By VennerRoad, 10th Aug 2014
Terence DuQuesne riding a camel.
James Terence DuQuesne was born at Cambridge in 1942; his original surname was Deakin. Winning scholarships to both Dulwich College and Oxford; he spoke five languages, and among other things became a poet, a Pagan and a vegan.
In 1964 at the age of 22, he published his first major work: Catalogi Librorum Eroticorum: A Critical Bibliography Of Erotic Bibliographies And Book-Catalogues, going on to author or co-author more than a dozen books including Britain: An Unfree Country (with Edward Goodman), and (the same year) Illicit Drugs: Myth And Reality for the Libertarian Alliance, which was presented to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee.
His major field though was Egyptology, which he studied at Oxford University and to which he made significant contributions, publishing under the auspices of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Throughout his career he elected to remain an independent scholar; his frequent trips to Egypt were privately funded. Because of his expertise he was asked to write the entry for imiut in the on-line UCLA Encyclopedia Of Egyptology.
Terence DuQuesne passed away in a Croydon hospital after suffering a stroke at his Norbury home. Although emphatically heterosexual he died without issue, and was given a Pagan funeral at All Saints Church, New Cross, London on June 19, 2014. He was cremated at Honor Oak Crematorium. Those present at both the service and the cremation included his publisher Daniel Jacobs and his oldest friend Dwina Murphy Gibb.
On his death, his unpublished papers on Egypt were donated to the prestigious Griffith Institute at Oxford. At the time of writing they have already been rehoused, a preliminary inventory has been made and they are being catalogued. Some of them will be sent in turn to the University of Swansea and some to the University of Lampeter.
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