How I Met the Minister of Magic
Written by Vivian Hughbanks
When I was little, Friday night pizza and movie parties with my mom, dad, and sister were the highlight of my week. Our favorite series to watch was All Creatures Great and Small—the BBC production of James Herriot’s classic tales of life as a vet in rural England.
I never dreamed that I would get to meet my favorite character from the show in real life. But on Sunday afternoon in the Dow Center, I spent about 20 minutes face-to-face with Robert Hardy, one of the most successful British character actors of the 20th century. He spoke on campus last month at the CCA on Sir Winston Churchill.
Waiting in the Dow Lobby at about 5:15 p.m. that Sunday, I heard the familiar, cheery British voice down the hallway. It was unmistakably Hardy’s: I’d heard it on screen often, calling greetings to his various pets on All Creatures Great and Small. Just then, he popped around the corner.
“You must be Vivian Hughbanks,” he said, his whole face smiling. “How very nice.”
Dressed in a green tweed jacket, with a dapper gold pocket square, he was unabashedly himself—and delightfully so. In the minutes that followed, I got a glimpse of the man behind the act, and I saw how much of himself he had inserted into his roles on screen.
I asked him what he remembered about the day that Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, and England went to war with Germany. He described his reaction when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war.
“All of that time, one was in some kind of mixture of excitement and dread,” he said. “Excitement because I was at the right age to be excited, obviously. War. Thrill. Airplanes. I was trained as a pilot.”
On the more peaceful side of things, he told me about his time at Oxford as a student of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He described his favorite class with Tolkien: an evening at the Eagle and Child pub, when the linguistic master described, without foreknowledge, where each student was from and why they spoke in the ways that they did.
“He went ‘round the six, and six jaws dropped,” Hardy said. “And when he got to me, he said, ‘Ah, interesting. A bit of border Welsh lilt there, but sadly overlayed by smart London.’ And I said, ‘You’re absolutely on target in every degree.’”
Tolkien wanted his students to understand how much knowledge can be gleaned from the details of language use. Hardy said that by the end of that class, he was able to recite Chaucer in the original Middle English.
And then he did. Right there in the Dow Center lobby, Hardy recited the opening words of the Canterbury Tales to me, as he had learned them from Tolkien himself.
After several minutes more, chatting about his role as Winston Churchill, it was time for another CCA event. As he walked away, I carefully restrained myself from doing a happy dance.
As a reporter for the Collegian, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and interview many particularly interesting people. But my few minutes with Hardy were different than all of the other conversations. Instead of discussing current events or political happenings, we talked about people and events that shaped the world over the nearly 90 years of Hardy’s life—things that he had experienced first-hand.
Vivian Hughbanks, ’16, is a politics and German major from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and a member of the Dow Journalism Program. Fueled with coffee, she de-stresses by cooking and forcing food on anyone in close proximity. She tries not to get lost (and fails regularly), and occasionally jumps into lakes for no reason.