Dr Martin Crossley Evans

DR MARTIN CROSSLEY EVANS Sympathetic warden of Bristol halls of residence

Martin Crossley Evans was appointed MBE for “services to higher education” in 2001

A devoted Anglican who could combine spiritual seriousness with a liberal and often scurrilous sense of fun, Dr Martin Crossley Evans was warden of Manor Hall and Sinclair House, the undergraduate halls of residence at the University of Bristol, for 34 years. It made him the longest-serving warden, including as head warden, of any hall at the university.

Martin’s students were his lifeblood, and his tenure was characterised by his generosity, hospitality, kindness and sense of humour. He had the ability to make almost everyone he met feel they shared a unique friendship and he went to great lengths to include those who came from overseas.

Of the many student societies who met in Manor Hall, Martin was an honorary member of the Malaysian and Singaporean Students Association, the Chinese Society, the Malay Cultural Society and the Hong Kong Society. Lifelong friendships were formed with his undergraduates, and he was a frequent guest at their weddings, including in Asia, and a godfather to several.

Much of Martin’s pastoral work happened quietly. On many occasions he was called to intervene with students who were finding it hard to cope. At all hours, and ignoring his own ill health, he used his kindly powers of persuasion and empathy to reassure them. In 2017 he was devastated by the university’s pastoral review, which replaced wardens, deputy wardens and senior residents within halls with a new model of “hubs” in the surrounding areas.

In 2001 Martin was appointed MBE for “services to higher education” and his wardenship is commemorated by a portrait by the Bristol-based Laurence Kell, which hangs in Manor Hall. He is warmly remembered by staff, from deputy wardens and hall tutors to his student support administrator.

Martin Crossley Evans was born in 1957 in Bromborough, Wirral. As a child he spent many hours with his grandparents, who were born in the Victorian era and were representative of its habits and sensibilities. Martin himself was rarely seen in anything other than a three-piece suit, sporting a pocket watch and chain. Family history was important to him, and after his retirement he returned to the Wirral to live near his brother, Mark.

As a child Crossley, as he was called by friends, initially struggled with reading. To compensate he learnt much by oral recitation and by the age of five could name 100 flowers. He went to Christ Church Primary School in Willaston and on to Wellington School, a private grammar school in Bebington. Sure of his religious convictions from an early age, he was just 11 when he was told off by a teacher and replied: “I answer only to the headmaster and to God.”

His happiest times were as an undergraduate from 1975 at the University of Bristol. As a resident of one of the university’s oldest halls, the then all-male Wills Hall on the edge of the Bristol Downs, he made lifelong friends, particularly as a member of its debating society, Barney’s Club. Such was the value that he placed on its supportive atmosphere that he later served for 20 years on the executive committee of its alumni body, the Wills Hall Association.

He studied archaeology and geology and was taught by Dr Basil Cottle, the historian and reader in medieval studies, who was struck by the student’s “savage, enormous blue writing… full of dates”.

After Bristol, Martin got a postgraduate certificate in education at Keele University, and for a while taught at the independent Shrewsbury School. He followed it with a position at Gresham’s School, north Norfolk, where a colleague wrote of him: “For three years he gave us all something different… to some a religious awareness; to others a sense of humour and proportion.”

In 1984 Martin returned to Bristol and stayed until his retirement in 2018. There followed a frenetic three and a half decades of devoted service. He joined the Corps of Bedells, the Bristol University ceremonial officers, and was university marshal between 2013 and 2017. Recalling The Mikado's Pooh-Bah, other university titles included historic collections officer, alumni officer, and assistant secretary and clerk to convocation.

With Manor Hall students

Martin was known to be passionate and punctilious in everything he undertook. On one occasion, during a heated discussion regarding the graduate database, the registrar pronounced: “Martin, the trouble with you is that you have the ability to create principles where none exist!”

In addition to his students, he was committed to charitable work. From 1973 he was involved in the Heswall Disabled Children’s Holiday Fund, which hosts holiday camps, first as a volunteer and later as a leader, recruiting many of his students to help. He served as a trustee and chairman of several local charities, many connected with the 18th-century Christ Church with St Ewen, where he worshipped and was churchwarden.

For 18 years he was a well-respected Bristol justice of the peace, with a skill for blending authority with compassion and for clearly explaining the bench's decisions. A wider circle of friends came from the fraternity of the Old Greshamian Lodge where he served as its master and in 1990 he joined the Saint Vincent Lodge in Bristol. He was a Royal Arch companion and, for a short while, a Mark Mason. As secretary of the Bristol Masonic Society his minutes were legendary and often more entertaining than the meetings they described.

Even after leaving Bristol, Martin remained acutely aware of the importance to university life of its alumni, and he continued to cultivate and foster the allegiance of graduates. He was president of the Manor Hall Association, which he helped to revitalise, and a Convocation representative on the University Court, which served as a bridge between the university and the wider community.

A learned man, he was a fellow of the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London and sometime chairman of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society. He published many articles and books, and his lectures to a range of audiences on the history of Bristol and the university number well over a hundred.

His 1990 Bristol PhD in ecclesiastical history at 968 pages with 5,500 footnotes was of such a prodigious length that the university subsequently imposed a word limit for doctoral theses.

Martin’s memory never left him and he continued to delight listeners with poetry and readings from the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the works of Charles Dickens, Gilbert and Sullivan and colourful limericks.

Martin had many bouts of ill health but faced them stoically with support from friends. At the Bristol Royal Infirmary in 2018 he kept a visitors’ book signed by 397 people during his three-month stay.

In his living and work quarters he collected an extraordinary number of antiques and as fond as he was of his students, one was heard to remark that they loved the warden “almost as much as the warden loves his Chinese porcelain”.

Martin Crossley Evans died on October 18, 2021, at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary after surgery following a fall. A memorial service will take place in Bristol in the Great Hall of the Wills Memorial Building on April 23. Email wills-hall-association@bristol.ac.uk

Reproduced with kind permission of the Times.

The portrait of Martin Crossley Evans by Laurence Kell hangs in Manor Hall, Bristol