Nares Craig
Nares Craig - 2nd November 1917 - 1 February 2012
Lucy Craig the daughter of Nares Criag has posted that sadly her father died on Wednesday 1st February 2012.
"As many of you will know Nares had been becoming increasingly frail in the last 3 or 4 months and of course at 94, his death was certainly not unexpected.
It was also what might be called “a good death” in that Nares didn’t suffer any dreadful pain or discomfort and he was surrounded by his closest family: myself, husband Gordon, brother Jonathan, my children Liam and Seran and – as it happened – her daughter Biba, who was asleep in her buggy.
He was also wonderfully well-cared for in his last days and hours by his excellent GP, his palliative care nurse and the fantastic staff at The Meadow where he has been living for the last 4 ½ years."
Lucy Craig 3rd February 2012
Nares Craig was born in 1917 in the week of the Russian Revolution, his father being the brother of the notorious Ulsterman Lord Craigavon.
Nares was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, whe
re he became one of the "elite" Cambridge night climbers and also became a life long committed socialist and later a communist, much to his families disapproval.
He left Cambridge and became a captain in the Armoured Engineers in the 1939-45 war. While commanding tanks adapted to carrying special assault equipment, he re-designed the Bailey Mobile Bridge to increase span capacity and reduce operating casualties.
He meet and married, Spanish civil war veteran and nursing trade union leader Thora Silverthorne.
After qualifying as an architect, he worked at the UK Building Research Station on investigations into housing design, production and erection processes, which were recorded in over fifty technical publications.
This work resulted in invitations to lecture in v
arious Third World centres, and later to the development of the low-cost Brecast system which was used widely in earthquake- and hurricane-prone areas. He was particularly proud to have been involved in housing issues in Chile, prior to the vicious US backed coup.
Nares lived and died a fully committed socialist, a socialism built not on dogma but upon harnessing his many skills on behalf of working people and ultimately empower them.
He was a quietly spoken man who brimmed with warmth for all he met, I'm proud to say I knew him, my sympathy to Nares family and friends.
As the great Russian poet Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote:
"Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest c
ause in all the world- the fight for the Liberation of Mankind."
COMRADE NARES CRAIG, PRESENTE !
http://narescraig.co.uk/memoirs/index.html#TOC
