Richard Webster (author) - Personal Life and Career

Personal Life and Career

Webster, the son of a subpostmaster, was born in 1950, in Newington, Kent, and raised in a strict Methodist family; according to Bob Woffinden, "His parents' work ethic meant he had much time to himself, leading to independence of thought and intellectual rebellion." He attended Sir Roger Manwood's School in Sandwich, Kent and graduated in English and American studies from the University of East Anglia. Webster returned to the University to teach in 1974 and 1975 and started a PhD, which he did not complete. When his father became ill, Webster ran the family post office, which had been shifted to Cambridge. Webster married in 1977, and with his wife Bod started The Orwell Bookshop in Southwold in 1985. The shop was successful, but was sold because Webster's other interests demanded too much of his time. Webster moved to Oxford after the breakup of his marriage.

Webster described himself in his A Brief History of Blasphemy as "an atheist who was brought up as a Methodist." This 1990 work led Margareta Petersson to describe him as being one of the few Western writers who have "tried to view the Rushdie affair from a Muslim perspective", one who views the controversy over The Satanic Verses not as a single case of confrontation between Islam and the West, but the most recent of a series of hostile encounters, which started as soon as Muhammad's movement had grown strong. Webster once wrote that: "...at the heart of almost everything I have written over the last twenty years or so is the view that, in our modern, proudly rationalist attempts to break the links which tie us to our superstitious, essentially religious past, we have become profoundly muddled about our own cultural history." He noted that his investigations into police 'trawling operations', which occupied him for a number of years, were not a diversion from his theory of cultural history but an attempt to apply it in practice.

Webster made the acquaintance of Frederick Crews while the latter was working on the essays that appeared in his 1995 book The Memory Wars; Crews thanked Webster for his help, and commented that his contact with him had been enriching. Webster's Why Freud Was Wrong, also published in 1995, received acclaim, as well as some criticism.

With Bob Woffinden, Webster helped find lawyers for Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, former Newcastle nurses who were falsely accused of sexually abusing children in their care. Reed and Lillie, who were first accused of child abuse in 1993 and only found not guilty in 2002, say that they would probably be dead, through suicide or murder, without this assistance. Reed told The Observer that, "After all that had happened, to find people who wanted to help us just out of the goodness of their hearts was amazing".

Webster explained his interest in the problem of false allegations in his 2005 book The Secret of Bryn Estyn:

... when I was an undergraduate reading English literature at the University of East Anglia, I stumbled upon a book by the historian Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium ... The extraordinary range and power of Cohn's book lead me to read his other work – his book about conspiracy theories and modern anti-semitism, Warrant for Genocide, and, when it appeared in 1975, Europe's Inner Demons, his study of the great European witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All three books seek to establish the role played in history by collective fantasies and all three are concerned with "the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil." ... The Paladin paperback edition of Europe's Inner Demons, which appeared in 1976, bore on its cover these words of Anthony Storr: "This is a book of real stature which I hope will have wide impact. Only if we begin to understand the horrifying recesses of the human imagination can we prevent the recurrence of those dreadful, irrational persecutions which have so disfigured human history." Without my fully realising it at the time, those words influenced me deeply and I have since taken it for granted that the principle reason why we should study the witch-hunts of the past is to enable us the better to recognise and oppose the witch-hunts of the present and the future.

In 2005, Wrexham council decided, following legal advice, to refuse permission for Falsely Accused Carers and Teachers (FACT) North Wales, a support group for carers and teachers, to hold its conference 'False Allegations – Truthful Answers' at the Erlas Centre, one of its venues, after it learned the purpose of the event. Webster, who was to have been a key speaker at the conference, had been going to discuss The Secret of Bryn Estyn. Wrexham councillor Malcolm King was quoted saying that he was "very pleased" that the council had prevented something that "would have been very hurtful to many people who have already been hurt enough". Webster stated in reply that he was "flabbergasted" by the council's action, and that Mr King "entirely missed the point", since the evidence showed that there never was a paedophile ring based at Bryn Estyn and that dozens of staff had been wrongly accused.

Webster died of natural causes in 2011; he had undergone heart surgery a decade before his death. Julie Summers, who knew Webster through the Writers in Oxford group, said of him: "What was so special about him was he had this very gentle, but very, very clear view on things. You could always rely on him to cut through the mud and see exactly the point of an issue. He had a very clear mind." Webster had spent much of the year assisting Portuguese contacts to expose the Casa Pia child sexual abuse scandal as a scare, and had been due to publish a history of the affair, Casa Pia. Webster also left behind an unfinished magnum opus, The Natural History of Human Beings.