#1824, John Barrett HASTED

The Guardian, 9th September 2002

Obituary by Ken Hunt

John Hasted, who has died aged 81, was a physicist and a musician in 1950s folk clubs. His Communist party allegiance underpinned his involvement in the Workers' Music Association.
He was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he read chemistry, and won a choral scholarship. Interested in Marxism, he visited the WMA's London offices and launched the Oxford Workers' And Students' Choir. He served in the army during the second world war and worked with the Telecommunications Research Establishment.

Back in Oxford, he specialised in dielectric constants. He decided that his politics would hinder his promotion, and in 1948 he became a University College London lecturer, while researching atomic physics. In 1964 his Physics Of Atomic Collisions was published.

After years with the WMA Singers, the Topic Singers and London Youth Choir, in 1946 he heard the New York-based Almanac Singers on record and, believing folk music to be the sound of the future, arranged cyclostyled tuition in banjo and guitar from Pete Seeger. Before folk clubs proliferated, Hasted was providing singarounds at UCL andCecil Sharp House, London home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society; he cut 78s for Topic records. His Streets OF London (not the later Ralph McTell work), gained currency through thr songbook New City Songster (1955).

By 1956, Hasted had realigned the Ramblers folk group, and the John Hasted Skiffle And Folksong Group emerged from the cellar of 44 Gerrard Street, Soho, soon renamed the 44 Skiffle Club. In the late 1950s came his accompaniments for Dominic Behan's Irish Songs Recalled and Shirley Collins's Sweet England, and False True Lovers. In 1958, he visited the US to meet scientists, and Woody Guthrie.

His second wife persuaded him to focus on science, and from 1968 until his retirement he was head of experimental physics at Birbeck. His Aqueous Dielectrics was published in 1973; The Metal Benders (1981) examined Uri Geller's exploits; his autobiography was Alternative Memoirs (1992).

He had twin daughters from his first marriage to Elizabeth Gregson. His second wife, Lynn, died in 1988; they had one son.

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