In recent decades reductions in per capita funding to Australia's universities, and the replacement of collegiality with obsolescent notions of corporate managerialism, have reduced the intellectual freedom of academics. After taking early retirement from university I joined the ISAA whose goals are:
The address of ISAA Headquarters is:
PO Box 268
Canberra City ACT 2601
Tel & Fax (02) 6251 5764
ISAA web site.
The following information is supplied for the convenience of ancestor-tracking Holgates who find this site. I have not been curious about my ancestors and relations, so the facts about previous generations came from my mother, who did a small amount of research at Somerset House shortly before she died. She seems to have followed the male lines mainly.
My father was Archibald Holgate, born in Derbyshire (I can't be more exact) on 2 Apr 1906. He married Dora Salthouse on 28 Dec 1932 at Adelaide Street Methodist Church, Blackpool. They had two sons, Philip (8 Dec 1934 - 13 Apr 1993) and me born 10 Oct 1937. Archie was a school-teacher in Derbyshire, and (from 1945) in Devon. He died on 7 Aug 1985. Philip had no children. Archie's father was:
James Holgate, born about 1875 at Wirksworth, Derbyshire. He was a cobbler and had a workroom and shop at Grassmoor, Derbyshire. Archie's mother was Emily Elizabeth Samuel. James and Emily had four children, Alice, Archibald, Florence and Olive. I believe Olive died young. Alice married Harry Ainsworth but they had no children. Florence married Ellis Bolton and had two children, Kenneth and Kathleen.
My mother did not find the first name of James's father. James's mother was a Miss Salt who had previously been married to a Mr Carline.
My mother was Dora Salthouse, 23 Nov 1902 - 21 Mar 1989.
Dora's father was James Salthouse, born 4 Feb 1868, died 1913. James was a printer at the Herald [presumably a Blackpool newspaper] and later owned three shops, one of which was the Imperial Cafe, Bank Hey Street. He built the White House, a hotel [in the English sense of the word] at 102 Adelaide St, and a row of houses apparently called Salthouse Avenue. He was a Freemason and member of the Clifton Lodge No.703.
Dora's mother was Jessie Runcorn, confectioner, of Warrington, who married James in 1900 ("London records"; Vol 8 DE, p.1068). Jessie was born at Warrington on 2 Sept 1874 and died on 25 Dec 1949. Jessie re-married in 1919, aged 33, to Alfred Jones of Liverpool, described as an "engineer". (Jessie's father was Joseph Runcorn, joiner, of Warrington. Her mother was Jane Twaddle.)
James and Jessie had five children: Jessie, Marjorie, Dora, James, and Connie. Jessie married a Mr Lascelles. She was widowed early and they had only one son, Peter, who remained a bachelor, now deceased. Marjorie married a man I knew only as Uncle Victor. They migrated to El Paso USA just after WW2. As far as I know they had no children. Jimmie served in the Royal Air Force, caught malaria in Karachi, was invalided out, and died about 1933.
James's father was Thomas Salthouse a fisherman and boatman. Her mother was Mary Craven. Thomas was coxwain of the "Bessie Jones" [a lifeboat?] which in 1863 rescued the entire crew of the brig Lemnos. In 1880 the Bessie Jones was wrecked but all crew survived. Thomas and Mary had five children, James, Ezekiel, Polly, Edith, and Anthony.
My mother did not find the first name of Thomas's father, but he married a Miss Lightfoot of Accrington.
Samuel. Emily's mother was called Stephens. Emily had siblings: Henrietta, Edward, Polly (married George Day), and Edith (married Ben Mosley). Back.
Carline. There were Carlines already in James's family - Mary, Herbert, Edwin and "Aunt Mary Ann". Back.
Twaddle. My mother said Jane came from Berwick-upon-Tweed and the name Twaddle derived from the Scottish surname Tweedale. Family folklore told of a relative who was a baker in Edinburgh, reputed to have invented the "Cream Cracker" biscuit. Back.
Well … that's our claim to fame. It's all I know.
Top.My brother held important positions at Birbeck College, London. As a dedicated scholar he fought against the grocer-shop mentality imposed on universities during the 1980s. The following obituary was written by a colleague, John Haigh and published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, A (1994) 157, Part 1, 151-4.
Philip Holgate was born in Chesterfield [England] on December 8th, 1934. His father Archibald was a schoolmaster and his mother Dora looked after the family, including Philip's brother Alan. When Philip was 11 years old, the family moved to Devon, and Philip went to Newton Abbot Grammar School, before entering the University College of the South West (now Exeter University) in 1952 to read mathematics. He obtained a PGCE from King's College, London, and taught mathematics and physics at Burgess Hill School, Hampstead, for five years.
During his period as a school-teacher, Philip attended statistics courses at University College London, but his career as a statistician did not begin until he joined the Scientific Civil Service at Rothamsted in 1961. He made remarkable progress: joining as an Assistant Experimental Officer, he moved to the Nature Conservancy and was a Senior Scientific Officer before his appointment at Birkbeck College as a Lecturer in 1967. His Readership came in 1969, and he celebrated his 36th birthday as a Professor with over 30 refereed papers published in academic journals. By the time of his death, from a heart attack, on April 13th, 1993, he had published about 100 papers.
As befits his early career, the themes of biology and ecology dominate his work. A few examples illustrate the range of applications: an estimate of the basal area of a forest from the number of trees that subtend an angle greater than 8; the use of the sum of the ages at death of members of a species that die over a year as an estimate of the population size; the time that mice spend in a given area; statistically, how to distinguish a natural forest from a plantation that has lost regularity through random thinning, followed by new growth. His contributions to statistical theory include several that arose directly from ecology: properties of certain distributions, typically bivariate discrete; tests of randomness of spatial distributions in the plane; how the manner of data collection can vitally affect the analysis. His 1969 Biometrika paper 'Species frequency distributions' is a fine example of a mathematician clearing up loose arguments. In a number of analyses of stochastic processes in biology, he made excellent use of numerical calculations to demonstrate central points. His direct style, focused on practical issues, makes these papers a particular pleasure to read.
He did his deepest work in non-associative algebras. The pioneers were S. N. Bernstein in 1922 and I. M. H. Etherington in 1939. When Philip read 'Population algebras' (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 1981), Etherington noted in the discussion that, since 1949, 'all the best new ideas have come from Holgate or his disciples'. The recent monograph Mathematical Structures in Population Genetics by Y. I. Lyubich points to Philip's seminal work, with particular highlights being two papers in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, namely 'Characterisations of genetic algebras' (1972) and 'Genetic algebras satisfying Bernstein's stationarity principle' (1975).
At the time of his death, he had plans to develop the statistical applications of the Latin squares associated with certain quasigroups, seeking a bridge between the pure and applied side of the amalgamated Mathematics and Statistics Departments at Birkbeck. His standing in this general field was recognized by many recent invitations to lecture at colloquia abroad; in the past few years, he spent periods at Montpellier, Sao Paulo, Oviedo and Ouagadougou.
It takes someone of his exceptional qualities to guide late developing and part-time students to research success in the areas of theoretical statistics and probability, yet he supervised 14 students to doctoral degrees, and there are several others for whom his death is particularly untimely. His lectures, in fields as diverse as experimental design, numerical analysis, geometric probability and stochastic calculus, were clear and thoughtful. He was external examiner for 25 doctoral theses and served 14 universities as external examiner in statistics, always constructively and motivated to see that fair judgments were made.
In addition to his activities in teaching and research, he worked very hard for the general academic community. At Birkbeck, it suffices to note that he was twice Dean of Science and three times Vice-Dean of Science, as well as Department Head for over 20 years, to recognize that, afortiori, numerous other positions of responsibility came his way. Within the department, he had the trust and co-operation of his colleagues; as financial pressures grew, he fought hard to maintain high standards in both teaching and research. He was profoundly saddened by the reductions in staff numbers and the amount of mathematics being taught, and by the lack of opportunities to recruit new staff. Baroness Blackstone, Master of Birkbeck, writes:
'Philip worked selflessly for Birkbeck, not just for his own Department. He could always be relied upon to take a completely objective view of the issues being debated. He always argued thoughtfully, taking account of the common interest; and had more integrity than almost anybody I have ever worked with.'
Philip will also be missed by many professional bodies. He edited Series B for four years and served on the Research Section Committee and the General Applications Section Committee of our Society; he spent six years on the Council of the London Mathematical Society, represented the Committee of Professors of Statistics on the Joint Mathematical Council (of which he was Treasurer) and has been President of the British Region of the Biometric Society. As Vice-President of the Birkbeck Association of University Teachers, he had the respect of academic staff, and of the governing body. He helped to initiate the series of popular lectures of the London Mathematical Society and chaired that Committee for five years.
He lived a full life, with a wide range of relaxations. A good Saturday might begin with a train to Derbyshire, continue with a 12 mile walk in the beloved countryside of his youth, and end with an evening at their cottage in Berkshire with Susannah, an enjoyable meal, and listening to music. His enthusiasms included travel by train, holidays in France, real ale, old films, photography, the history of mathematics and American football. He was very knowledgeable about etchings, having a particular affection for Pissarro and Jongkind, and could read many languages. He was a man of exceptionally high principles, manifest trustworthiness and, again to quote Baroness Blackstone:
"Everyone greatly respected him, even though they may not always have agreed with him; but usually they did agree, because of his powers of gentle persuasion". I am grateful to Susannah Brown for her personal details of Philip's life, to Baroness Blackstone for her comments, and to Andris Abakuks who supplied much useful information.
John Haigh.
Recently (June 2005) a fellow statistician, Julian Leslie, wrote to me with memories of the time he spent in Philip's department at Birkbeck College. The following extract is published with his permission.
"For such a long time I have been wanting to tell you just how devastated I was when I learnt of Philip's death. I spent 16 years with him as my Head of Department and he was amongst the finest people I have had the good fortune to know. His style of running the department suited me and I have never met a person who was more transparently honest than he. He was the ideal head of department, he commanded respect by sheer force of intellect. He would typically take on the awful administrative jobs and not burden us with them. I was particularly struck by the weight he gave to simple words - he didn't use words associated with extremes of emotion. He somehow rejuvenated the spoken language for me - he was interested in telling you the facts stripped of emotion and innuendo. His words were carefully chosen, appropriate and full of information. When he told me about disputes he was involved in he was always careful to give me a scrupulously balanced account, to the point where he would sometimes put the case for the opposition more forcefully than his own point of view. The effect was that you immediately understood the problem. As you know, Philip also had a marvellous memory (this of course made it easier for him than for others, to recall all events leading up to disputes!) and this sometimes meant I had difficultly talking to him. So often I would open a conversation with him on some topic and make a few remarks, then Philip would come out with a string of penetrating comments, it being clear to me that he had already thought of my arguments and dismissed them. This would put me ill at ease and I felt that anything I said was lightweight in comparison. I know it was never his intention to have this affect on me, but I couldn't help reacting that way. His influence on me has been enormous and enduring. When I have dealt with people as acting head of department I have tried to listen to and represent their views as honestly as Philip used to in comparable situations. I found Philip a natural leader and I have realised why - I have already mentioned the impact of his intellect. When your head of department has such a broad yet penetrating knowledge, you are happy to surrender your judgement in certain matters to such people."
Julian Leslie
Top.Ballet is an art form of great vitality, comprising movement, music, scenery, costume and lighting. You can take from it what suits your mood of the moment - the colour; the dynamics; the mobile sculpture; the emotions; the psycho-analytic overtones (preferably all simultaneously).
Dancers and dance enthusiasts come from all walks of life and tend to be great people - especially the dancers. Years of dedication, striving for individual excellence within a team environment, coping with injuries, etc. produces very special people.
Melbourne is the home of The Australian Ballet with its associated School. Societies of friends exist in most Australian states, meeting to hear dancers, choreographers, set designers, conductors, etc talk about their work; facilitating closer involvement with the ballet world; and raising funds to assist the Company and School.
The relevant group in Victoria is the Australian Ballet Society Inc. Its office is on the 4th floor of the Ballet Centre, over the footbridge behind the State Theatre.
Top.Mooroolbark is a suburb of Melbourne, about 30 kilometres from the city centre. It was part of the territory of the Wurunjerri or Yarra Yarra people and the name means "red earth" in their language. The first grazing leases were registered in the late 1830s. The area was proclaimed a parish in 1855 and became part of the Shire of Lillydale in 1872. The railway arrived in 1882. After reorganisation of local government some years ago, Mooroolbark is within the Shire of Yarra Ranges.
Melbourne is a long way from Mooroolbark, but makes up for this by being the home of :
The Australian Ballet
A great Arts Centre
A great State Library
and many other treasures. Melbourne also has a very active professional and amateur music world.
For views of the city and further information see e.g.
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/
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