Douglas F Schumacher Scott (QM 1920 - 27)
17th September 1910 - 15th April 2006
Douglas was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, the only child of German immigrants. He was educated at Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall, the Dillman-Realgymnasium, Stuttgart and the Universities of Tubingen, Gottinggen and London. In the Second World War he served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, during which time he met Margaret Ellis, and they married in Birmingham in 1942. Margaret died in 1972. They had two daughters, Elisabet and Helen. Douglas has two grandchildren, Paul and Rosie, and his great grandson, Alex, born in July 2005, whom he was able to meet. Douglas came to Durham, as Reader in German, and head of department in 1949 and was Professor of German from 1958 until his retirement in 1975.
(Address by Neil Evans at his funeral at Durham Crematorium, 22nd April 2006.)
Virginia Woolf thought that human character had changed somewhere around December 1910. Douglas, who was born around this turning point, might have added: ‘and not for the better.’ He was born straddling one of the fault lines of early twentieth-century Europe as the son of German-born immigrants in Newcastle-under-Lyme. His earliest memory was of the attack on his father’s pork butcher’s shop in 1915. The family had to hide in the garden as their property and livelihood were destroyed, with Douglas wrapped in a blanket. In school he faced bullying because of his German ancestry.
He went to Germany just at the end of the boom years of the Weimar Republic in the mid 1920s but shortly after he arrived, boom turned to depression and democracy collapsed. He witnessed virtual civil war, with communists and Nazis shooting at each other with machine guns across a city square. Friends and colleagues took him to hear Hitler speak but with his characteristic independent judgement he was mightily unimpressed. While he was completing his D Phil in Göttingen he was involved in a race with time: he had to complete the degree before the Nazis sacked his Jewish professor. During this time he was also doing some teaching. A friend led him into a cornfield to warn him that his non-party-line teaching might come to the attention of the authorities and that he needed to be careful about what he said.
It was experiences like this which drew him into the Society of Friends and led to his service in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in the Second World War; there he observed the consequences of bombing in both Britain and Germany and he was in Belsen shortly after its liberation. In Berlin, he and Gerald
Gardiner found a Quaker meeting; their khaki FAU uniforms frightened the congregation but when it was explained who they were, they all burst into tears. Douglas recalled it as the most moving experience of his life.
Much of his first thirty five years were grim, and lived through one of the worst periods of European history. But he had the love of his family, his many friends and that vast complex of friends and relatives in Britain and Germany which we now find so difficult to disentangle. Let us also remember that neighbours sheltered his family from the attentions of the mob in Newcastle-under-Lyme and that his headmaster in Walsall protected him from bullies. He never forgot these kindnesses.
In the Second World War the general tenor of his life was transformed. In 1941 he met Margaret Ellis whom he married in 1942. By the later stages of the war they decided that the world was a safe enough place to bring children into. He took delight in his daughters, Elisabeth and Helen and kept saying in his later years how proud he was of them. He showed the same pride, love and generosity to his grandchildren, Paul and Rosie. We were all saddened that Margaret was not able to share this as, tragically, she died some months before Paul was born, in 1972. But we remember warmly the day last August when Rosie brought her son Alex to meet his great grandfather.
He welcomed others into the family. In some ways my most vivid memory of Douglas is of his warm, smiling face and extended hand when I first met him early in 1971. He showed the same love and warmth to Helen and to Rob, his grandchildren-in-law, if there is such a category.
On his last morning, a week ago, we were called urgently to the North Durham University Hospital. By the time we had arrived he had died. Bizzie, as she is always known within the close family, asked why he couldn’t have waited for us. I reminded her of what Mrs Hart, his long-time secretary, had said to me many years ago: ‘You know what he’s like – if a job needs doing, he wants it done yesterday!’ Patience was not one of Douglas’s virtues. But he had so many virtues – generosity, friendship, high principle, refusal to be swayed by fashion or received opinion. He passed on these qualities to his students and colleagues and it is a great tribute to him that so many of his students remained in touch. He introduced them – as he did his family – to what was best in Europe, through his teaching, his work for International Tramping Tours in the 1930s (which were early exemplars of international understanding) and through the academic exchanges in which he took part. In this work – and with the voluntary work he did in the NHS – he helped build a better world than the one he was born into and helped heal the wounds in that world.
In remembering Douglas we need to practise what he did – friendship, co-operation, independence of mind, and above all these, love.
Neil Evans