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Rising up, we’re imagined to assume our dad and mom aren’t cool. With my father, Ron Stewart, Stew to his pals, who has died aged 80, this was inconceivable. He as soon as returned dwelling from a visit, casually mentioning he had simply purchased a complete nation’s rug manufacturing. The nation was Nepal, the rugs had been created from nettles, and nobody had introduced them to Europe earlier than. This was solely regular for Stew, a quietly extraordinary man.
Stew began out with rugs and textiles that he offered first wholesale after which at Liberty in London, the place he labored from 1989 till 2000, working the carpet division. In time “the store” created the oriental division for Stew to promote objects from around the globe. Japanese pottery, Indonesian furnishings, fetish masks from West Africa – he realized about them, sought them out, and offered all of them within the store.
Alongside the best way his shopping for discovered him in Kabul in 1979 because the Russians invaded, or consuming eyeball stew with the Bedu someplace within the Excessive Atlas. Nothing fazed him (other than any expertise invented after 1920), and neither did his lifelong diabetes, an sickness he largely ignored regardless of it at occasions touchdown him in scorching water – like having to be flown by helicopter to hospital from a prepare on the Ukrainian steppe, at night time, in winter. Simply one other work journey, he mentioned when he made it dwelling.
Stew was born in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, to Jane, a hospital librarian, and Ian Stewart, an RAF pilot turned stitching machine salesman. He went to Tottenham grammar faculty after which the College of Slavonic and Jap European Research of London College (which is now a part of UCL).
With a level in Russian and “getting by” in seven different languages, Farsi and Arabic included, Stew was largely self-taught, and was nonetheless finding out philosophy and French when he died. He was additionally extremely artistic. When he was not studying concerning the Abbasid Caliphate or the artwork of revolutionary China, he could be at his loom weaving carpets, hangings and, for the previous few years of his life, a sequence of work in wool – landscapes, drawn from his creativeness – that grasp on the partitions of many pals.
A polyglot however not a polymath, my father was not involved with how issues labored, however somewhat why issues had been. He liked cities and was happiest sitting in a conceal birdwatching. He immersed himself in historical past and was a staunch modernist. He was leftwing and purchased and offered luxurious. He was fiercely intelligent and watched Bergerac on repeat. He was a dedicated atheist deeply moved by Orthodox liturgy.
And amid all of the contradictions, complexity and infrequently downright stubbornness, he was a loyal and caring father to his three youngsters.
He’s survived by his spouse, Bev (nee Harries), whom he married in 1969, and their youngsters – Rachel, Ruth (often known as Hooch) and me – and 6 grandchildren.
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