Once upon a time: an English friend in Paris

It’s weird to be googling around casually on the off-chance of finding out what might have happened to an old friend, and to run into an obituary [access], indeed an old obituary.

Anthony Richard Sutcliffe [1942-2012]

In the years 1963 to 1965, Tony was an assistant English teacher at the Lycée Henri IV in the Latin Quarter. That’s to say, we were colleagues.

Whenever I think of Tony, who had what you might call a quietly-spoken Oxfordian personality, I remember his excitement concerning the birth of the Beatles phenomenon. He talked of them often, and his enthusiasm intrigued me. During a short holiday break, he returned to England and attended a Beatles concert (one of the group's first-ever big events). At that time, to my mind, the Beatles were nothing more than a group of new kids on the block, as it were. And I simply couldn’t understand why Tony seemed to take them so seriously, as if they were about to create a pop-music revolution. I soon learnt, of course, that Tony’s tastes were spot on.

Tony spoke excellent French. Meanwhile, he looked like a typical young English gentleman, always attired in a tweed coat with a necktie.