John Willett

Brecht scholar and veteran of the 'Times Literary Supplement'

After talking to Anne Willett, may I correct and expand on my obituary of John Willett? writes Professor David Childs.

Although Willett was born in and later lived in Hampstead, he was brought up near Farnham, Surrey. After Winchester he took a year out to go to Vienna to study the cello.

His mother, Aimée – daughter of Thomas Tizard FRS, who served on the Challenger expedition of 1872-76 and was later Assistant Hydrographer of the Navy; sister of Sir Henry Tizard, wartime adviser to Winston Churchill and chief scientific adviser to the Attlee government – had learned German in preparation for piano studies in Leipzig before the First World War. (She later used these skills as a teacher at Downe House, the independent girls' school in Berkshire.) She had a great influence on John, whose father died shortly before he was born in 1917. They went together to Germany in the early Thirties. Friends say that he was already singing the songs of Bertolt Brecht when he arrived at Christ Church.

At Oxford, he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and got involved with left-wing causes, including the fight against Fascism. Among the tutors who influenced him was Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford), at the time a Labour anti-appeaser.

During his years at the Manchester Guardian John Willett became interested in the cultural scene in the North-West. Later, his book Art in a City (1967), on Liverpool's art and culture, architecture, contemporary artists and the art scene in general, had considerable influence.

John met Anne Sainsbury, his wife-to-be, in 1950, at the home of Pau Casals, the great Catalan cellist, in the small French Pyrenees town of Prades. Casals was preparing a festival in aid of Spanish republican refugees. Anne, whose mother was French, and who had had some of her schooling in Vienna, had worked on liaison with the Free French during the Second World War and was then living in Paris. They married the following February.