A Visit with BSN Alumnus Joseph O’Neill

Some people might think that being an archivist is a rather dry and dusty business, sitting all day in a small room surrounded by bookshelves full of bound volumes and old school records. In fact, it is a stimulating, varied and at times even exciting job. I never know from one day to the next what emails will be waiting for me from alumni, ex-teachers, employment agencies, embassies, the general public, the media, universities and so on, all around the world.

Some emails are very special indeed. Just recently, there was one such.

Joseph O’Neill, second from the left in the last row, pictured with his class at Senior School Voorschoten in 1979.

Way back in 1979, when the Senior School moved to Voorschoten, I had in my class a particularly remarkable student. A boy, half Irish, half Turkish, speaking several languages, handsome, with a delightful character, highly intelligent, good at sport, a talented actor and so on. No one was surprised when he was awarded a place at Cambridge to read Law. Not the sort of student one easily forgets. I certainly didn’t.

From a distance, as school archivist and as his ex-teacher, I followed Joe O’Neill’s subsequent career. After graduating at Cambridge, he was called to the Bar, as the expression goes, and began practising as a barrister in London.

He also began writing. Initially (and this has been the case with so many subsequently famous writers), he had difficulty getting his first novel accepted for publication; but once he succeeded and his work began to appear in print, his literary career really took off.

For a full picture of his many successes, I would suggest you go to Wikipedia. I only have space here for a few details.

Joe is now an established literary figure. He has written novels, short stories, non-fiction, essays, and critical works. He has received or been shortlisted for numerous literary awards (including the most prestigious Booker Prize).

His novel “Netherland’ was praised by Barack Obama in a BBC interview and described by well-known critic James Wood as,

A Visit After 45 Years

Joe, who lives in Brooklyn, is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts at Bard College. A couple of weeks ago, he let BSN alumni know via the website that he would be in Amsterdam briefly to give a talk on his work.

I got in touch immediately, and a couple of days later, Joe was ringing at the doorbell of my flat in The Hague.

It had been nearly 45 years since we had last seen one another, and it was a very special moment indeed.

The sort of moment that makes being BSN archivist far from a dry and dusty business.