The sudden death of Anthony (Tony) Hollingsworth has deprived Ireland of one of its brightest scientific minds and of a human being of extraordinarily wide interests and accomplishments. He died on July 19th while on holiday in Galway. He was 64.
I feel proud to have counted Anthony Hollingsworth as my oldest friend. We first met as schoolboys in 1955 when we both entered the Christian Brothers Secondary School in James's Street in the heart of Dublin, a school situated in the shadow of the great Guinness brewery.
Indeed an appreciation of the aromas from the various processings of the great beverage were as much part of our education as the odes of Horace, the sonnets of Shakespeare or the theorems of Euclid.
For the greater part of our secondary school days I sat beside him in class, and we became the closest of friends, cycling together through the Dublin and Wicklow mountains at weekends, going to the cinema, theatre, concerts, participating in school debates, and generally exploring the wonders of adolescence together. He was an outstandingly gifted student, the most brilliant, if I may say so, of a remarkably talented class, a number of whom went on to achieve eminence as public servants, in the world of business, in academia, the church and even the judiciary. But Tony Hollingsworth was the most gifted of us all, and it was no surprise that in the Leaving Certificate Examination of 1960 he came first in Ireland.
Like so many of the best of our generation, he entered the Civil Service, joining the Department of Finance, and from there he was seconded on scholarship to University College, Cork, where he studied mathematics and mathematical physics, graduating top of his class in 1964 with first class honours. At UCC Tony was not only a remarkably gifted mathematician, but he was also a towering personality in student life, being a gifted debater, active in the Philosophical Society, the Literary Society, and the Music Society. His love of poetry and literature was both comprehensive and infectious, and his ability to quote literature from memory in both Irish and English was truly prodigious. The term "Renaissance Man" is one that barely does him justice.
His love of music was an interest that, of course, fuelled our friendship, and I recall from those early days his excitement when it was announced that the great Igor Stravinski was to visit Dublin in June, 1963. This was an occasion he was determined not to miss, and so he arranged for a party of some 20-30 of his fellow students in Cork to come to Dublin for the concert, and I remember how the whole contingent (including myself) descended on his family home in Iveagh Gardens in Dublin where his wonderful parents welcomed us all with open arms, and victualled and refreshed us as if we were family.
In 1965 he joined the Irish Meteorological Service and in 1967 he was awarded the Jonathan Whitney Fellowship in the department of meteorology at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, graduating with a starred PhD in 1970, being one of the fastest students since the war to graduate from that demanding doctoral programme.
In 1971 he moved to the UK and joined as a research fellow of the UK Universities Atmospheric Modelling Group at the University of Reading. From there in 1975 he moved across the road, as it were, to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, where he was to stay for the remaining 32 years of his life, rising from the rank of senior scientist to head of the research department, and deputy director. In 2003 he became leader of the immensely important Global Environment Monitoring Systems project.
Global monitoring of the environment was his passion and his stature in the world of global environmental monitoring can be gauged from the reaction to news of his death of the director of the United States National Centre for Environmental Prediction who described him as "a giant in the field".
Professionally he was a giant: the author of more than 100 scientific papers and reports, the recipient of many honours: D.Sc of the NUI, honorary adjunct professor at NUI, Galway, his adopted city, where he enjoyed nothing more than to spend time with Breda and the family in their second home in Claregalway, play a round of golf, banter with the locals over a pint of an evening. He was a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and recipient of their prestigious Jule G Chamney award, a member of the US National Academy of Science, to mention but some of his distinctions. But primarily and most importantly he was a wonderful human being, a giant in terms of personal attributes, compassionate, caring, generous and loving, enjoying to the full a life which had his wife and his two accomplished children at its epicentre. Breda, his wife of almost 40 years, Cormac and Deirdre will miss him so much as will his many friends and colleagues across the globe.
To have counted Tony Hollingsworth as a friend was to experience one of life's greatest gifts at its most profound. The incomparable words of William Butler Yeats, a poet much loved by Tony, come to mind: "Think where man's glory most begins and ends and say, my glory was I had such friends".
I bPárrthas na Grást go raibh Sé is ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal, cneasta, dílis.
GG