Bernard Noble

Bernard John Noble OBE (5 February 1928 – 5 October 2004) was a teacher and university lecturer, a translator of works of philosophy and international jurisprudence, a senior ranking United Nations employee, first in Beirut, Lebanon and then in The Hague, Netherlands, and an author.

Biography

Noble was born in Bromley, Kent to parents of modest circumstances. His father, John, worked variously as a civil servant, an unpublished novelist and as a caterer, running a café in Battersea Park. Noble entered King's College School (KCS) in Wimbledon in 1939 on a scholarship in what would now be considered an unconventional way: having "tied" in the examination with another boy, they were given the same puzzle each to complete: whoever finished it first, would win the scholarship.

Suffering from asthma, Noble was excused sport and used his time to discover model aeroplanes, literature, music and languages. Hospitalised for his asthma, he found himself sharing a ward with a young German airman; he left KCS in 1946 to read German and French at Trinity College, Oxford where he had won an open scholarship. His contribution to the war effort was working as aeroplane mechanic at RAF Desford Aerodrome in Leicestershire.

Noble was awarded a First Class Degree in French in 1949 and embarked on a thesis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophical method, first at Oxford and then as Assistant Lecturer at the University of Manchester. In 1956 he finally abandoned the project in order "to seek a post of contemporary urgency, being tired of living in the past", as he wrote to one potential employer. He taught in a school in Switzerland briefly before finding employment as a Lecturer in English at the University of Baghdad. In 1959 he went to Beirut for a summer holiday where he worked on his translation of Max Scheler's On the Eternal in Man and where he met and married Amy Jalkh. He then found a position as Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University and, in 1961, the year his first son, Bruno, was born, became Translator-Reviser and later Deputy Head, Press and Publications at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Beirut. He found himself translating into English from French and, occasionally, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch and revising translations into English from Arabic.

In 1967, the family moved to The Hague in the Netherlands where Noble had been appointed First Secretary to the International Court of Justice and where his second son, Marc, was born. Noble’s work at the Court had some of the same multi-lingual, multi-cultural aspects as his work with UNRWA but now involved judges and staff from more than a dozen nations. It took on more of a legal hue, as Noble found himself ever more involved with the complexities of international law; he translated numerous books on the subject from French and Dutch into English. In 1987, he was elected Deputy Registrar to the Court, a position from which he retired in 1994. He was awarded an OBE for services to the International Court of Justice in 1995.

Noble spent the first few years of his retirement writing three broadly biographical books: The Chocolate Tram tells the story of a boy growing up in South London before the war; Young Mortality (cf. Old Mortality) recounts the life of a boy attending KCS in Wimbledon during the war; Talismen is about a student at Oxford after the war. The trilogy is titled Echoes.

Noble developed a love of classical music, of the classical romantics and Wagner in particular, and built a large collection of LPs and CDs many of which were given to KCS who named their new music library after him. His elder son established the Bernard Noble Sculpture Foundation in commemoration of him.

Noble died on 5 October 2004 in The Hague.

Bibliography

• 2002 The Chocolate Tram, Pen Press Publishers Ltd
• 2002 Young Mortality, Pen Press Publishers Ltd
• 2002 Talismen, Pen Press Publishers Ltd