Professor Alfred Felix Landon Beeston 'Freddie' (1911-1995)

Freddie in the North Quad of St John's College, Oxford with Professor Jacques Ryckmans (left) and Professor Mahmud al-Ghul (right). 1982.

The Laudian Chair of Arabic carried with it a professorial fellowship at St. John's College, and Freddie later wrote 'nothing in my career has given me more pleasure and comfort than membership of that friendly and generous society.' This photograph was probably taken after the Seminar for Arabian Studies, which in 1982 met in Oxford. Over many years, Freddie invited colleagues working on South Arabian epigraphy to spend some days at St John's after each Seminar in order to discuss particular problems or points of interest which each had encountered recently in the inscriptions. Professor Jacques Ryckmans (Louvain) was one of the foremost South Arabian epigraphists, (see his obituary in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 35, 2005), as was Professor Mahmud al-Ghul, then Vice-President of Yarmouk University, who died, alas, the following year. These three, together with Professor Walter Müller of Marburg (who may have been taking the photograph) published the Sabaic Dictionary in the same year as this photograph was taken, 1982.

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