Malcom Watson Norris, B.A., M.Soc.Sc.

Malcolm Norris was born in Harrow on 25 May 1931 and educated at Merchant Taylors School and St John's College, Oxford. He was a man of versatile talents and an unusual range of experience. He joined the Colonial Service in 1959 and worked in Tanganyika as a district officer until independence and a change of name to Tanzania, when he joined the Ministry of Local Government. In 1965 he returned home to take up an appointment in the new Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham, and over the next decade he was seconded successively to universities in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malaysia to assist in the establishment of public administration programmes. Home again in 1977, he continued to teach international courses for public servants at Birmingham, directing the highly regarded Department of Development Administration from 1985 until his death at the age of sixty-four, while continuing to pay advisory visits to third-world countries such as Sudan, Uganda and Indonesia. Norris's Fellowship of the Society arose from his research into church monuments, with a particular predilection for monumental brasses and incised slabs. He was an active member of the Monumental Brass Society from 1955 and its president from 1993; and a member of the Church Monuments Society from its inception in 1978. He contributed numerous papers to the M.B.S.'s Transactions and collaborated with the late Roger Greenwood, F.S.A., on Norfolk Brasses and on Palimpsests with the late John Page-Phillips, F.S.A. He produced the universally recognized definitive works on monumental brasses: Monumental Brasses: the Memorials, 2 vols. (1977) consisting of a chronological analysis of brasses by period, c. 1180 to c. 1800, and region; and Monumental Brasses: the Craft (1978) which covers all aspects of the craft of brass engraving, the engravers and their customers. For this excellent work Norris was awarded a doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Birmingham. Interspersed with his tours abroad were visits to Burlington House; he was an endearing, untidy figure, tousle-haired, shirt-sleeved, bursting out of his clothes, and totally absorbed in the brass rubbings which he laid all over the floor in the inner library, oblivious of the traffic around him. He had a ready laugh, was a talented cartoonist and a fine chess player, having gained his half-Blue at Oxford and represented Middlesex. At the time of his death he was working on an exhibition for the Monumental Brass Society of memorials to English Civil War combatants to be held at the Commandery in Worcester in 1996. Popular with everybody at Birmingham, the university hired a fleet of coaches to transport colleagues and students to his funeral at Worcester. He died on 28 May 1995.