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Cedric Dickens's death has deprived his great grandfather Charles of one of his most robust, passionate and charming ambassadors, and the Fellowship of one of its dearest champions. Our sympathies go out to all his family. It is so difficult to believe that he has gone.
Cedric was born in 1916, the son of Philip (Pip) and his wife Sybil. Philip was the third son of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens. Cedric's childhood was spent in Durham, his schooldays at Eton from where he went to Cambridge. In 1937 he joined the British Tabulating Machine Company and two years later he enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Corps. He served in the Navy from 1939 to 1946, taking part in the Battle of the Atlantic. On one occasion during this period, the young officer Dickens fell off his bicycle in Portsmouth Dockyard and was helped to his feet by a very attractive Wren, later to become his wife, Elizabeth. 'She picked me up in Portsmouth Dockyard', he boasted ever afterwards. In 1946 he returned to work with International Computers and Tabulators Ltd, becoming their Public Relations Officer (a gift to any company, surely).
In 1965, he became President of the Dickens Fellowship, following the unexpected death of his father, who had recently been elected to that office. He confessed that he knew very little about his revered ancestor, except for having read Pickwick several times over and having heard his grandfather Henry Fielding Dickens giving family readings of A Christmas Carol, and he had to rely on covert mentoring from the then Honorary General Secretary John Greaves. One of the fruits of the Cedric-Greaves collaboration was a very popular abridged Reading edition of A Christmas Carol (1965): Cedric 'knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge'. He took to his new Presidential office with gusto, and for the next 40 years of his life he was indefatigable in his efforts to...