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ERobin Farquharson was famous for his consistency. He caused concern and sympathy in equal measure. His aim in life, according to an anonymous writer in the Oxford student newspaper, was “to be controversial in words. The biography described his life as “dogged, indomitable” and “fierce, inconsistent”. Perhaps. Later to become a prize-winning sportsman who was often recognized as a professional, he died at the age of 42 in a squat fire on April Fools’ Day 1973. The poet Aidan Andrew Dun called him “a stranger among foreigners … the greatest ruin of a man”. For the anti-psychiatry RD Laing, he was “too clever and too stupid”.
Farquharson once joked that he was born a member of the South African race. He was not entirely wrong. His father founded a prominent law firm in Pretoria; high-ranking politicians often came for dinner. He went to high schools – future students were the writer Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk – and got himself a pilot’s license, before he turned 16, he entered the university. Later at Oxford he studied PPE, hung out with Bertrand Russell and Rupert Murdoch (a self-proclaimed Marxist at the time), and shared digs with the future chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson. Intellectually he is considered to be very athletic but, on the verge of joining All Souls College, he spoils his luck by calling the college administrator to tell him that he has a message from God that he must share.
Like Lewis Carroll a century before his birth, Farquharson was interested in mathematics and voting systems, believing that the need for more directly from the electorate than from parliament. His work earned him respect from philosophers such as John Searle, Michael Dummett and Amartya Sen, as well as a major award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has appeared at panels and conferences with key figures in finance, holography, computer science and artificial intelligence. His eloquence and ability to crunch numbers led to a popular segment on the BBC’s late-night polls in 1955.
In the early 1960s, Farquharson was busy as a fast bowler in South Africa. He was one of the leading lights in the country’s Liberal Party (which was more left-wing than its name suggests), discovered the writings of the columnist Bessie Head and her journalist husband, Harold, and conspired with the poet Dennis Brutus in his successful campaign to stop South Africa from banning the international game. He kept a non-discriminatory company, refused to hide his homosexuality, and was often harassed by the police who thought they would confiscate his passport. Later, in London, he was able to blow most of his inheritance in order to raise money to set up a gang to cross the racist country. (He was drunk by patrons in an Irish pub who swore they could supply him with bombs and weapons.)
In M Syd Rosen’s fascinating, meticulously researched biography – the first to date – Farquharson seems to have been everywhere in the 60s and early 70s. Meetings with Nobel Prize winners and the Department of Defense. Chat with magician Frater Choronzon and dianetics advocate George Hay. In the well-known places of the culture like the Arts Lab on Drury Lane, explaining the religion of Rupert Bear in the middle of the demimonde of London to a reporter from the Sunday Times, in the establishment of the Situationists Housing Association, making an experimental film acceptable to Palestine that ended, Rosen says, “with Israel pushing Palestine down and making movements”
Was Farquharson a brilliant wanderer, another Timothy Leary – a US student whose career was changed by drugs? Is he a class fault by running away from his blessed life? His 1968 memoir, Drop Out!, recalls being beaten by a gang of teenagers – “Now I was a Negro. Now I was a Jew. Finally, finally.” Insanity, poorly managed by mental institutions, forced him: he claimed to be the king of Zembla – the world that appears in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire; arrested at Didcot station for not wearing clothes while waiting for a train; he had no interest, especially in pelting stones, in beating the police – or friends.
Rosen, who also founded Jargon – a long-forgotten project focused on the Jewish diaspora – first heard about Farquharson from random drinkers in London pubs. He wrote: “I was attracted by this story and I was disgusted by it. Considering the chaotic life of his subject and that the Cambridge college that has many things about him will not release it because it is “too painful”, he has done very well to recreate the events of the “mad scholar”, someone “on a trip without a ticket”, a culture that he followed and in the end was consumed by his old age. “I loved big business,” said Farquharson. Did he begin.
