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A Dick’s Life, the Browning Version

By Kevin Steel ⋅ November 2, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Spent yesterday reading about Britain’s two bozo bobbies, Ian Blair and Cressida Dick, after the verdict in the Jean Charles de Menezes case. Makes you wonder, why on earth do these two people still have jobs?

Blair is responsible for the department and the department was found guilty. He was involved in the attempted cover-up–there is no escaping that conclusion, especially when you consider the attempt to bribe the victim’s family long afterward. Blair refuses to resign. Who cares? An innocent man was shot seven times in the head with hollow point bullets at point blank range under his watch. He should be fired.

Dick was in charge of the operation and so bears the responsibility for the events of that morning. That’s what “being in charge” means. My blog entry would have ended there, except for this Oct. 23 story in which Cressida Dick makes a surprising statement; “In relation to my own decisions, given what I now know and what I was told at the time, I wouldn’t change those decisions.”

In other words, she knows now that an innocent man was killed. And if she knew back then that an innocent man was going to be killed she would have done nothing to stop it. This is swaggering self-justification on the brink of insanity. Maybe that’s why Blair promoted her. That’s another reason Blair should be fired. Such a public rewarding of incompetence will no doubt erode public confidence in the police.

However, the fact that Dick makes this awful statement probably shouldn’t surprise anyone because I quickly discovered that she has made stupid statements in the past, most notably when she was the head of the “Diversity Directorate.” She orchestrated a raid of the thought police on 150 homes back in 2002 and was quoted in the press: “People should not have to go through life being subjected to abuse because of who they are or what they believe in.” She said this while she was arresting people for what they believe in. Blogger Mark Shea at the time called her “irony-challenged”, but I think he’s being nice. It’s dumb and embarrassing.

Two stupid statements, diversity directorate, jury going out of their way to absolve her of any responsibility. . . this was starting to look like politically correct nonsense, and official nonsense is intriguing. I started looking up all the main players in this awful event, beginning with Blair (I like this statement in the Wikipedia entry, “Blair is keen to be politically correct…”) and I eventually came to the Wikipedia entry for Cressida Dick. The short paragraph under “Early life” caught my eye:

The third and youngest child of Cecilia Dick (nee Buxton), an Oxford historian, she was born and raised in Oxford and educated at The Dragon School (Oxford), Oxford High School and Balliol College, Oxford. Before joining the police force, she had worked in a fish and chip shop and in a large accountancy firm.

It’s pretty obvious what’s missing here. Her mother is listed but there’s no mention of her father. I found this weird because the person writing this knew enough about Dick to make note of where she went to grade school, and her mother’s maiden name, but doesn’t mention the father. Later, I would find in this Telegraph story: Shadow over future of De Menezes commander, with an oblique reference to her father. “The 47-year-old daughter of Oxford academics…”

I was way ahead by then.

Cressida’s father, Marcus William Dick was a fellow and senior tutor at Balliol College, Oxford. There is a memorial plaque on a wall there with his name on it. He would move on to then newly minted University of East Anglia where he was appointed a full Professor of Philosophy. His early education he received at Winchester College. While still at Oxford, he was associated with A.N. Prior. In 1956, Dick helped Prior organize the first Logical Colloquium held in Britain, in Oxford in 1956. “A small ad hoc committee was formed, and Marcus Dick arranged for a lecture room at Balliol.” We actually have a interesting little detail available to us on that event; on July 15, 1956, at 10:30 in the morning, he chaired a session, C.A. Meredith: Theory of Deduction in Combinatory Logic. To my surprise, Dick was actually quoted in public, albeit from memory, as recently as this year in a January Daily Mirror column. In the quote, Marcus Dick displays a bit of academic arrogance;

Brodhurst spoke to Marcus Dick, then senior tutor at Balliol, and an old Wykehamist. “Tiger Pataudi, oh yes, the cricketer,” sniffed Marcus Dick, “quite brainless I should think, and my dear old boy, there are thousands wanting to read History.”

There is some of publishing history on Marcus Dick. In 1952, he revised the 5th edition of Oxford, As it was and as it is today by Christopher Hobhouse. And in 1956, he provided the text for Portrait of Oxford. A selection of photographs by A. F. Kersting. I could find no publishing history for his wife, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

It’s impossible to tell from this distance, and with only little bits of information floating around on the web, the what-and-why of anything; these are only tiny glimpses into a life though the lens of technology that didn’t exist when that life ended. Marcus Dick died in 1971 when Cressida was eleven. His date of birth isn’t listed in this peerage report, only the year of his death. Even that omission is somewhat revealing–like the Wikipedia entry on Cressida, someone has taken care to make sure the maternal side of Cressida’s family is well-represented here, but not her father’s side. There was heartbreak before his death. Cressida’s parents had officially split up three years before that, divorcing in 1968, when she was only eight.

It was upon seeing that little bit of info about the divorce that my mind suddenly turned on the 1951 film, The Browning Version, based on the play, the story of a life-battered gentle scholar suffering various indignities, including an unfaithful wife. Not that I’m suggesting I have any clue as to why the Dicks, two scholars, divorced. I often think of that film when English scholars are mentioned. My guess is that the split was a long time in coming, as these things don’t happen overnight. Marcus Dick had taken the position of Professor of Philosophy University of East Anglia sometime after 1963. Marcus Dick is mentioned several times in The History of the University of East Anglia, Norwich by Michael Sanderson, but not all the references in the book are available online. Dick is referred to as one of the original scholars, though. Norwich is about 170 miles–or three hours drive–away from then Dick family home in Oxford.

In Cecilia Dick’s obituary we see she was promoted from lecturer to Ordinary Fellow in 1965 and a year later appointed Domestic Bursar. The promotion and extra duties no doubt provided extra income. That would have been right around the time husband Marcus was heading off to East Anglia. It was also a year after her own father (and Cressida’s maternal grandfather) Wing Commander Denis Alfred Jex Buxton, died at age 69. Husband Marcus, the logician, was probably no wing commander. Cecilia would herself die at the age of 68. Her mother would die in 1970, a year before Marcus, though I can’t tell how old she was when she passed away. 1970 and 1971, losing your grandmother and then your father, those would have been a tough two years for young Cressida.

Did little Cressida have problems with her mother? What girl growing up doesn’t have problems with her mother? It can last a lifetime, but imminent death can sometimes resolve these. What we can see is that the year her mother died, 1995, Cressida took a job in the Oxford area, and then shortly after her mother’s death, she either quits or takes a leave of absence from the police force and returns to the scholarly life. Probably just a interesting side note that she ends up studying at Oxford’s historical rival Cambridge.

This November 9, 2000 police press release announces her return to the force.

There is a mysterious little footnote to the mother’s life. In 2001—incidentally just after Cressida returns to the police force—someone made an anonymous donation to the Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, in the memory of Cecilia Rachel Dick; two bird and flower paintings on glass, c. 1800.

Did Cressida idealize her dead father? Idealize might be too strong a word, but we often idealize those we have lost and I would think a young girl, living under the disciple of a living mother, might have a tendency to do that. We have a little evidence that Cressida remembers him quite fondly. First of all, it should be remarked that Cressida attended the college where her father once taught, Balliol, in 1979. Her maternal grandfather, the wing commander, also went to Balliol. In 2002, on November 21, Cressida gave a speech to Balliol alumni; “In a most moving part of the speech, she spoke of her late father, who had been a Fellow and Tutor at Balliol for a number of years.”

Cressida followed no obvious career path immediately after leaving Balliol in 1979–she traveled, worked in a fish and chips shop, and then for an accounting firm. This I see as regular “I-don’t-know-what-I’m-going-to-do” young person stuff. In 1983 she decided to become a cop and became, as far as I can tell, a fairly dedicated one. It doesn’t appear that she ever married (this Mail on Sunday story refers to her as “Miss”). None of the stories I’ve read mention any children. But then, if you look at the peerage pages, it would seem her sister didn’t marry either. The middle child, brother Jasper, wed in 1988.

What does all this mean? I don’t know. It’s a life, little parts of lives anyway. There are news stories with mini-profiles of the players and I’ve tried to fill in one little corner. Cressida Dick was born on October 16, 1960. Forty-five years later, she would be in the wrong place at the wrong time, making the wrong decision. The order to apprehend came too late, the result of indecision, which endangered the public and caused an innocent man to be gunned down. Indecision is okay in the life of a gentle scholar, and I recall The Browning Version; “God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.”

When you’re a Gold Commander, or a Wing Commander, and lives are on the line, indecision can results in disaster.

So let me end with another quote, from Chaucer, the lament of Cressida’s namesake; “Alas, of me until the world’s end shall be wrote no good song.”