Chris' Tribute
cjp, 4th April 2008
On behalf of the family, thank you very much indeed for coming today.
As Leo Pyle’s youngest son, I grew up knowing that the Lake District was a particularly special and sunny part of the world.
And he always talked about Jack’s Rake. It’s a steep rocky path which cuts across the top of Dungeon Ghyll, which he somehow persuaded my mother to climb on their honeymoon in 1964.
Forty years later, she wrote:
Said mum crawling back the last mile
To the cottage above Chapel Stile
“My only mistake
Was attempting Jack’s Rake
So soon after I wed Leo Pyle.”
My dad replied,
Mum and dad then went out for a walk
Sleet stabbed them both in the face like a fork
Their faces were cold
They felt very old
And mum was unable to talk.
Well, he wasn’t very old, but in his love of the Lakes that was almost the only time he ever admitted to bad weather. I’d speak to him perhaps on a Sunday evening. “The forecast looks pretty bad.” “Well, we had a bit of rain hail sleet and snow in the morning,” he’d say, “but I had a fantastic afternoon on the tops.”
And despite everything, it is good to know that up above the Kirkstone Pass last week my dad was enjoying a glorious day in one of his favourite places. Somewhere he’d climbed with his grandchildren, and the very place where he walked with his own father and his brother John on the day before his mother’s funeral in 1973.
Dad was physically immensely active.
He once cycled from Manchester to Oxford in a day – and then chose Cambridge (you can draw your own conclusions). He ran the London Marathon in 2 hours 40 minutes – twice. I can almost relate to that, but I never understood the DIY. In the middle of one Kevin McCloud-style project, I remember how pleased he was when the man in Jewson’s called him back to the till for a trade discount. He did go like the Clappersgate (and it’s hard to understand that he’s stopped).
Intellectually, too, he was never at rest. The first Pyle to stay at school beyond 14, he got a First in Manchester and a doctorate in Cambridge, before going on to lecture at Imperial and a chair in Reading. Science was immensely important and creative for him – from coal to crumpets – and he was doing almost as much teaching and research in retirement as ever. An internationalist, his father learnt Chinese aged 80, and I’m sure my dad would have done the same! No surprise that he was teaching Spanish and learning Italian, although his puns in every language were atrocious.
Now my dad did really believe that people matter; and people should act.
Not strident, but deeply committed to social justice. I think the most poignant messages I’ve read this week have been from South American scientists whose careers he helped to rebuild when they were refugees in the 1970s. Whether it was nuclear weapons, the Labour Party – from which he resigned – the development charity CAFOD to whom half our retiring collection goes, the Ambleside Climate Change forum, or as chair of Churches Together (and that hardly scratches the surface of his activities) - it’s because he spent them for others that his 67 years were so full and so fulfilled.
And of course he knew a huge number of people in both Dorking and Henley, and especially up here too.
And family was everything to him, ever since his eyes met my mum’s across a college room apparently crowded with Catholic Socialists, or Socialist Catholics perhaps. He was particularly delighted with the grandchildren, from Dylan (number one) to beautiful Alice (number nine). His laptop ground to a halt under the increasing megapixels of each new baby. What a shame that he will never meet the next little boy due in July. He would have loved that day.
There aren’t many regrets for the past – he was a remarkable man, and it was a great life – but a million regrets for the future.
But despite those regrets, my mum’s choice of readings today reflects his conviction that the claims of the resurrection are believable and true.
A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions, or in his list of achievements, however distinguished, but the measure of a man is the quality of his relationships. Leo Pyle was a modest and lovely man; the most loving and supportive of fathers; an inspiring and much-loved grandfather; and we will miss him tremendously.
CJP 4th April 2008