold onto Christ’s promise of peace and the hope of the resurrection:
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. … Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
“I am the resurrection and the life,” says the Lord. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Amen.
Wings of the Morning 