↓ SECTION 06— CURATOR
RICHARD WILLIAM LESTER
B
ill Lester, who died on 16 September 2012, was one of many Old Geelong Grammarians who have returned to serve the School on its teaching staff. His times at Corio from June 1935, when as a nine-year-old he joined Junior School, to 1985 when he retired from teaching, spanned half a century of which he wrote with characteristic perceptiveness and humour in a memoir that was published (at his request, instead of the conventional valedictory tribute) in The Corian of November 1987. His service was particularly gallant and he occupies a special place in the regard and affections of a multitude of pupils, colleagues, and other friends.
near Mansfield. Marjorie died in 1945, and Hugh later married Eileen Kellaway (née Scantlebury), the mother of Frank (GGS 1934-41; died 2012), Bill (GGS 1936-44), and Michael (GGS 1940-44). In retirement Bill wrote Do 30, Dad! Sketches of a 1930s Childhood at Mansfield and Geelong Grammar School (Harlequin Press, Melbourne, 1999), which he dedicated to his children and in memory of his brother Flying Officer Geoffrey Hugh (Tim) Lester (1922-1943), with whom he had shared his childhood. It is a wonderful memoir (I know no better evocation of
somebody’s early years): one which makes one wish he had written more; it is clearsighted, amusing, and beautifully written. The title, incidentally, refers to the speed (in miles per hour) which the boys were egging their father on to reach in the family Dodge along the Dueran lane. It ends with Bill still in Junior School, where he was a member of Barrabool House from 1935-39 with Doug Fraser MC as his housemaster. Bill went on to Perry House from 194043, and in his last year was a School Prefect. In 1943 he was also Captain of both Football and Athletics. He was first in the High Jump at the APS Combined Sports in 1942, with a height of 5 feet 10 inches (1.76 metres), jumping scissors on to sand; and in 1943 he won both Jump events at the School Sports, achieving 20 feet 1 inch (6.09 metres) in the Long Jump. He was also selected in the Victorian schoolboys’ football team. A Sergeant in the Cadet Corps, he failed the eye test for RAAF Aircrew and enlisted in the AIF in January 1944, training at Cowra, Wagga, and Kapooka before joining the 2/13th Field Company Engineers attached to the
Bill was born on 2 July 1925 in Shanghai, where his father, Hugh Lester, an Englishman (son of John Beaumont Lester and Rose née Freyberg), represented an English trading company, Dodwell and Company, for which he had worked there since 1904. His mother was Marjorie, a daughter of Geoffrey Ritchie (GGS 1881), of Aringa, Port Fairy, and (from 1902) Delatite, Mansfield, and his wife, Antoinette Lempriere née Aitken. His parents had met during the war at the Swedish Hospital in London, where Hugh’s sister, Monica Patton-Bethune, was matron and Marjorie a nurse. Both world wars took a heavy toll on both families: Hugh’s two younger brothers, John and Peter (formerly Eric) were killed in the first, and so in the second were Monica’s son Michael and son-in-law Ian Liddell VC as well as Bill’s brother Tim. Bill was the youngest child of Hugh and Marjorie. Their first son, John (GGS 192938; died 1999), was born at Mansfield in 1919, and their other children in Shanghai: Jean (Clyde 1935-38) in 1920; Tim (GGS 1933-40; died 1943) in 1922; and then Bill. In 1928 the family moved from China to a property, Dueran, on the Broken River, RIGHT Bill Lester high-jumping for Oxford, White City, 1947
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LIGHT BLUE - GEELONG GRAMMAR SCHOOL