For his funeral held on 12/1/24.
We gather here today to remember our family member , friend, neighbour and colleague Thomas Leonard, better known to those who knew him as Tom.
Tom was born in Devonshire in 1948 and grew up in Plymouth. He studied Mathematics at Imperial College London and later University College London. He worked and taught statistics at Madison Wisconsin from 1979 to 1996. Tom co-founded the renowned International Society for Bayesian Analysis(ISBA) in 1993.
Moving to working at University of Edinburgh from 1995, Tom published two academic books in statistics (one in 1999 and one in 2001) before finally medically retiring in autumn 2001, aged 53. Tom was both proud of his time in academia but critical of its commercialization whereas he believed in the pursuit of knowledge for human advancement.
Tom was a seeker of truth and justice. He was always on a spiritual journey and so moved from church to church and was an unsparing critic of where he felt Christians failed to live up to what was required of them. He moved from Episcopalian to Church of Scotland to Quakers before finally finding a home at Augustine United Church which he found to be welcoming and so the right fit for him.
He spoke truth to power whether in statistics, churches or society at large. He was a strong supporter of the LGBTQ+ community of which he was a part, speaking out against gay discrimination by the US military on the Madison Wisconsin campus in 1989.
He spoke out regularly in support of the disabled and neurodiverse and very strongly in support of Palestinians, taking part in protests in solidarity with them . He worried deeply for the future of the world and urged us to act to change it.
His battles with mental health issues are well documented and motivated him to become a campaigner on the issue with him fighting for improved treatments that went beyond the medical model and him seeing mental health issues as a product of our social and political contexts.
As a retired academic, thinking, writing and reading was his bread and butter from his retirement until the last weeks of his life. He would love to debate and argue passionately on many topics from religion to politics, history to science, literature to philosophy.
Tom was a prolific writer. He co-wrote and published two academic textbooks on statistics and his personal history of statistics was published by Wiley . Alongside those he has a catalogue of numerous unpublished poems, essays, short stories, novels and a yet to be published book of LGBTQ+ history .
It was through creative writing that Tom met his flatmate of 10 years Scott . Tom was in a writer's group Scott had begun attending. Eventually dissatisfied with what was felt to be its stifling intellectual atmosphere they split off and both Scott and Tom co-founded a new writers group which they hoped would prove freer air to breathe and the group lasted a number of years.
Another aspect of Tom was that he had a long standing interest in the history of eugenics and its consequences on society. From the perspective of his subject statistics, he was ashamed of its origins in eugenics.
One of his proudest moments was when Tom and Scott went together to University College London in 2019 to present the evidence they had co-wrote together to the inquiry into University College London’s involvement in eugenics.
Until the pandemic in 2020 Tom was socially active regularly going to the Royal Statistical Society meetings in Edinburgh and making contributions including giving a presentation oh the history of statistics, going to a chess group, going to a reading group at the Botanic gardens and going to bowls and scrabble at his church.
With the pandemic he became more fearful and health conscious as many of us did and perhaps rightly so as his health woes increased considerably.
After 2020 he became more withdrawn, spending much of his time in the flat writing, reading and watching sports. Plymouth Argyll was his favourite team. World cups were major events for him.
Tom was a compulsive player of chess and champion of scrabble. We would go over to Julie's house at Christmas and New year and he was a serious and competitive player whereas Julie and Scott were more light hearted about it. He would brook no messing about or silliness. This wasn't just a game to him. He could be witty and charming, stubborn and difficult, eccentric and thought provoking. There will only ever be one Thomas Leonard. He was one of a kind. We will all miss him deeply.
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