Rae Alfred Earnshaw

Eulogy

 

Dear family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, brothers and sisters, it’s good to see so many here today. We’ve gathered to say our collective farewell to our dearly beloved Rae. It’s our privilege to celebrate his extraordinary and wonderful life, and especially to set our thoughts in a Christian context because that was very important to Rae.

 

We are holding in our thoughts also his brother’s family – Jon Earnshaw, his wife Rachel, their children Paul & Elizabeth and the grandchildren. It is with a deep feeling of loss that we all contemplate Rae’s passing. It is so difficult to adjust to the fact that he is no longer here to give informed opinion and kindly advice. Yet we can be sure that Rae would have wished today to be an occasion for happy confidence in the future.

 

Some in this audience will know Rae as a friend and speaker at local Christadelphian ecclesias around Yorkshire and beyond, the organizer of the Leeds May-Day Family Gatherings in the Great Hall with 1000 attendees, and of many similar events. Others in our audience will know Rae in a quite different way as the energetic architect of numerous technical conferences worldwide, the prolific writer and author of a huge volume of published work in his professional roles at Leeds, Bradford & Glyndwr Universities.

 

Rae was indeed a leading light and world authority on computer graphics. He made lifelong contributions, was a regarded as a pioneer in his field, with worldwide recognition. He was a visiting professor at many universities on different continents, making numerous trips to America, China, Japan, Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India. Rae’s life spanned many worlds and we will attempt to enter some of them. Let’s go to the beginning of our story.

 

Rae Alfred Earnshaw was born on 16th May 1944 in York into a family of Christadelphian origin. The 2nd World War was drawing to a conclusion and times were hard for everyone. Parents Edmund and Fanny, along with Rae and his brother Jon, moved from York to Leeds in 1950. The city of Leeds then remained the focus of Rae’s entire life, despite his extended periods overseas. He attended Chapel Allerton Primary School until 1955, was successful in the 11-plus exams and progressed to Roundhay Grammar School, just walking distance from home. Rae received several school prizes for his work, particularly at A-level where he focussed on Maths, Physics and Chemistry. His younger brother in contrast excelled at music, with virtuoso piano performances on television at a very young age. They were a talented family. Some 55 years later, professor Rae Earnshaw would donate significant funds to Roundhay School for scholarships and achievements. It was typical of his generosity to many students at all stages of their careers. Rae had taken to heart the profound and lasting impact which excellent teachers can have on their pupils.

 

Rae’s choice of Leeds University for a physics degree was based on its reputation for research, the easy commute from home, and perhaps also because his father Edmund worked as a senior technician in the electrical engineering department. The 10,000 Leeds students in 1962 compares with about 40,000 today, a reflection of the massive expansion of higher education, from a mere 5% of the population in the early 60s to more than 40% today. As we might expect, Rae was a gifted student, but his final year was interrupted by a month’s hospitalization. Nevertheless, he was able to do well in his final exams, graduating in 1965, with an invitation to be a postgraduate student in Space Physics at Leeds.

 

Initially, Rae studied high energy cosmic rays, and analysed the data using a newly purchased KDF9 main-frame computer. This enormous “wonder-machine”, housed in a large air-conditioned room on the Leeds campus, was vastly expensive in today’s terms. It could perform about one million operations per second, which seemed impressive at the time. But your hand-held mobile phone will exceed this by a factor more than a thousand with infinitely superior user-friendliness. Such technological leaps are hard to grasp, and it has been said that “the digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even printing”, almost a second industrial revolution.

 

We mention this because Rae played a very significant role in such developments on a worldwide stage for the next 40 years of his career. His PhD was eventually to be in Computer Graphics rather than Astrophysics. He realized quickly that researchers wanted pictures as well as numbers for quick visual comparison of the analysis of datasets. With this insight he began developing the software vigorously.

 

Rae obtained a post in the newly established Electronic Computing Lab at Leeds University, which became significant in developing his career in this new discipline. He made contributions in several areas, including graphics, algorithms, visualization, digital media, and art & design, becoming over time an author, co-author and editor of some 40 books on these topics, not to mention over 200 technical papers in various journals. He became a professor at Bradford University in 1995, but also held visiting professorships overseas.

 

As more powerful computers and workstations became available, the need for visualization became strongly evident. Rae’s early pioneering work in computer graphics then became prominent, and he received many invitations to give lectures overseas. One of these was to Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago in 1976, to present courses on Computer Graphics & Programming Languages. A particular follow-on visit to the conference Siggraph 76 at the University of Pennsylvania fully convinced Rae that his efforts were on the right lines, to unlock the enormous power and vast potential of computers. It was the beginning of a wide international experience in his work-life, which we can highlight with a few examples.

 

In 1984 Rae was invited as Visiting Professor to the People’s Republic of China to give a lecture series on State-of-the-Art in Computer Graphics. It was sponsored by the British Council and the Chinese government, and included visits to the universities of Xian and Shanghai, and to the Chinese university of Hong Kong. The demanding programme filled a month. At Xian alone, Rae gave over 50 hours of lectures in 3-hour long sessions, sometimes two per day, translated into Chinese on a sentence-by-sentence basis for a large audience of deeply-attentive academics. In typical Rae-style, he had provided 800 overhead slides, along with written lecture notes and other illustrative material, all in advance, which the Chinese professors had laboriously translated.

 

Few would understand the difficulties of such cross-cultural ventures, but Rae was certainly up to the challenge. Fascinating visits to the Great Wall of China and the Tombs of the Terra-Cotta Warriors, completed a memorable experience of China as it was only eight years after the cultural revolution.

 

On some of his extended international trips as visiting professor, Rae formed lifelong friendships. This was especially true of the USA. John Dill (now professor emeritus of Simon Fraser University) offered this recent tribute:

 

“Rae was a good friend and long-time colleague. I think of him as a builder – he was not only a good researcher but worked on creating new structures, new combinations of fields. He was a ‘doer’ – he got things done; once he set his mind on a goal, he would work effectively and tirelessly to achieve that goal.  … He was a good friend, sharing with me much helpful information on recovering from back surgery – based on his own experience. He was also generous in helping others – academically, personally and financially”

 

The story of Rae’s Japanese trips is fascinating. On his many visits Rae was hosted by Professor Tosiyasu Kunii, a senior figure at the University of Tokyo with an international reputation. He was deeply impressed by Rae’s many lecture courses and his work with students in various locations. The result was that Rae was eventually honoured by being appointed a Goodwill Envoy of the Fukushima Prefecture in 1991 for his extensive contributions.

 

On the subsequent visits of Professor Kunii to the UK, he was hosted often by Rae’s elderly mother, and the two of them got along extremely well. I have several photographs of this unlikely association. In Prof Kunii’s words, she was “a very gracious lady”, a description I can warmly agree with having experienced her thoughtful kindness a number of times.

 

Perhaps we can mention also Rae’s visits to the Middle East. The background is that Rae was trained by the Quality Assurance Agency as both a Subject and an Institutional Reviewer, and had gained considerable experience. This work on Standards in education was actually very important to him. Later when the QAA was contracted to do overseas reviews, he made many visits to Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia & Egypt, where universities and courses required accreditation by professional bodies, widening Rae’s experience yet further.

 

Such intensive work began to fill his life. Perhaps I can include comments of a more personal nature at this point. Rae never experienced the comforts of married life and family. Although he had yearned deeply for such things they proved elusive, as happens for some people. But he maintained a resignation and ready humour about this matter. I know that Rae had very high standards, and his expectations of himself were almost impossible to meet.

 

Rae was very close to his mother Fanny Earnshaw who lived just opposite at Winnipeg Place, and he took devoted care of her as she grew older. She was very much a part of his life, and he included her in many of his career events and associations. Rae’s father Edmund had died at 68, and so Fanny was a widow for more than 20 years, eventually passing away at age 90.

 

Because Rae lived alone for so many years in his later life, his friends were particularly important to him. He was always very communicative, usually by email, and often on the phone. I’m happy that Rae had such supportive neighbours, as he forged his relatively lonely path through life. Winnipeg Place, his lifetime home, was a quiet cul-de-sac of a few houses where everybody looked out for each other.

 

There were regular acts of kindness and consideration which made such a big difference to Rae’s life. When he was overseas the neighbours kept surveillance of his property, and when Rae was finally taken ill with a stroke, his neighbours John & Ginny McDermott spotted the problem and took him promptly to hospital. In the list of such kind neighbours are Isabelle Jackson, John & Mercedes Scire, Annie Whitehead & Rob Cope, and Granville & Linda Thwaites, some present here today. We say our warm thank-you to them all.

 

I’m similarly happy that Rae’s professional life was richly blessed with colleagues and close friends on whom he could depend. Most of these maintained a regular contact long after Rae’s retirement. Rae would frequently organize meals and get-togethers. The Zoom meetings with former colleagues during the Covid era persisted long after the pandemic abated. Rae, the great facilitator in his professional life, continued the same vigorously in retirement.

 

I don’t think that Rae troubled to learn much of the languages of the countries where he spent time. Chinese, Japanese and Arabic were a bridge too far. But there was an amusing excursion into American English. I’m grateful to Professor Jack Bresenham for this story. Jack became a long-term friend and colleague ever since Rae first visited him at IBM’s development laboratory in Research Triangle, North Carolina in the 1970s. Jack had much experience of the UK during his 3-year assignment to IBM Hursley in the early 1980s.

 

Jack told Rae that he had once thanked a conference presenter for doing “quite well”. He insisted that in the USA “quite well” enthusiastically implied “superior performance”. But Rae subsequently explained to Jack, at very great length, that in British-English “quite well” actually implied “not bad, but you could have done better”! Jack said he was so grateful after this for Rae’s never-ending decoding of British-English subtleties, in relation to their “two nations separated by a common language”.

 

Many tributes to Rae have poured in from around the world, and testify to his influence on so many people, both students & colleagues, who remain grateful for the opportunities he created for them. Some have said that their career had become possible, simply because Rae had believed in them at an early stage. Rae achieved this result by organizing very many graphics workshops around the world with prominent attendees and with publications that continue to be referenced. Jack Bresenham summed up Rae as “a terrific organizer, author and educator, his many contributions will be long and fondly remembered”.

 

You may have noticed from the photo on your service sheet that Rae is wearing a dark suit. In fact, this was quite rare, and Rae’s signature suit was most often a very light colour, almost white. Because he was very tall, he stood out brightly in many photographs, towering over his colleagues. The inevitable happened on one European funding visit in Eindhoven. A red wine was accidentally spilled all over Rae, suit, shirt and socks, and he had no alternative attire.

 

The story is that he disappeared into the hotel kitchen, and reappeared 45 minutes later with his suit and shirt pressed, gleaming white in pristine condition. This impossible transformation is testimony both to Rae’s initiative and the exceptional skills of the Dutch hotel staff. I’m grateful to Rae’s close friend Alan Haigh for supplying this story. He had worked with Rae over some twenty years at both Leeds and Bradford universities, giving Rae excellent project support and remaining thereafter a close personal friend in retirement.

 

In mention of “retirement” we seriously doubt that Rae actually believed in it. After finishing full-time work as Pro Vice-Chancellor at Bradford University, he embarked at age 68 on a new career as Visiting Professor of Creative Industries & Interactive Technologies at Glyndwr University in 2012. The background is that the late Professor Peter Excell, who had been a close friend of Rae’s in their time together at Bradford, had invited him to expand the work of the relatively new Centre for Creative Industries. With Rae’s usual vigour there followed many productive interdisciplinary collaborations providing opportunity to integrate Technology into the Arts and Media worlds. It resulted in a dozen publications and a major open-access volume, all a wonderful testimony to Peter, Rae and their colleagues. Peter’s wife Dianne is here today.

 

My outline list of Rae’s various career appointments includes 32 overlapping roles of astonishing diversity. But the bare bones are his appointments at Bradford as Professor of Electronic Imaging & Media Communications in 1995, as Dean of the School of Informatics in 1999, and as Pro Vice-Chancellor of Strategic Systems Development in 2004. And following this, his appointment at Glyndwr. But then came a rather unusual final addition – the role of Visiting Fellow at St John’s College, Durham. The Durham experience gives particular insights into Rae.

 

His ideology was both simple and profound. He performed all his work, both religious and secular, with the Christian ethic “as unto the Lord”, to use our New Testament phrase. In fact, he told me that he thought a separation of the religious and secular domains of life was artificial. So he went about all his endeavours with an intensity and thorough meticulousness which would leave most of us breathless.

 

Most of Rae’s friends will be unaware that he made an excursion into the world of Theology, completing an MA degree at Durham University in his mid-70s. He formed a whole new raft of friendships with the academic staff at Durham. This adventure was no doubt a part of Rae’s profound belief that “education is life itself”. But I’m also convinced that it was an expression of Rae’s ongoing spiritual quest – a deep-seated yearning for a wider understanding of the Christian world, for unifying principles underlying everything.

 

Rae was a sensitive individual, always conscious of other people’s needs in respect of religious matters. He took great care never to offend or bring into question the limited, if sincerely held, views of his contemporaries. Rae’s Christian convictions were deeply important to him. He remained true to his roots, and his life’s endeavours in their totality were an expression of his deep-seated faith in a Christian purpose underlying our experience of the world.

 

During his final years, Rae completed a first draft of an autobiography entitled The Sciences and the Arts in a Digital World, which was essentially the story of his professional life. He was planning to make the work available on the internet when overtaken by his final illness. We are taking steps to make the work available in electronic form (contact elvin.nix@hotmail.com), with the help of Professor Colin Mellors, a previous Pro Vice-Chancellor at Bradford and another close and valued friend of Rae.

 

I would like to conclude by quoting a few words from 1 Corinthians Ch.13, which always retain their wonderful force: “Love is patient, love is kind… it is not self-seeking… it rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” Rae was truly an example of this, always generous and considerate, thinking of the needs of others, of how he could help, of what he could contribute. There was a generous compassion in all his interactions.

 

The Christian Faith was central to Rae’s life from earliest youth. He left us in no doubt that this was his focus. His hope lay in the Resurrection and in the Kingdom of God; his life was a steady and enduring demonstration of that faith, an example for us to contemplate. He was a lovely person. We will certainly miss him, but our happy memories will endure.

 

At the end of life, the Christian faith does make a huge difference, because it encompasses a broader purpose and future. Can anyone face the end of life with complete equanimity? Rae did manage considerable calmness and composure after his specialist had pronounced an “end-of-life diagnosis” with just months remaining. In fact, it turned out to be much shorter, but we were able to have some good conversations with Rae until just a few days before his death. Both Alan Haigh and I were able to reassure Rae that his life had been wonderfully productive, that he had fought a good fight of faith on every front. He seemed content with that, and at peace. Rae passed away peacefully in the evening of 22nd April in the presence of loving friends at his bedside in Olivet Care Home in Birmingham, where his mother had also ended her days 20 years earlier.

 

Occasions such as this are a time to reflect on the privilege of a life which is God-centred. Rae would have wished us to think on these things today, and to leave here refreshed. His conviction to the end was centred in the words of the Lord, “whoever hears my word and believes that the Father has sent me has eternal life, and will not be condemned; but has crossed over from death to life …”. Such is the wonderful hope of the gospel, which Rae embraced wholeheartedly.

 

Thank you, everyone, for your presence today, for spending precious time with the church and family, and with Rae’s many friends and colleagues; for the expressions of sympathy; for saying our present farewell to our beloved Rae. He now “sleeps in Christ’’ awaiting the day of resurrection and the dawning of new hope and life in the presence of the Lord whom he followed.