My brother Hans died unexpectedly and suddenly from an Aortic Aneurysm on Monday, July 8th, 2024. We were always close, but had been brought ever closer since our parents' deaths in 2001 and 2002.
As soon as news of his death came out, I was overwhelmed with letters, cards, emails and online messages from his friends, each telling me why they loved him so much. His funeral on Saturday, August 31st, 2024 brought together around 200 people, with a choir of 80 friends from the many choirs with whom he sang.
A large number of people have asked if I could present my Eulogy to Hans in writing for those who were unable to attend. At the funeral service, the eulogy was interpolated with performances by the choirs of St Mary's Hendon and St Margaret Pattens of five Bach Chorales. I have attached links to these chorales where they appeared.
Chorale 1 - Nun Ruhen Alle Wälder - Vocalconsort Berlin: Daniel Reuss
`If you thought you knew my brother…
A Eulogy for Hans Rashbrook (5. 6. 1964 - 8. 7. 2024)
Saturday 31st August 2024
Dear Hans, for as long as I can remember you’ve always been there - and now, so suddenly, you’re not. I talk to you every day - and I can hear your voice so, so clearly in my head. You were. . . no, you ARE such a one - off. None of us here will ever forget you.
I feel that if the tables were turned, and it was Hans giving this speech in another building, in front of a much, much smaller congregation, he would find a way of delivering it that would be uniquely “Hans”. He’d incorporate a folk song, like he did in a zoom meeting with his fellow Prommers during lockdown, and he’d have the whole thing hand-written in his instantly recognisable, slightly squashed and listing script. No-one present would have heard anything like it anywhere else.
But that’s Hans - I spent my whole life knowing that there’s no-one on earth quite like my brother.
I will try to give you a flavour of the man by recalling a few stories and events from our time together. As you will hopefully see, no-matter how well you think you knew Hans, you really didn’t know him at all.
I have to start at the end though. When I first visited Hans’ flat after leaving the hospital, I spotted, taking pride of place in front of some records on the middle of a central shelf, a toy cement mixer. This was the same toy that had been secretly wrapped in my garments on the very first day I was introduced to Hans as his new baby brother in 1968. It was my first gift to him, before I even knew what gifts were. Hans had treasured it for the rest of his life.
Hans was born in Roehampton hospital in 1964. Because ultrasound scanning wasn’t routinely available in those days, Hans’ severe cleft palate took everyone unawares. This obviously required immediate surgery and thus began Hans’ lifelong, unwanted familiarity with the surgeon’s knife. Gorlin syndrome was the next thing to be diagnosed, a fairly rare condition that presents itself via many continually developing but benign cancerous skin and bone growths. Hans had to go for dermatological check-ups (usually followed by some minor surgery and stitches) every six months from infancy. He also developed associated bone cysts in his jaw, just as he was preparing to start his A-level studies. This required a prolonged stay in hospital, followed by the necessary wiring together of his lower and upper jaw for 2 months. All this set Hans back, both in terms of his confidence and his academic work, just when it mattered the most.
In addition, Hans’ early childhood development had been slow. He was, I’m now fully convinced, quite autistic. Although he made a few excellent friendships whilst at school, his chief fascinations were for buildings, especially church spires, television towers, the green copper roofs of many of the churches in Hamburg, as well as mountains and hills - all of which, as far as Hans was concerned, had a soul. Hans visited an Educational Psychologist when he was around 8, whom he impressed by drawing, from memory, the skyline of Oxford as imagined from the roof of the building they were in. Unfortunately, this was taken to indicate that Hans was basically fine and he was subsequently left to deal with the wider world without the extra support that would have greatly helped him. This multi-talented man whose brilliant skills in the visual arts, music and language would become so obvious to anyone who knew him, despite some really good teachers, this man’s A level grades were a C in Art and E in Music and German. There’s no escaping the feeling that Hans was let down by the education system.
But here’s a measure of Hans. I, his younger brother, experienced none of this, sailing through my childhood with hardly any visits to hospital (other than self inflicted ones). Where Hans struggled, I breezed through life. The advantages that eluded him seemed to fall into my lap. And yet, at some point in the middle of all this turmoil, when he was tasked with writing a general studies essay on the subject of “Jealousy” - Hans, dear Hans, had to have it explained to him by Mum and Dad what jealousy was as a concept, as distinct from envy. Hans just couldn’t grasp the idea that you might turn against someone because they had experienced benefits which you had not. We all realised then, that Hans didn’t possess a bad bone in his body.
He studied Art at Swindon College, the first ever student to complete the newly offered course in archaeological illustration, a highly specific area that required very precise attention to detail and advanced draughtsmanship - right up Hans’ street. Hans trained as an archaeologist, working on digs with the Trust for Wessex Archaeology in Salisbury before securing his first job as a graphics officer with the British Museum’s department of Medieval and Later Antiquities in 1988. A couple of years later, Hans was moved to the affiliated Museum of Mankind, where he worked as a curator before being made redundant in a departmental reorganisation in 2000.
Hans loved his time at the British Museum and, whilst he continued to look for work in this field, this was the time when our parents’ health started failing. Hans spent much of 2000 - 2002 looking after Mum and Dad at the family home in Swindon, up until their deaths in 2001 and 2002.
Chorale 2 - Mach’s mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt - Kölner Akademie: Michael Aleksander Willens
Our parents had always wanted us both to live our lives by means of our creative talents. Their final gift to Hans was to leave him in a financial position where he could devote himself more to working as a freelance illustrator. Commissions indeed came, each one filling Hans with a new sense of purpose and self-worth. He specialised in portraits of buildings, capturing the essence of a particular church or home - again, as if it had a soul to which he related. Some of his earlier work for the British Museum was republished as a children’s book on Aztecs, and Hans began to feel more and more confident in himself. His portraits reflect this growing confidence and he managed to produce some of his most stunningly life-like work. This period also features some of our very happiest memories together. Hans can genuinely feel proud to know that his work is cherished, hanging on walls in private homes and up and down the country.
However, if you only knew Hans as an illustrator and fine artist, then you really didn’t know Hans at all.
Hans and I started ringing bells in 1977, but I had to give up fairly quickly due to a) pressures of other musical commitments and b) being useless. Hans, however, LOVED bells. From the very earliest years of his life, during regular visits to Hamburg to visit our Grandmother, Hans had a fascination for the rich harmony of the bells of all the city’s churches. Hans would be able to identify which church was ringing, just by ear. His intimate knowledge of that city’s history and geography continued to astonish many life-long citizens of Hamburg, who often felt that he knew their home town far better than they themselves did.
Given the opportunity to meet the man who actually rang the bells in Hamburg’s St Nikolai Kirche in 1976, Hans took it upon himself to find out about bell-ringing back home near the family home in Swindon. I was already a chorister in the choir of Christ Church, so Hans joined their ringing team and never looked back. Bell ringing has provided some of Hans’ most enduring friendships, especially when mixed with walking tours and trips around the country. It gave him the opportunity to appear briefly on BBC Radio 4 and it brought him to this church and community, where he served as steeple keeper.
However, if you only knew Hans as a bell ringer, then you really didn’t know Hans at all.
Chorale 3 - Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan
Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart: Helmuth Rilling
Hans started singing lessons during his 6th form years at Commonweal School under Anne Hart. He had a warm, baritone quality to his voice, but was always able to keep going right up into tenor register. He had always been the more musical of the two of us. I remember a family walk on holiday near the Lizard Lighthouse in Cornwall. The peace and tranquillity was rudely shattered when the foghorn sounded, nearly knocking us to the ground in the process. All except Hans, who quietly said “that was a B flat”. Thus Hans revealed his perfect pitch to the world. But Hans didn’t just have perfect pitch. His musical memory didn’t only extend to the piece of music he was thinking about. Hans’ gift (or curse) was that he could remember (and hear in his head) every little detail of every performance of every piece he had ever heard. He fell in love with early Tallis Scholars recordings as a child and sang together with me on Eton Choral Courses and Rodolfus Choir tours during the late 80s. As soon as he was established in London, he started to sing, occasionally also on a professional basis, with as many choirs, it seems, as he could. He loved all his choral work - and many of the 16 (at least) choirs and ensembles with whom he sang are represented here today. Singing brought more self-confidence and took him right across Europe on various tours and visits, developing new friendships wherever he went.
But if you only knew Hans as a choral singer, then you really didn’t know Hans at all.
Hans was a fluent German speaker. He immersed himself in German culture, traveling the length and breadth of the country (but most specifically to our childhood haunt of Hamburg) whenever he possibly could. He also loved to help others get the sound of the language just right. Hans was also a Tennis fanatic. As far back as I can remember, Hans was obsessively keeping up not just with Wimbledon, but with the whole Tennis circuit. His memory was amazing here too. I remember one wet Thursday afternoon in the pub after evensong - challenging Hans to see if he could remember who the Wimbledon men’s runner up was in any particular year, randomly chosen by someone else in the pub. Not only could he remember the runner up, but he could recite the full table of all the rounds - with scores. And then, for completion, he did the same for the ladies’ championship. Utterly extraordinary. One very small consolation in amongst the tragedy of Hans’ sudden death is how it happened after a blissful day celebrating his birthday with his dear friend Tessa, at Wimbledon.
Hans was also a devoted fan of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Ever since his first experience promming, Hans was hooked for life. He was always very happy to spot himself in the crowd after a televised Prom, and, looking back at one or two of these moments, you can see a person almost completely overcome with the joy of sharing something so precious with so many people. This led to more friendships that lasted a lifetime. However, you should know that Hans’ enthusiasm for music didn’t stop with choral classics and prom favourites. Hans loved all kinds of music. On his desk, amongst his papers, I found notes detailing a particular artiste’s set-list at Glastonbury, cross-referenced against the original albums on which each track could be found. Hans loved folk music, cheesy middle of the road stuff, he still had all my Mum’s James Last LPs from the 70s. Hans loved the Spinners, the Bee Gees, Abba, and, more recently, the Shires and Dua Lipa.
On one memorable occasion, when Lili was still very young and speaking to Hans and me exclusively in German, Hans had been baby sitting - and had brought along some records to play. When I got home, Hans said to me “I’m sorry Roy, but I think I may have permanently damaged your daughter”. “What do you mean?” I asked, panicking slightly. “Well, I brought along this record”. He held out a garish LP named “Die Grosse Stimmungsbox” - The big “good-mood” box. “Well, I thought she might like to do a bit of dancing, only she’d become obsessed with the last track and I’ve had to play it 15 times in a row now and she shows no sign of giving up”.
The last track was a song by Ernst Neger that didn’t just go “oom pah oom pah”, it was actually titled “Humbta humbta humbta tä tä rä”.
There’s one more thing you should know about Hans, if you’re to be able to say you knew him at all.
Chorale 4 - Wenn Ich Einmal Soll Scheiden
Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart: Helmuth Rilling
Hans was kind, gentle, unassuming and generous with his time and talents. He was a fiercely loyal friend who knew the difference between a hand written letter and an email. Amongst Hans’ papers, by his illustration materials, I found a card offering congratulations to a brother and sister-in-law on their wedding anniversary. It was on his desk 21 days before the date. Hans would scour card shops until he had found the card containing exactly the sentiment needed of the occasion. Hans was the most amazing uncle to Lili and godfather to Primrose.
Our mum had witnessed Hans’ start in life and knew how hard it had been. She constantly feared that Hans’ sweet nature would leave him open to be taken advantage of in later life. She also witnessed Hans’ early struggles, both as child and adult, to be accepted by his peers, initially not always completely successfully. She asked me to promise to look after him, and I did what I could.
But the sheer outpouring of sympathy from so many people, the hundreds of cards and other messages, each detailing why they loved Hans so much - well, this caught me off guard. It seemed that maybe it was me who didn’t really know Hans at all. We usually find ourselves, at a funeral, trying to say thank you for the life of the person who has gone. And we are all incredibly grateful to you Hans, for the light that you shone into our lives. But I want to take this opportunity here, to thank YOU all - those that have come, those that have written, those that have phoned, those that have contributed to his memorial fund. Through your friendship and love, you helped dispel my Mum’s fear that Hans would be lonely later in life. You took him for who he really was. You saw not the early struggles and pain, but the joy, the innocence, the generosity, the gifts of talent and friendship.
Hans touched your lives and you repaid him with love.
Thank you.
Ach, Herr, laß dein’ lieb’ Engelein -
Monteverdi Choir:
John Eliot Gardiner