My oldest friend – Graham Parsons
I met Graham in October 1964 at University College London where we were both first year students in the B.Sc. (Economics) program. At the end of our first year, our studies continued in parallel with Graham doing some geography along with economics with me staying entirely within economics. At the end of that year, Graham suggested we look for a room to share for the next year and we found a small room a couple of blocks from Baker Street, about a 15 minute walk to UCL. We sometimes saw Scott Walker and Mick Jagger who lives 3 blocks away in much more expensive flats.
Our favourite breakfast was a hot honey and butter waffle straight from the waffle iron in a cafe in Great Portland Street tube station. We also shared a larger and nicer room belonging to UCL in our third and final year. At the end of that year, having had no examinations for nearly 2 years, we had 5 days of taking 8 examinations, each one lasting 3 hours. I found this stressful, but I am not sure Graham did - he had been so organised with careful note taking for the past 2 years. Indeed, I learned the importance of being organised from him, never having seen it before.
Towards the end of the three years, we were both looking for jobs. Graham's experience sticks in my mind, very uncomfortably, to this day. He applied to Shell Oil and found himself in a room with 6 or 8 other candidates waiting to be interviewed. As they chatted, he realised they all had "posh" accents and he concluded - sadly and correctly in my view - that with his accent he would always be at a disadvantage applying for jobs in the UK. I guess this is hard for those in North America to imagine, but I later encountered cases that confirmed Graham's judgement. He told me that was the main reason he emigrated to Canada, where of course, he did spectacularly well.
But he was not finished with either the UK or UCL, since he returned to do a doctorate under Gerald Manners in the Geography Department at UCL. I remember his topic: Agglomeration Externalities. I had never heard of this topic. However, after some decades it did become important as Economic Geography grew within economics. I remember Graham's wry smile when I told him.
The are a few anecdotes that I think of as typically Graham. One is that, very unusually for the time, he drove up from Leigh-on-Sea to UCL in busy Central London where parking could be difficult. At UCL, order was kept by Beadles. Think of them as uniformed and a bit like Tower of London Beefeaters, or perhaps university bouncers. Any potential parking problem was solved after the first Christmas by Graham giving the relevant Beadle a bottle of Scotch, repeated for the following 2 Christmases. I had never known how easily some problems could be solved.
Graham also told me that he had kayaked across the Thames from Southend on the North side to Kent on the South side. It must be at least 10 miles, and probably one of the most dangerous stretches of the estuary. And this was before the Port of London stopped operating, so huge ships would have been toing and froing there. Even so, Graham did it at night, even when it was foggy. He told me that you did not hear the ships, but if you saw one heading in your direction you needed to wait till it was very close - close enough to determine its trajectory. Why? Because if you didn't, it would have been too easy to paddle into its path rather than away from it!
There are several other stories along the same lines:
After his doctorate, Graham returned to Canada, for good this time, and we lost touch for a while. Eventually, Graham contacted me having seen something by one of my grad students who put us in touch. We had a joyous reunion in Vancouver and later a memorable road trip from Calgary to Regina. The most memorable thing about this was not the scenery, the likes of which I had not seen before, or the dust storm. Rather, it was the company of two old friends who always got on so well. I will miss his independent quirky take on life.
