Edmund Boleslaw Fryde 1923–1999

Edmund Fryde liked to dwell on the quirks of fate. It was a game. He liked to explain how by some round-about chain of causation you, his friend, came to be where you were because of some long-past chance action on his part. That Edmund himself, the gifted Jewish boy of cosmopolitan upbringing from Warsaw, should have spent over fifty years of his life in Aberystwyth, resigned to having been stranded there and, in his later years, increasingly content with his fate, was not to be predicted. For much of his time at Aberystwyth he was active in the affairs of the College, as a member of the Senate, on the Finance Committee, the Library Committee, acting as secretary of the Staff House. Edmund was also an inspirational teacher. In the lecture theatre, as in conversation, he had a remarkable ability to bring characters to life. His lectures on subjects outside his specialities, subjects upon which he never wrote, were as gripping as any. Apart from art, these included 18th-century French history — Edmund was in essence a child of the Enlightenment — and 19th- and 20th-century Russian history.