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IHEU Founder celebrates Centenary

  • post Type / Humanists International News
  • Date / 31 March 2003

IHEU warmly Congratulates H.J. Blackham on his Centenary on March 31st 2003.

IHEU, British Humanist Association and Rationalist Press Association, several friends and colleagues will gather in Conway Hall on 29 March 2003 to celebrate with Blackham his Centenary.

H. J. Blackham, born on 31 March 1903 has been a leading British Humanist during the last century. He was first leader of the Ethical Union and then Executive Director of the British Humanist Association. He also played a leading part in the foundation of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in 1952 and has been Secretary General of IHEU till 1967.

He worked with leading thinkers such as Julian Huxley, Barbara Wootton and A. J. Ayer. His influence and interest was especially in education, in particular the introduction of moral education, and counselling, where he helped to found the British Association of Counselling.

He is a leading humanist writer. His Six Existentialists became a widely established text and his Penguin, Humanism, was a classic. He had a considerable role in revising Julian Huxley”s Religion Without Revelation.

Education for Personal Autonomy explored a key theme and The Fable as Literature was a fruit of his old age.

He has enjoyed many years retirement in the Wye valley reading, writing and growing vegetables. He lived the exemplary life of a liberal humanist -thought and action welded together.

He wrote of “a resourceful, self-dependent, realistic, constructive attitude to life” – an attitude he held for 100 years.

*For more information, contact Jim Herrick, former Editor, International Humanist News at 020 7430 1371 (United Kingdom, country code: 0044).

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