Gilbert Murray [1957]

THIS SHORT OBITUARY of Gilbert Murray (1866-1957) was composed, recorded and broadcast (on the BBC Home Service’s Light Programme) on 20 May 1957, the day that the distinguished classical scholar and liberal internationalist died. It has not appeared in print until now. Murray had been one of Russell’s oldest and closest surviving friends. In 1889 he had married Lady Mary Howard, Russell’s cousin, and the two men became near neighbours when in 1896 the Russells moved into The Millhangar cottage in Fernhurst, West Sussex, near the Murrays at Churt, Surrey. A new intimacy developed between them after Russell’s celebrated “conversion” in February 1901-triggered supposedly by a moving reading by Murray from his new translation of The Hippolytus (see Russell 1967, 145-6). Meeting especially frequently over the next four years or so, they had also begun what became a voluminous correspondence extending across many years and from which Russell quoted at length in a longer tribute (1960) published in Murray’s Unfinished Autobiography.