P. J. Honey

P. J. Honey was the first person to hold a lectureship in Vietnamese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University; in the course of a productive career he became the first Reader in Vietnamese Studies, and later also the Head of the Department of South East Asia and the Islands. His knowledge of the language, first-hand experience of the country and above all his interest in current affairs led to his opinions being sought by government agencies when Vietnam was going through a most turbulent phase of its history.

Patrick James Honey was born in Ireland, in Navan, County Meath, in 1922. He went to Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in London, and entered Birkbeck College, London, in 1940 to read Classics. When called up in 1941, he chose to enlist in the Royal Navy and saw active service on the Atlantic convoys, on the Russian convoys, in the Italian campaign and finally in the Far East. After the surrender of Japanese forces in Saigon, a small British force under General Douglas Gracey was charged with maintaining civil order, and it was as a young lieutenant with this force that Paddy Honey had a first brief encounter with Vietnam.

After being demobilised in 1946 he resumed his studies in London and graduated in Classics from University College in 1949. He was persuaded to take up Vietnamese by the 1947 Scarbrough Report, which drew attention both to the importance that increasing contacts between countries would assume after the Second World War, and to the serious lack of expertise across Oriental and African languages that the war had revealed. Classics graduates were believed to have a special aptitude for mastering "difficult" languages and the Linguistics Department at Soas, under Professor J.R. Firth, was asked to recruit and train, among others, scholars to cover the languages of South East Asia.

Honey was recruited and appointed to a newly created post of Lecturer in Annamese (as Vietnamese was then known) in 1949, given 16 months' preliminary language and linguistics training and then sent out on his first year-long study tour of Vietnam. He arrived in Saigon in February 1951, at a time when the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, were waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the French colonial regime.

With difficulty and at considerable risk, he made his way to Hanoi, where he set up a safe base from which to carry out his planned research and his study of the local language. In the event this proved to be Honey's only opportunity to visit Hanoi. The country was partitioned under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Agreement and, when he next went to Vietnam in 1958, it was only to visit South Vietnam, and a Saigon "full of Americans".

During the early 1960s students came from Australia and the United States to study Vietnamese with him in the Department of South East Asia; in the years before it became a full honours degree subject at Soas it was studied as an option in the BA Chinese degree. Honey's knowledge of the language and first-hand experience of the country before partition were unrivalled in the English-speaking world. His advice was highly valued by the British Foreign Office; and in 1964 he was invited to Cornell in 1964 as a Visiting Professor.

In 1965 he was promoted to Reader in Vietnamese Studies in London University. The fall of Saigon in 1975 brought an end to his chances of returning to Vietnam but not to his engagement with, and continuing study of, the country. He wrote many articles on post-war Vietnam, and as the "boat people" crisis developed, his knowledge and language skills were again called upon, to brief both officials and refugees.

From the late 1950s Paddy Honey wrote prolifically on aspects of Vietnamese language, history and politics; the Communist regime in the North was his major research interest and, as well as numerous contributions to academic journals and the press, he wrote Communism in North Vietnam: its role in the Sino-Soviet dispute (1963) and Genesis of a Tragedy: the historical background to the Vietnam War (1968). Towards the end of his career he also published a translation of Truong-Vinh Ky's Voyage to Tonking in the year At-hoi (1876) (1982).

Honey was one of a band of young ex-servicemen at Soas whose military duties had taken them to faraway countries, to places that they then devoted their working lives to studying after the war. These included my colleagues in the South East Asia department the Thai scholar Stuart Simmonds, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Thailand, and the Mon scholar Harry Shorto, who had fought in Burma; and in the Law department Tony Allott, who had trained African troops in Kenya. All have now died and Soas is the poorer for it.

Paddy Honey retired early, in 1985, and moved to Devon, where he spent 20 happy years indulging his passion for golf.

Anna Allott