| Galton Institute Home Page | September 1995 Newsletter Contents | Newsletter Index |
The death of Lord Goodman earlier this year deprives the Galton Institute of one of its most illustrious Fellows. Harry Armytage, a past President of the Institute who knew him over a period of sixty years, has written the following memoir.
To a poor history exhibitioner in his first year at Downing College Cambridge, to be addressed in the common room by Aby Goodman was a more intimidating experience than to be interrogated by one’s tutor. His knowledge of the details of the victims of a typhoid outbreak at Croydon public baths - a case in which he made a precocious legal debut - was so astonishing that one found it difficult not to call him "Sir". His very presence transcended the College and his seeming omniscience was exercised far beyond its walls.
His capacity for getting things done subsequently enabled him to combine a successful legal career with the chairmanships of some nineteen organisations, ranging from race-tracks to childhood trusts, eliciting from Tam Dalyell the tribute of being "the most resourceful man in public life". He even managed to get himself to the beachhead at Normandy, despite being precluded from active military service.
He set up the Arts Council working party on obscenity, chaired by John Montgomery, out of which emerged the "Defence of Literature" group which fought many censorship cases in the 1960s that could be said to have determined the climate of opinion on such matters. During the last three decades of his life he was one of the most potent presences wherever ideas were being bandied about.
Needless to say, Lord Goodman joined the Eugenics Society and displayed a command of the subject and its history which, once again, astounded the author of this brief memoir. He became a Fellow in 1951 and served on the Society’s Council from 1977 to 1984 and though, inevitably, he was unable to attend many of its meetings he meticulously sent his elegant apologies adding, in his own hand, "but you know where I am if you need me" or some equivalent sentiment.
In 1993 some 400 of his friends attended a banquet in the Hall of Lincoln’s Inn to celebrate the publication of his autobiography. Its apt title Tell Them I’m On My Way prompted the obituarist of the Times, on 15 May 1995, to regret that "that way lay as Chairman of the Trustees of the Observer". Galton Institute members can be gratified that it also lay in the way of an attachment to our own intellectual concerns.
W H G Armytage