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  • In MemoriamT. F. Evans
  • Ivan Wise (bio)

Tom Evans became the editor of The Shavian, the journal of The Shaw Society, in 1964. His first issue began with a Shaw quotation: "A newspaper will kill its editor if he cannot announce the Day of Judgement without turning a hair." Evans then riposted, "Up to the time of writing no calamity of the kind that the words appear to foresee has, in fact, occurred." Following the editorial was an obituary of John F Kennedy. His final issue was published forty years later, shortly before the reelection of George W. Bush, when Evans finally gave up the job at the age of eighty-five.

This huge dedication led him, over the decades, to write on almost every aspect of Shaw's work, not least his views on education, his interest in phonetics, and his political outlook. But, most of all, Evans campaigned in the pages of The Shavian for more productions of Shaw's plays, which he thought were relevant to all people in all countries. His sheer hard work for the journal—published biannually—ensured that there was never a shortage of material. However, he said, "Even if I thought I had acres and acres of space, somehow I managed to get it finished." He cajoled all his colleagues to contribute articles and, when they did not, he wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, including Adolphus Bastable. He also contributed a regular letter from England to the New York–based journal The Independent Shavian.

Evans was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, in 1919 and was educated at Southend High School. He took a job with the Inland Revenue in 1938, which, on the outbreak of World War II, moved from Somerset House in London to Llandudno in north Wales. There he met Marjorie, whom he married in 1948, and with whom he had four sons. He became a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association and for the extramural department of the University of London, for which he became the deputy director. A tall man, he was an impressive and imposing public speaker; his Platform lectures at the National Theatre in London were widely appreciated and he spoke at conferences in North America, South Africa, and Australia.

In his chief work, Shaw: The Critical Heritage (1976), Evans gave a very interesting account of Shaw's output. He even criticized the critics in their reaction to Pygmalion, where, he wrote, there was a "totally disproportionate amount of space, time and attention that was given to the use by Shaw … of the word ‘bloody.'" He contributed to many volumes of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies and guest-edited volume eleven (1991), Shaw and Politics. He assisted Dan H. Laurence on the indexing to Shaw's Collected Letters, which enabled him to observe that, in his works, Shaw used the word "good" six times as often as he used the word "bad." He became vice president of both the International Shaw Society and, on his retirement as editor of The Shavian in 2004, of the Shaw Society. [End Page 240]

After Marjorie's death in 1986, Tom met Frances, who later became his second wife. They moved to Stone in Staffordshire, which Evans very much enjoyed, although he occasionally bemoaned his reduced access to London theater. Frances joined him for a number of hugely entertaining lectures, where together they acted out scenes from Shaw plays, which he used to call, with typical self-deprecation, a "ragbag." They were an effective team: when he was asked what year a particular event happened, he turned to Frances and said, "You keep track of the years."

His wry humor was still clearly in evidence well into his eighties. At a conference, when an audience member asked a question very quietly, he asked whether the comment was in fact "confidential." When beginning a speech to the Shaw Society, he was instructed to use a microphone. He replied, "Do you want fingerprints too?" Encountering one man from Milton Keynes, Evans asked him deadpan whether he was a poet or an economist and, encountering another who was his slight superior in height, asked him, "Not many people...

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