Letter: Robin Fior's design for student life


Robin Fior was a contemporary and good friend of mine at Harrow, where he first expressed his socialist temperament and visual skills. Jewish, short-statured and short-sighted, with an aversion to team sport, he was far from being a typical Harrovian.


His background was also atypical. Lucien, his father, was a London solicitor, and the family lived over the office in Manchester Square. Lucien had acted for Harry Willcock, whose refusal to show his identity card to a policeman led to the abolition of identity cards after a widely publicised prosecution, and young Robin was not slow to grasp the message of protest, which became his lifelong philosophy.


His ready access in the holidays to the cultural riches of the metropolis encouraged his appetite for the visual arts and the iconography of protest. He taught himself the essentials of typography; while his contemporaries at school might gossip about county cricket, Robin would expatiate on the revolutionary virtue of sans serif typefaces. His most satisfying achievement at school was in the publication of Broadsheet, a literary magazine written and illustrated by his contemporaries, which he handsomely designed.


However, his judgment of how his virtues would be appreciated was not always perfect, and nowhere was it worse than at Oxford, where we both arrived in 1953. He was determined to make a big social impact on the undergraduate scene. He concluded that the best route upwards lay in assiduously attending student parties, while noting that freshmen were urged to restrict their social ambitions for the first two terms until they had sat "prelims", the first public examinations.


Robin devised a cunning plan, worthy of Baldrick: he decided to dispense with prelims in favour of the social whirl, and when the time came, he duly failed his exams. He was unable to work while his contemporaries, freed of the shackles of revision, drank and danced their way through the Oxford summer, and he failed his second shot at the exams. Sadly, the dons of Magdalen College did not appreciate his gifts, and his university career came to a premature end.





guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds