My friend and brother-in-law John Riddy, who has died aged 82, made his mark as a book collector, and built up a much-admired private library on the history of British India. It was based on a large section of the old Bombay Yacht Club’s library, and was once the largest of its kind in private hands.
In retirement in York, after a career mostly working in universities, John’s interest in book collecting flourished even further. When from time to time he decided to prune his library he gave substantial parts of it to the Borthwick Institute for Archives, York, but nonetheless after each donation his collection would quickly grow again. Wherever he visited, no secondhand bookshop remained unraided.
John was born in Kempston, Bedfordshire, to Donald, a teacher and education inspector, and his wife, Kathleen (nee White). He was educated at St Paul’s school in London, where among his brilliant classmates were Oliver Sacks and Eric Korn. He won a history scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, which he took up after national service in the RAF as a Russian linguist. Most of his service in 1953 and 1954 was spent flying over the North Sea, monitoring and translating transmissions from Russian spy trawlers.
On graduating in 1958 he went to India and worked for three years as a factor in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his association with the yacht club library began. In 1961 he returned to the UK as an assistant registrar at Oxford University, where he met his future wife, Felicity Maidment, who was a student there.
From Oxford they both went, in 1965, to the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, where John was an assistant secretary. He was present in 1966 when large-scale massacres of the Igbo population took place, with some of the killing extending on to his university’s premises. Subsequently John was largely responsible for the job of clearing away corpses from the campus, and soon afterwards he and Felicity left to take up positions at the new University of Stirling.
Although an administrator at Stirling, John also taught courses on Commonwealth literature. He retired early and with Felicity moved to York, where she became professor of medieval English literature and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of York.
John was a witty, erudite, generous and kind man. He was also a true eccentric and an outrageously Rabelaisian host who at times would leave the dinner table to lie on the floor and take a nap. He had a taste for Havana cigars and kept a filing cabinet of rare malt whiskies in his garage. He always kept glasses full to the brim.
Regrettably he never published a book on British India, but he did give lectures and wrote articles that illuminated various aspects of Indian history – mostly to do with the 1857 mutiny and its aftermath. He was a gentleman scholar, learned, eloquent in style and diction, and captivating in the telling of historical anecdotes.
He is survived by Felicity and by their three children, Gerson, Francesca and Myrianthe.
