Betsie Livingstone (1)

 Today, January 1, is the first obit, Year's Mind, of Betsie Livingstone. She died in a care home in Iffley.

Betsie was one of the most considerable people I have known. Not that I had the privilege of knowing her intimately for most of the decades of her long life. I first 'knew' her from a very respectful distance: during my visits to the Patristics Room in Bodley, she would be occupying a table set aside for her, swathed in old-style galley-proofs of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, with Bodleian attendants bringing her books she had ordered up. We did not know each other; awe ... on my part ... was our relationship.

Elizabeth Anne Livingstone was, at first, a research asistant of Dr F L Cross, Student of Christ Church, originator ... editor ... compiler ... of the ODCC from 1939. I don't know how he came to discern her genius: she once said to me that he did not formally offer her the role "until I had shown that I could do something"; i.e. had got her First. She soon became the research assistant. As he wrote, "No problem that arose could be allowed to rest until it had been pursued to its limits, whether by research, correspondence, or personal interviews, and in somecases by all three means ... The drafting of the bibliographies is almost wholly due to the same collaborator. There are relatively fewof the books or articles cited which Miss Livingstone has not handled, or, where this has proved impossible, pursued to an unimpeachable source; and, it need hardly be said, there are a vast number of others which, though examined, have been passed by unrecorded, either through the exigencies of space or  their want of permanent interest. This task has involved the consultation of what must be almost, if not quite, a record number of books in public libraries ..."

Betsie, like not a few of the English professional classes of her generation, was born (1929) in India. She matriculated in 1948 at St Anne's College, when it was still "St Anne's Society" and when its senior members were products of the days when it had been the "Society of Oxford Home Students" with origins back in 1879. The bookplates in the older  volumes of its Library included words, I think, something like Societas Mulierum Oxonii Privatim Studentium! She became Artium Magistra  in 1955. She, and my Wife (St Anne's, matriculated 1960), were able to exchange and compare reminiscences of that very distinguished institution! It is, of course, no longer single-sex ... the young men, I fear, think it amusing to refer to it as Stans.

She was also the begetter and organiser of the Oxford Patristic Conferences (and of the later Oxford New Testament Conferences), which brought scholars from all over the world to exchange brief papers ... which, naturally (but however did she find the time?), provided her with the labour of handling the publication of very large amounts of very diverse material. I recall the first day of one such conference: Bodley had just introduced a requirement that you had to show a card in order to be admitted. The Quadrangle, inevitably, was thronged on the first morning with foreign scholars who, vainly, had hoped to Verify the References in their Papers before having to read them!

Some readers of this blog may be interested in one tiny detail: Michael Moreton's paper Blepete eis tas Anatolas first appeared in those volumes, demonstrating that, contrary to the superstitions of the 1960s, Christians in the early centuries had faced East in order to worship.

To be concluded.