Ivor's life spanned (almost) three centuries.
He was born into an essentially Victorian industrial society that promised thin gruel for a child of his background.
Yet he flourished through the 40s 50s and 60s under the aegis of Atlee’s mass social reforms.
And though the late 20th century didn’t prove quite as profuse (Ivor was ever conflicted about moving the family from Morecambe area 1971) he was able to spend the 21st century appreciating the quiet life on the North Down gold coast.
Professionally, his colleagues describe a spectacular professorial legacy of over 100 research papers, two text books, and a Doctorate of Science awarded at an early age for internationally recognised scholarship.
Personally, his family and small circle of friends remember an all-points polymath, yoga dabbler, soccer zealot and prodigious cat wrangler who was absorbed by a life of the mind ... though too often belaboured by poor health.
As a boy, he bicycled extensively around North Staffordshire often finishing up at the local hill ruins of Mow Kop where he would immerse himself in TS Eliot.
As a young man he swam for hours in the river Lune river on visits to the Lake District.
As a professor at QUB he relished his massive garden in Glencraig and tended a hefty vegetable patch that kept him occupied for nearly two decades.
After his wife passed into 2015, Ivor became frail and spent his later years well cared for in Ballyhome, Bangor - right across the road from the school his sons attended when the family first moved to Northern Ireland.
"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange ..." The day Thou gavest Lord is ended.
Friday 13 December 2024
Adrian Maddox