Prof. L. G. Pocock was a noted scholar

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33739, 11 January 1975, Page 12

Prof. L. G. Pocock was a noted scholar

Professor Lewis Greville Pocock, whose death occurred on Thursday after a short illness, was a distinguished professor of classics at Canterbury University College from 1928 to 1955 who had a world-wide reputation as a scholar. From 1952 on, working on Samuel Butler’s theories about the Odyssey, published 60 years earlier but invariably treated with contempt, Professor Pocock devoted himself to the study of the Odyssey, and through it, of Hesiod and the Iliad. In two books, “The Sicilian Origin of the Odyssey” (1957) and “Reality and Allegory in the Odyssey” (1959), he sought to show that all the fictitiously named places in the Odyssey, and many of those in Hesiod, were real places. These, he argued, were still to be seen and photographed, and the origins of European literature and the Odyssey in particular had been consistently misunderstood and mis-stated from 500 B.C. to the present day.

Professor Pocock had no doubt that his closely reasoned and mainly factual arguments were right, and that the discoveries, to which his realistic and topographical approach had led, were by far the most important made in the history of literature. He expanded on his beliefs

in a number of articles, two of them published in "The Press,” in which he dealt with the House of Hades and the Rock of Gibraltar. Professor Pocock was fond of saying that his beliefs would not be accepted by “the establishment” for at least 20 years; but that if he did not achieve immortality by reason of them, it would be a gross swindle on somebody’s part. In 1955, Professor Pocock! spent some time in Sicily, getting material “on the ground” to support his theories.

Professor Pocock was much in demand as a deviser of original Latin mottoes. These include those on the arms of the City of Christchurch (“Fide Condita, Frutu

Beata, Spe Fortis”), Christ’s College ("Bene Tradita, Bene Servanda”), the Cashmere, Aranui, and Bumside high schools, and the Canterbury Aero Club ("Callum Patet, Ibimus Iliac”), the latter a quotation from Ovid.

Professor Pocock was bom at Rodenbosch, South Africa, in 1890, but was educated at Cheltenham College and University College, London, where he was lecturer in classics before coming to Christchurch in 1928 to take up the chair of classics at Canterbury College. He saw service in the First; World War with the Horse Artillery and Cape Mounted Rifles in German W’est Africa, and with the Royal Field Artillery in France and Italy, winning the Military Cross. In his younger days, Professor Pocock was a noted amateur actor. He is still remembered as Professor Higgins in a Repertory Society production of Shaw’s “Pygmalion." Professor Pocock is survived by Mrs Pocock, who for •many years taught at St Andrew’s College; by his son, Dr J. G. A. Pocock, who was! head of the political science department at the University of Canterbury, and is now professor of history at Baltimore University; and by his daughter, Mrs P. Wheeler (Wellington), well known as a journalist.