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Obituary: Dr Ted Harrison

by
17 January 2025

Ted Harrison with the steam engine that is the subject of his final, yet to be completed, book

Ted Harrison with the steam engine that is the subject of his final, yet to be completed, book

Canon Robin Gill writes:

THE son of a clergyman, Ted (Edward Peter Graham) Harrison was an occasional contributor to Church Times, and led a remarkable number of different and talented lives.

From childhood, he always had a gift for drawing, producing caricatures of his teachers which may or may not have been appreciated. Aged 60, he concentrated on this, taking an MA in fine art (focused, he judged, too much upon philosophy than on works of art). Subsequently, his religious art was exhibited in churches and cathedrals: permanent installations are at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals; other artworks are deposited in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

It was, however, his 20 years working as a broadcaster and producer, especially on BBC Radio 4, which made his voice familiar to a wider public. His skills were used by both ITV for their series The Human Factor and Channel 4 for the 1988 Lambeth Conference; and he was known more widely on the BBC as its religious correspondent. Significantly, starting in 1991, he was appointed presenter of Radio 4’s disability series Does He Take Sugar? Unlike presenters on similar programmes, he was not visibly disabled. Yet ,he was a remarkable transplant survivor.

In the mid-1980s, Ted’s kidneys had failed. After some five years of haemodialysis, his surgeon at Guy’s located a kidney suitable for transplant. He said that it was not a perfect match, but might give him an extra 15 years of life. But the kidney failed to function after the operation. After an agonising four weeks, it began to work on Easter Monday.

As he wrote in a feature in the 9 April 2020 issue: “This spring, I celebrate a landmark anniversary that I never expected. My transplant and I have been together for 30 years. It is older than all my grandchildren — it even exceeds the age of some of the hospital doctors I have seen of late. And, while other ailments of old age are catching up, the kidney still works well.”

By the time he died, Ted was probably one of the longest-surviving kidney-transplant recipients in the world. He wrote every year anonymously to the family of the donor, knowing that his gift was their tragedy. The experience shaped and deepened many of his subsequent books and artworks, with their themes of death and resurrection.

Ted met Helen when they were students at the University of Kent. They married and, in 2018, celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in their much-loved second home in Shetland. When I arrived at the university in 1992, they were back there, Helen working as a senior administrator and Ted as a Ph.D. student, on the intriguing subject of stigmata in the past and present.

Historical examples of those regarded, by themselves and/or others, as having received stigmata — ranging from St Francis to Padre Pio — were well documented. Ted, however, used his journalistic skills and contacts to track down a mixed group of living people who were so regarded, some religious and others, curiously, not. He considered a number of “explanations” (some suggesting chicanery), but, ever the professional journalist, he resisted making value judgements, just as he did in his books on the cults surrounding the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Elvis Presley.

In the book Letters to a Friend I Never Knew (1995), addressed to his donor, he expressed his own nuanced faith well. “When we use words to express emotion or mystery, I fear we are almost always doomed to fail. Words can never do justice to those things deep inside ourselves which we want to express. Poetry can be a key that can unlock this emotion, though the words themselves can often be mundane. . .

“[Death] is, to all of us left on earth, a mystery. . . I am always a bit suspicious when people say they know the answers. Particularly those who know the answers to questions of faith. For even the Christian faith, when explained in words, can at best only be described in inadequate myths, allegories and stories. . .

“Perhaps . . . faith is not blindly accepting the unprovable, but graciously accepting the unknown [on his ‘miraculous’ Easter 1990 experience].”

The subject of Ted’s final book was a steam engine (with which he is pictured). He rode on its footplate as a boy when it worked out of his home in Torrington. Some years ago, he started writing its life story, in the first person. Sadly, he was unable to finish it last year; his widow, Helen, hopes to do so.

He was a talented friend whom I and many others will miss.

Dr Ted Harrison died on 3 January, aged 75.

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