Ron Hall was a much-loved lecturer in the English Department at Rhodes University in Makhanda. Among many other interests, Hall was an ardent Shakespearean. One of the co-founders of the Grahamstown branch of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, over many years he initiated play readings, delivered lectures and contributed to the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa. Trudi Adendorff wrote this obituary on behalf of Hall’s friends and former colleagues.
A Tribute to Ronald Felix Hall
Deceased 23 July 2023
“They also serve who only stand and teach.”
In his tribute to Ron Hall, delivered at a gathering of those in Grahamstown who were touched by Ron’s life, Paul Walters drew a revealing comparison between Ron and Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford:
Of studye took he moost cure and moost hede
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche ...
In the minds of almost all who knew him, Ron was most memorably a teacher. In the 1970s, government funding for universities began to favour research over teaching, going so far as to attach a cash value to research output. Ron’s friend and Head of Department, Malvern van Wyk Smith, describes the requirement to “teach less, research more” as a hand grenade tossed into the academy, and before long academics began to argue for lighter teaching loads to offset heavier research commitments. Ron’s response to the matter came in the form of a biting parody:
Throughout the year in this dark whirl of work,
And that one project which is death to shirk
Filed under Pending, though my soul more bent
To pacify the VC and present
Another cloud of academic murk;
“Will (he) class me as a lazy jerk?”
I sadly ask. But Justice, to prevent
That scruple, soon replies, “Does Learning need
That all should publish or be damned? The Muse
Imposes oft a quiet yoke. To each
His calling: thousands at her bidding speed
From conf’rence-halls to galleys to reviews;
They also serve who only stand and teach.
Ron was of course a brilliant academic. Following a BA degree in Theology and an MA in Literature at Oxford, he went on to receive a first in his MPhil at Oxford, a very rare achievement which was marked by an even rarer congratulatory viva. His PhD came later in his career, on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Prof. van Wyk Smith writes: “In the realms of first-world academia there would be no doubt that the thesis would have been published and that it would have constituted a major addition to critical writing on T.S. Eliot.”
When Ron retired, he returned to the study of classical languages, studying Latin and Greek and then tutoring, and lecturing on, these. His last teaching course in the English Department at Rhodes was a course on Chaucer.
As a student of Ron’s I have three special memories. First, he inspired in me a deep love of Milton. Second, he booked me into the Hillandale Monastery outside Grahamstown when I was very uncertain in my studies. And third, when he heard that I had written a tongue-in-cheek essay comparing Grendel to a real-life man-eating crocodile in Papua New Guinea, he encouraged me to treat the subject more seriously. I sadly never did.
Ron and his wife Priscilla were co-founders of the Grahamstown branch of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa. Their intense appreciation of Shakespeare’s corpus and their generous and welcoming spirit lives on. What they created has continued to celebrate the Bard over a period of 30 years, with reading up to 5 plays a year, and, at least once a year, his sonnets. We meet in a venue now called the Ron Hall.
Ron’s daughters, Katharine and Ruth, sitting at his bedside while his life was drawing to an end, were moved and delighted by the accounts his carers gave of “a brilliant mind, a gentle and warm soul, a generous and wonderful teacher, even in his dementia”.
Dear Ron, we will always cherish and miss you.
TRUDI ADENDORFF
Chair: SSOSA Grahamstown
