Obituaries

In Memoriam

Christopher W Arnold (1939-44) Donald C (Chris) Barber (1946-47) Brian A Barnett (1946-51) Timothy J Bonham-Carter (1954-58) Stanley J Clayman (1948-53) John C Durnin (1973-77) Nicholas R Gooud (1958-63) Gilbert W Green (1938-42) John C Grover (1948-53) John B Hewitt (1946-49) Robert F Lees (1970-74) John A Lunn (1941-48) John L R Melotte (1971-75) Charles H Merriman (1954-58) Basil D Moss (1948-53) John S Parker (1959-63) David P C Russell (1960-65) Richard L L Simmons (1955-60) Michael J Stacey (1949-53) Richard A Stokes (1955-60) Stuart W C Taylor (1949-54) Jack E Thomson (1935-40) John F Turner (1961-66) Alexander A Wheaten (1938-42) Harold D Wicks (1946-50) Henry J Winson (1940-46)

Brian A Barnett

(1946-1951) Brian Barnett attended St Paul’s in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and with his parents having moved out to rural Rickmansworth, he was immediately enrolled in High House, where he was a weekly boarder throughout his time at School. In his first year, he received instruction for his bar mitzvah from the late Reverend Sam Vennett of the Hammersmith Synagogue, which was then opposite in Brook Green. At School he was a keen boxer, captaining the School team. He made lifelong friendships, and his regular Monday night bridge games with Old Paulines John Garden (1942-51), Raymond Davoud (1944-49) and Clive Moss (1944-48) were to last half a century.

He left St Paul’s to read economics and international history at University College London and then joined the army for National Service, during which he narrowly avoided court martial for using an army vehicle to take a girl on a date.

On leaving the army, he joined public company Ellis & Goldstein, a manufacturer and retailer of ladieswear, rising over 30 years to become the Group Managing Director before the company was taken over in 1988. During his time there, he was Chairman of the British Mantle Manufacturers’ Association and a pioneer of what was then called shop within shop retailing, which is the model that all department stores operate on today. He also successfully developed the manufacture of what we now call loungewear, using the advent of the fax machine to have London designs made seasonally in the Far East.

He was particularly proud when his son Keith (1974-1978) joined the School and when his daughter Joanna married Old Pauline, Jonathan Mindell (1973-1977), also the son of a school friend, Bertram Mindell (1945-1950).

In later life, his joy was his family. He is survived by wife Susie, three children, eight grandchildren and two greatgrandchildren and will be very sorely missed by us all. Keith Barnett (1974-1978)

Alistair A Conn

(1950-55) Alistair was born in Twickenham in 1937. He attended the Mall School and then St Paul’s from 1950 to 1955. He was a prefect, captain of the Boxing Club and the 2nd Cricket XI, secretary of the Christian Union and treasurer of the Historical Society. Alistair was posted to Wuppertal for his National Service. He read history at Downing College, Cambridge, and obtained his boxing Blue. Alistair studied at Lincoln Theological College and was ordained as a priest in 1963. He was a curate at St Paul’s in West Hartlepool and then was school chaplain and assistant housemaster at Busoga College in Uganda for one year.

Alistair was school chaplain at Shrewsbury School from 1966 to 1973. He also taught English and R.E. and helped coach the under-14 football and cricket teams. He met his future wife, Bella, at Shrewsbury. They married in 1968 and in the following years their first two daughters were born.

Alistair and his family then moved to Scotland, where he was rector at St Anne’s, Coupar Angus. Alistair and Bella’s third daughter was born in Scotland. From 1978 to 2002, Alistair was a vicar in the Southwell Diocese and served as Rural Dean of Newstead and of Newark. He played cricket for the Southwell Diocesan Clergy team and was its captain for some years. Alistair had an active retirement; he walked many of the National Trails, was a literacy volunteer, undertook several courses, was a regular cinema-goer and spent many happy hours at Trent Bridge.

Alistair’s health deteriorated rapidly after Bella died in 2014. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2016. He died peacefully on 26th March 2020, aged 82 years. He will be remembered for his kindness, his caring and gentle nature, his dry sense of humour, and his strong sense of fairness and social justice. He lived a deep and full life, but also lived a life in the service of others. Lucy Conn (daughter)

Robert F Lees

(1970-74) Rob arrived at St Paul’s in 1970 as a voracious reader and thrived under the tutelage of Bryan Robson (Master 1970-90) and Harry Quinn (Master 1966-79). After reading English at Pembroke College, Oxford, he emerged in 1978 with a relentless curiosity, a keen appreciation of good beer, and a group of friends that never stopped expanding.

Rob was rare in being both creative and logical, an intellectual and a ‘doer’. So, when it came to career choice, there were plenty of options. He decided to enter business, focusing on IT. One result was that he worked on many innovations we now take for granted, from barcodes to SMS texting. Another, at Vodafone, was the tense New Year’s Eve he spent navigating the company through the infamous Millennium Bug. Later, after gaining Chartered status in the procurement field, he moved into consultancy, serving the London Metal Exchange among other City institutions as well as the Ministry of Defence.

Rob’s teams knew him as an outstanding boss and mentor: sharp, often challenging, but always generous with time and advice. And once away from work, no one was better company. Passionate about both music and sport, he also delighted in model car ‘slot racing’ relishing the chance it affords to engineer ‘stuff that works’.

Above all there were, and are, his wife Sonia and their children. A chance meeting in Devon initiated Sonia and Rob’s life together. Adam, Katy and Tom’s arrival soon followed, as did countless happy times shared across Cornwall, Somerset, and Wiltshire.

Another passion was cycling. Rob loved being out on his bike – and it was while riding that he first realised something was not right. He was diagnosed with cancer, which sadly overpowered him in October 2020 after a short, brave battle.

It was typical of ‘the big man’ that he continued to make plans until his last day. He even specified a ‘final overture’ of voice recordings for his funeral – culminating in a sentiment that perhaps helps explain why his memory will be so cherished. “It’ll be alright in the end. And if it isn’t alright, it’s not the end.” Hugo Kondratiuk (1970-74) and the Lees Family

Brian (Bunga) Lowe

(1948-51) Brian was born in Twickenham in 1934 to a prosperous family of Billingsgate fish merchants. He attended the Mall School before entering St Paul’s where his genial personality shone through. He raised eyebrows when, in his last school year, he came to school on his powerful motorbike. Leaving school early, he secured a job selling cars at a prestigious Mayfair dealer, which set the pattern for his future career in the motor industry. He quickly joined the OP sports clubs at Thames Ditton, which started him on an amazing membership as an active and popular member spanning almost 70 years.

At rugby, he played mostly for the 2nd or 3rd XV in those halcyon days when the OPs ran up to 7 rugby sides. At cricket, he was a stalwart of the 2nd XI and will always be remembered for hitting a huge six onto the roof of an adjacent bungalow against Datchet C.C that prompted his skipper, Neil Fitch (1955-60), to call him ‘Bunga’ – the name that stuck to him for the rest of his life. After retirement from field sports, he continued as a very regular attender at TD and joined rugby and cricket tours. He was also a tennis and squash player and in his eighties played croquet.

Bunga became a prominent member of the OP golf society. As past captain, he managed matches against Fulwell Golf club for over 40 years and played until he was 80. In his seventies he was elected a VP of the OP Club to add to his Vice Presidencies of the Golf and Rugby clubs.

Bunga married twice and then had a final good run of 25 years with his partner Jane. His children kept in close and loving contact. Jane sadly died in 2019 after a short illness and her demise upset him so that he quickly declined himself, becoming too weak to fight some underlying health problems. Bunga will be sadly missed. Bunga’s family and friends

Basil D Moss

(1948-53) It is hard to quantify the immense contribution that Basil, who died peacefully in November last year, made to the lives of countless Paulines and Old Paulines – and to the OP Club, of which he was President from 1991-93.

After graduating from RADA and acting in rep, Basil became a regular in the BBC TV soap opera Compact, as Alan Drew, and, later, in the corporation’s equally popular radio soap Waggoners’ Walk. A variety of stage, screen and radio roles followed.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s he was a key driving force in one of the most successful periods in the history of the Old Pauline rugby club. He ran the club’s ‘Extra A’ – regularly fielding three teams himself – and was appointed an OPFC Vice President in 1974.

When the decision was made to expand the facilities at Thames Ditton, Basil spearheaded a major fundraising campaign that enabled the building of the current clubhouse, which the Club would use in partnership with the newly formed Thames Ditton Sports and Squash Club – now Colets – ensuring the long-term future of the Old Paulines’ pitches and sports teams. Basil served Colets for 35 years, first as managing director then director and CEO. He also supported the newly established OPAFC and became its first chairman when football was introduced to Thames Ditton in 1992.

Basil’s prime cause, however, was that of The Pauline Meetings and house parties, the Barnes branch of which he ran for many decades. Speaking at Basil’s funeral, the Very Revd Joe Hawes said: “Time and again, testament has been paid to the work at the centre of Bas’s life: the St Paul’s School Christian Union, through which he expressed his quiet but deep faith, into which he poured unshowy, costly and generous love and from which he received friendship and the return of seeing young lives flourish.”

A person of genuine warmth and charisma, Basil was also a gifted musician. He ran a jazz band and composed a number of songs and choral works, including two Mass settings.

A memorial service for Basil will be held at Southwark Cathedral on 22 September. Andy Puddifoot (1974-79) and John Howard (1971-75)

John S Parker

(1959-63) My brother John Parker, born in 1946, entered Colet Court as a scholar in 1956 and left the senior school in 1963, on election to an open scholarship in mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge. He was no sportsman but received a superb training in maths in the 8th form from the celebrated Jack Moakes (Master 1931-67).

At Cambridge, where he was in his element, he got firsts in both parts of the tripos, very close to the top of the list in the second part. He started a PhD at Warwick University but broke it off to become a civil servant in the Ministry of Transport, which mutated into the Department of the Environment. He enjoyed the work and rose to the rank, if I remember, of Under Secretary, until disaster struck: because of a personality clash with a boss recruited from the private sector and not appreciative of civil service ways he was forced (unjustly and wastefully, in my view) into early retirement. In this enforced state of leisure he joined the Hertfordshire family history society and conducted spectacularly successful researches into every branch of our family history.

He was a loner among loners, who never married but could apparently live happily with few social contacts. But his interest in family history was an expression of a strong loyalty to family: he kept us all in touch and was a devoted uncle to my daughter. Only now do I realise how shamelessly I exploited and relied on him to cope with all the administrative tasks (for instance after our parents’ and other elderly relatives’ deaths) of the family.

Until his middle years he was a keen mountain walker, with an impressive total of conquered Munros; classical music was also very important to him, and he read voraciously, mostly non-fiction, and stored an extraordinary amount of what he learnt in a quite formidable memory. Robert Parker (1963-1967)

Associate Professor Michael H Pritchard

(1951-56) Born in Southampton, England on 10 August 1938, Michael died in Auckland, New Zealand aged 82, on 18 August 2020. His mother, widowed when he was six, worked as a housekeeper to send him to Colet Court from 1944, and St Paul’s School (1951-56), where he flourished as a choirboy, rower and scholastically. Rejecting a place at the University of Cambridge (then not offering geology), Michael graduated with an Aberystwyth University Bachelor of Science.

Aged 23, with a young family (eventually seven children, fourteen grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren), he migrated to New Zealand in 1961 to take up a position with the Ministry of Works, going on to study Town Planning at the University of Auckland. Recruited to the staff in 1965, he helped fashion Planning Education in New Zealand, then an emerging discipline and profession. He established the New Zealand Planning Institute’s professional journal, Town Planning Quarterly while writing a regular newspaper column to enhance public recognition and understanding. An outstanding teacher, he received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award (1994). Prominent in academic leadership, he headed the Planning Department (1990-93) and the Faculty of Architecture, Property, Planning and Fine Arts (1996-2004).

Michael was also a community activist and at the forefront of New Zealand’s heritage and environmental movements. He entered local politics in his home suburb of Devonport, as a councillor (1971-83) and Deputy Mayor (1977-80). A visionary polymath, talented in harmonising discordant voices towards constructive transformation, Michael’s New Zealand legacy is substantial. St Paul’s provided the foundation: a reverence for knowledge and the obligation to pass it on. The Pritchard family

Professor EOR Reynolds CBE, FRS

(1946-51) “Os” Reynolds died on 24 April 2017.

He was in the Biology 8th, taught by the legendary Sid Pask (Master 1928-66) with two other classmates who also achieved national fame, Oliver Sacks (1946-51), author and neurologist, and Ian McColl (1948-51) who became President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a Peer. A year behind them was Jonathan Miller (1947-53), the future pathologist and polymath. Captain of Fencing, he was an exceptional talent described by a team-mate as having “very fast moving feet, long arms and legs so that when he attacked you he unfolded like some sort of terrifying spring coil.”

On leaving school he fenced for Wales at the Empire and Commonwealth games, and for Great Britain in the 1955 World Championships and won a team Bronze Medal, defeating France, reigning World and Olympic champions, on the way.

He then retired from the sport to pursue his career in medicine, but maintained that his fencing career had changed his life. He strongly believed that children should be encouraged to be good at something, and it probably did not matter what it was.

His medical career was summed up by a colleague, who said he was the founding father of neonatal medicine in the UK and a major leader in the field worldwide. In 1993 he was the first neo-natologist to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, a singular recognition of his leadership and influence in this field of medicine. He was awarded the CBE in 1995.

His wife Margaret was a distinguished physiologist and their two sons Mark (1970-75), now a doctor was awarded an MBE for services to General Practice and Matthew (1982-86), currently a Professor of English at Oxford University are both Old Paulines: Mark was Captain of Fencing. Os’s family was most important to him and he was extremely proud of them and his grandchildren. Another great love was music, Glyndebourne being a high spot of the year.

He was a delightful man, kindly, courteous and considerate with a great sense of fun. His company was sought and relished by his many friends. Charles Madge (1952-57)