The life of my brother Adrian Crilly, who has died aged 70, began with great academic promise, but unhappily his aspirations were frustrated.
Born in Bristol, the son of Alexander, a school science teacher, and Vera, a secretary, Adrian was the youngest in a family of four children. He was educated at St Brendan’s college in the city and progressed to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study English. Early on in his course he was overtaken by mental health problems and these cut short his time at Cambridge and remained with him for the rest of his life.
He worked for a short period at the Bristol Royal Infirmary as a porter, but his health circumstances precluded sustained employment. He lived in the Bedminster district of Bristol for nearly 50 years intermittently broken by periods in hospitals and mental health institutions.
Adrian was an imaginative child who created and inhabited a make-believe world, including his town of “Kegworth”, where he managed its football team and charted its movement up and down a league table.
At St Brendan’s he was inspired by teachers of English literature and the history of art. He became an accomplished artist in oils and showed an attraction to poetry, Thomas Hardy being among his favourites. While at Caius he was taught by the modern poet JH Prynne, whose work he admired.
In Bedminster he was most content with life around his books, and he accumulated a large library. He was a keen motorcyclist, but an abiding image is of him chain-smoking with a poetry book six inches from his nose, oblivious of his surroundings. His early love of English literature and his knowledge of it remained undimmed.
He was completely impractical and lived, at first with a friend and later alone, in a ramshackle Victorian house which needed upkeep but never received it. He felt at home in the Bedminster village, where people knew him – in second-hand bookshops, coffee shops and at the local Windmill City farm, where he helped out from time to time.
Later his health problems became more acute and in 2017 he moved to a care home, where his reclusive life of study continued. In the summer of 2021 he had a stroke.
He is survived by his siblings, Andrew, Veronica and me.
