John England

Alfred Anthony Heathcote (1931–2012)

‘Local Lad Makes Good’. So ran the headline to a brief article in the local newspaper in 1980 announcing that Tony (as he was always known) Heathcote had been appointed Hughes Professor of Spanish in the University of Sheffield. Rarely can a clichéd headline have conveyed a more powerful truth. Tony was born in Sheffield, and educated at Firth Park Grammar School where he, like many others pupils there, excelled in modern languages. Following undergraduate and postgraduate study at the University of Manchester, which at the time was developing a strong reputation for producing Hispanists, and national service in the RAF, he returned to Sheffield in 1958 as assistant lecturer in Spanish, at which point he began to make his outstanding contribution to the Department of Hispanic Studies, to Hispanism at large, to the University of Sheffield, and to the lives of enormous numbers of students, colleagues and friends. Tony’s postgraduate studies in Manchester had centred on the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age, and included a thesis on the female characters in the religious plays of Tirso de Molina (MA, 1954). The Spanish Golden Age, and especially its theatre, was to remain the focus of his scholarly activity for the whole of his career. His choice of research topic could not have been more apt, as he loved all aspects of theatre throughout his life; he was an accomplished amateur actor, whose cv included a walk-on part in an early episode of Coronation Street, major roles in departmental Spanish plays, and, as a leading member of the University Staff Dramatic Society, demanding roles as pantomime dame and master of ceremonies in Victorian music-hall. Ahead of his time, he always brought his awareness of the realities of a theatre, a stage, and an audience to his analysis of Golden-Age Spanish plays, and both in his scholarly writing and in his teaching he made the texts come alive with a thrilling mixture of intellectual rigour and imaginative re-creation. Tony joined a Department which was enjoying postwar growth under the leadership of Frank Pierce, and his role in the strengthening of Hispanic Studies in Sheffield was crucial. As a scholar his publications included a book Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCI, Number 3, 2014