Obituaries
Simon Whitworth Whitworth SWB (c, 1965-1969) On 26.11.2015 Simon William Battams Whitworth. At Radley he was a Scholar, played for the lst Hockey XI, and the 2nd Rugby and Cricket teams. He won the C. Y. Morgan Prize, the Historical Essay Prize, the A-Level History and English Prizes and the Richards Gold Medal. He was a House Prefect, Assistant Stage Director and Secretary of the Political Society. He went up to St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he was awarded the Forde History Scholarship. His brother Ben and his three sons, Archie (1998), Lucas (2000) and Theo (2003) were at Radley. His brother, Ben, writes: It was a huge privilege to hear my much loved brother Simon, who died on 26 November 2015 of neuro-endocrine cancer, spoken of with such affection on two occasions. The first was his funeral in his parish church in London, the second a wonderful Thanksgiving Service in the College Chapel, organised over the Christmas holidays with the help of the Bursar, Chaplain and Precentor and held at the very beginning of the Lent term. Three of his lifelong friends, contemporaries in C Social in 1965 spoke at these services: Thomas Seymour, Michael Hodgson (Chairman of Council, who spoke at both, entirely 110
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without repetition, hesitation etc.) and Simon Eliot; they were joined by a non-OR, a lawyer he had worked with on behalf of Kuwait Petroleum for thirty years, David Emmerson; Sally Milner (another Kuwait friend who trained for lay ministry there) preached at the Radley service. Copies of what they said are available on request to juliemwhitworth@btopenworld.com. One thing was apparent before a word was spoken, and that was Simon’s extraordinary gift of making, and keeping, friends. His death prompted more than 300 people to write to Julie, each of whom had by the end of March received a handwritten reply. Keeping in touch with friends scattered across the several continents in which they had lived meant seizing every opportunity when paths crossed. The extent to which they succeeded was borne out by the numbers who attended those two services. It was his and Julie’s love of, and interest in, people, coupled with their energy, which made them ideal ex-pats, throwing themselves into the life of the community in which they found themselves, whether that was Buenos Aires or Kuwait. He was conscientious too: his commitment to Radley and attendance at meetings of Council on which he served for so long was matched, for as long as possible, by his involvement in youth cricket in Argentina or the welfare of the Anglican church in Kuwait. I felt very proud as I listened to the descriptions of this clever, multitalented, loyal, insightful, diplomatic, clubbable, humorous individual who was Simon, whose company on the cricket pitch, in chambers, at the other sort of bar, on the Councils of church and College was appreciated by so many and yet, ultimately, for all too short a time. I also wondered if I had taken some of these qualities for granted, or simply overlooked them, just because he was my ‘kid brother’, three years my junior, though someone I admired and respected enormously. Re-reading letters I had written home from school, I came across this from December 1966: ‘Si distinguished himself this week by getting +10 on his Report Card... which equalizes (sic) the College record. Tutor was absolutely thrilled; he sent for me to tell me...’ It was a sign of things to come: there were
many other achievements, academic and otherwise, to be ‘equalized’ or surpassed. But it was not his brains or his industry that will stand out in my memory as much as some of his other abilities, one of which was the way he coped with crises. The first time I became aware of this was when, soon after having joined Bowyer Marine, his boss, the founder of this relatively small business, died of cancer. Simon could simply have found himself another job, which would have meant that his dozen or so colleagues would also have been out of work. He rose to the challenge and took over the business which survived and prospered, although another three of that small team would also meet early deaths (one in the Clapham rail disaster). Simon was a brilliant correspondent, writing (in the pre-email era) long letters, always in blue ink, his sense of humour and love of the absurd never far from the surface and his personality shining out of the uniformity of emails. There were running gags and family jokes which lasted years or even half a century: he and I always called each other ‘Booth’, after the Australian test cricketer of the mid-1960s, but pronounced in the way we imagined that Raymond Baxter, the presenter of TV’s ‘Tomorrow’s World,’ would have done. Don’t ask me why. Another quality which Simon demonstrated to the end of his life was courage. His illness was for as long as possible to be treated as a tiresome interruption to the enjoyment of life in all its fullness. Last September, during an all too brief remission after months of chemotherapy, I stayed with him and Julie in West Wales, in the house where they had holidayed for several years with their young family and much later been able to buy. He spent a whole day working with the neighbouring farmer, turning a couple of redundant telegraph poles into logs and stacking them. The farmer sawed and split. Simon did the stacking. We burned some of that stack on a day of hail showers and bright sun in early April as the family and some of his Welsh neighbours gathered to bury Simon’s ashes in the churchyard in the tiny hamlet of Capel Dewi. Afterwards, we adjourned to Simon’s visible contribution to the Welsh landscape, an Argentine ‘quincho’, a summer house magically created from the ruins of a piggery, with indoor parrilla (barbecue), but sadly not completed in time for him to put it to full use.