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Raymond Dawson 1923 - 2002

Ray Dawson was born in Westminster, London on 15 February 1923. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he went on to become one of the first to teach Chinese language and culture at university level in the UK.

Early Life
Coming from a working-class background, Dawson’s life took a major turn when, at the age of eleven, he won a scholarship to Emanuel School, Wandsworth where he thrived academically, especially in Classics. He also enjoyed and excelled in a variety of sports. He was a Chelsea fan and a keen follower of Middlesex cricket club.

Oxford, the RAF and Oriental Studies
In 1941 Dawson was awarded an Exhibition to read Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. After completing the first part of his Literae Humaniores (“Greats”) degree in 1942, he - like many others of his generation - interrupted his studies to join the RAF and the following year was sent to South Africa to train to be a navigator. During the final months of the war a medical problem meant he could no longer fly, so he applied for a course aiming to learn Russian but was instead sent, in August 1945, to the School of Oriental and African Studies to study Japanese.

After the war he returned to Oxford to complete his degree in Classics at the end of the Michaelmas Term 1947. His brief encounter with Japanese had awakened an interest in the Far East and he applied successfully for one of the first government-funded, Scarbrough scholarships to study Chinese at Oxford. A First in Classical Chinese paved the way for a 40-year career working in the field of Oriental Studies.

Family and Crosswords
In June 1944 he had married Eve Harding, then in the WRNS and subsequently a librarian. They had three children, a daughter and two sons. In the late 1940s he embarked on a parallel career as a crossword compiler for the New Statesman and The Sunday Times (pseudonym, ‘Setsquare’) He was a pioneer and past-master of the cryptic clue in a career that lasted 50 years

Academic career; Durham and Oxford
In 1952 Dawson was appointed to fill the newly created post teaching Chinese Religion and Philosophy at Durham University. Over a nine-year period at Durham, Dawson was instrumental in creating the Gulbenkian Museum, (now the Durham University Oriental Museum) and a Library, having acquired the Cant Chinese Library and Percival Yetts Collection. Exhibitions were organised which resulted in significant gifts or long-term loans, notably from the Sir Victor Sassoon Collection, Malcolm MacDonald, 1000 coins presented by the Ashmolean and 4000 pieces of jade from the Sir Charles Hardinge Collection. In 1958, he also set up a soon-to-be flourishing Honours Course in Chinese. A slight thaw in relations with China in 1958 enabled Dawson to make a long-awaited visit. Limited to 6 months, he travelled widely, with some difficulty, at a time of great unrest.

In 1961, at the invitation of Professor David Hawkes, he took up the post of University Lecturer in Chinese at Oxford. In 1963 he was appointed Fellow of Wadham College where Sir Maurice Bowra, the Warden, saw the potential of Modern Languages and Oriental Studies to fill the gap left by the decline in numbers applying to read Classics.

Dawson was a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford until his retirement in 1990 and devoted himself both to teaching and to building up Oriental Studies (with Chinese at its core but including Arabic, Persian and Japanese components) into a major subject area at Wadham. As Librarian (1972 -1980) he made a major contribution to the design of the new College library.

Books
Dawson was a prolific author whose books were frequently reprinted and include: The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilisations (1967) An Introduction to Classical Chinese (1968) which became a standard text. He was Editor of The Legacy of China (1964) His later publications include: Imperial China (1972) and The Chinese Experience (1978) introducing laymen as well as students to Chinese History. A New Introduction to Classical Chinese (1984) Confucius – The Analects (1982) and Sima Qian - Historical Records – A selected edition (1994); both translated with an Introduction and Notes by Dawson

Retirement
In retirement, he wrote about his home village, Garsington, The Oxford University Connection. Eve had preceded him as a local historian, notably with her Diary of an Oxfordshire Market Gardener, 1863 – 67. He was, himself, a very keen gardener.