Bob Chenciner

Bob Chenciner was a scholar, a dealer (antiques as well as business to business acquisitions) a Caucasian traveller, a lecturer and a freelance legal case worker, specialising in writing reports for asylum appeal cases. He could appear somewhat vague and amused, if not eccentric, but this was mere social camouflage which allowed him to survive a difficult childhood and then determinedly lead a life of his choice. He worked from home, in one of those elegant streets that run down from Amwell street towards Kings Cross.

Bob always looked healthy and happy, like some vision of a well-fed monk from England’s golden past. His eyes glowed with bright animation, his cheeks shone with an apple-red glow, his large mouth was usually curved in a wide smile, all framed with a mane of wind-blown white hair. His dress sense was erratic: some days squeezed into shorts for a game of squash, or dressed for a roller-blading circuit of Hyde Park, but now and then he could be spotted in a well-tailored tweed suit, off to attend some academic conference. He was a regular fixture at Vienna, Oxford and the former Soviet Union, at international gatherings of textile historians, food history conferences and anything and everything to do with the Caucasus, of which he was an authority. Bob was made a Senior Associate Member of St Antony’s College Oxford in 1987 and an Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dagestan Scientific Centre in 1990.

On the streets of Islington he could be a liability, for he did not so much dominate conversations but annex them, but as all his many interests were fascinating, I never left off without learning something. The titles of his dozen books were often wilfully whimsical, for he loved provoking as well as engaging with academic life. But Dagestan: Traditional and Survival (1997), Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade (2011), Kaitag: Daghestani Silk Embroidery (2007), and Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Dagestan (2006). Dragons, Padlocks and Tamerlane’s Balls: A Material Cultural Memoir of Textiles, Art, Metals and Myths (2013) were all profoundly centred on tangible things. He had a genius for taking some tiny material object (such as key guards or wooden spoons) and using it as a device to explore thousands of years of material and artistic culture.

With his house in Clerkenwell (and one in the Lake district) and his row of scholarly publications, Bob could look like a card-carrying English eccentric as depicted by Hollywood. But like many an English gentleman-scholar, he was a luxury import, an only child of a Polish Jewish father and a German Jewish mother. Both of Bob’s parents died before he was eight, after which his Canadian uncle, packed Bob off to a succession of English boarding schools.

Instead of destroying him, this lonely childhood somehow empowered Bob to become a generous host, a trusted friend and a totally brilliant father. It was somehow typical that his oldest and best school friend should be Robert Irwin: one of Englands most distinguished Arabists and also an ingenious, highly inventive novelist, and they should share a passion for roller-blading. The last third of his life turned out to be the best, for with his wife Marian he delighted in bringing up two confident, out-going daughters (Isobel and Bella) over the last twenty-seven years.

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