In addition to his passion for Haydn, he had a scholar’s approach and an encyclopaedic knowledge.Food and wine came a very close second. The books on wine in Hurford’s library nearly outnumbered the books on music, and these were accompanied by bottles of the real stuff, all numbered, probably catalogued, and kept in orderly racks under the staircase It was Hurford who introduced me to pudding wines. I remember, when visiting the Haydn Festival at Eisenstadt and Esterhaza, his insistence that we try the pudding wines at every meal.Hurford was a keen follower of cricket, owning a complete collection of Wisden, the older volumes inherited from his father. He had been a skilled oarsman, having rowed for Eton and his college, Gonville and Caius.As part of his work on the QEII Conference Centre, Hurford worked with Wendy Barron, the curator of the Government Art Collection, to choose the centre’s pictures, and they commissioned several original artworks, including a large mural by Eduardo Paolozzi. Hurford had always been interested in art in buildings and through Barron he became a Trustee of the Public Art Commission Agency, on which he served from 1989 to 1993.
Before that he was a member of the Arts Council Special Projects Committee from 1986 to 1988.Derek SugdenJames Hurford was the ideal companion at a concert, writes Dr Jeffrey Tobias. He was thoroughly well informed and generally with the appropriate scholarly book (invariably out of print) in his hands. A picnic would usually materialise, particularly if there had been time in the summer months to meet beforehand on the steps of the Albert Memorial.A great lover of Haydn (above all), Beethoven, Messiaen and Steve Reich, he was equally fierce in his disdain for other “lesser” musicians, for opera generally, and Mozart in particular, whom he once sniffily dismissed to me as a composer who “might have been quite good if he’d lived long enough”. He was a tremendous champion of 20th-century music – the more difficult the better.James David Kinahan Hurford, architect: born 17 September 1945; MBE 1988; married 1971 Katharine Storry; died London 29 January 1997.. Tristan Hawkins wrote by day and went home to write by night.
By day, as creative director of Rapport Learning, the specialist promotion and publishing company of which he was a founder, he was a constant source of ideas for educationally led projects, from initial presentations through to the final product’s vast volumes of copy By night, he wrote novels. His first, Pepper, was published by HarperCollins as a Flamingo Original paperback, in November 1993 Hawkins was then 30.
It attracted many favourable reviews. The story of a hard- living, hard-drinking advertising executive who spends a great deal of time around favourite Soho haunts, it had woven into it deft street knowledge with an incisive and compassionate understanding of contemporary relationships. It also announced Hawkins, in the words of an Independent on Sunday reviewer, as “a young writer with talent to burn”.After leaving Newcastle University with a degree in Philosophy, Hawkins had joined the circulation department of Centaur Publishing in a temporary capacity. One day he plucked up the courage to criticise his publisher’s copy for a new subscription letter Given half an hour to produce something better, he did.
