Obituaries
your thing. John Donne too fussy, and there’s just too much of the joss sticks about the Eastern mystics for you. So it had to be that old crooner Sinatra... with a song that could have been written for you:
Honorary Members
And now, the end is near; And so I face the final curtain. My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain.
From The Times:
I’ve lived a life that’s full. I’ve traveled each and every highway; And more, much more than this, I did it my way. Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew When I bit off more than I could chew. But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spat it out. I faced it all and I stood tall; And did it my way. To think I did all that; And may I say – not in a shy way, ‘Oh no, oh no not me, I did it my way’. For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels; And not the words of one who kneels. The record shows I took the blows – And did it my way! You certainly did, old friend. And in the words of the great Dave Allen: ‘Goodnight, Thank You, and may your God go with you.’ le Blanc Smith SM (h, 2000-2005) On 26.9.2015 Simon Meryon le Blanc Smith. Simon, aged 28, died in Singapore as the result of a tragic accident – it is thought he fell while trying to get back into his flat having locked himself out. At Radley he was a member of the Chapel Choir, played Lacrosse for the 1st team, Football for the 2nd XI, Rugby for the 3rd XV and was in the 2nd Pair for Rackets. He was a House Prefect. He went up to read Economics at Leeds University and then International Business. He became a Trainee Broker with Braemar Seascope Ltd and then, from January 2013, a Shipbroker with Howe Robinson in Singapore. His father and his brothers, Paul and Mark, were at Radley.
Robin Fletcher On 15.1.2016 Dr Robin Anthony Fletcher, OBE, DSC. He was a member of the Radley Council from 1967 to 1988.
Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, who campaigned for black scholars from apartheid South Africa Softly spoken and exceedingly modest, Robin Fletcher rarely spoke of his youth as an Olympic hockey player, or his wartime adventures in command, at just 21, of Greek-crewed vessels navigating the Naziinfested waters of the Aegean. To speak to the sailors he learnt Greek, sparking an interest that led to his becoming one of the first lecturers in Modern Greek at Oxford. Highly conciliatory, he later became the Bursar of Trinity. In 1980 he was appointed Warden of Rhodes House, headquarters of the postgraduate scholarship programme open to the sharpest intellects in America and other former colonies. Those Fletcher steered through the shoals of Oxford tradition included a future prime minister of Australia (Tony Abbott), a Booker prizewinner (Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North), and the neuroscientist Professor Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who was recently named the next President of Stanford. All of them benefitted from a scholarship scheme established under the 1902 will of Cecil Rhodes, the British magnate based in South Africa. The angry calls in recent months for the removal of Rhodes’s statue from Oriel College – he was decried for ‘British imperialist views’ – would not have been unfamiliar to Fletcher, who waged an assiduous campaign to attract more black South African Rhodes scholars through the South Africa at Large scheme launched in 1972. He invited the first such scholar, Loyiso Nongxa, who had missed school as a boy to tend to his father’s sheep, to lunch. Kumi Naidoo, later the director of Greenpeace, was another as numbers increased. Yet Fletcher’s plans fell foul of a legacy in Rhodes’s will assigning four scholarships to four South African boys’ schools. At the start of the 1980s, only two admitted non-whites. Fletcher
asked all four schools to surrender their scholarships as ‘an anachronism’. They refused, so Fletcher and the Rhodes trustees challenged the schools’ racial admissions policy. Only after the fall of apartheid, however, did these change. He had greater success convincing the boys’ schools to twin with sister schools so that girls might apply for Rhodes scholarships. This too was an innovation. Rhodes’s will had stipulated that the scholarships were to be offered to all men ‘regardless of race or religion’. Only in the 1970s after Shirley Williams, Labour’s secretary of state for education, tabled an act of parliament to change Rhodes’s will did scholarships become open to women. Early beneficiaries included Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer. Aware that the schooling of black South Africans was undermined by apartheid, Fletcher asked Rhodes scholars to fund a programme to help black South African children. He dismissed any head of a scholarship selection committee in South Africa who refused to include non-whites. Quiet in manner, his stance was clear. When organising celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of the scholarships in 1983, Fletcher excluded Piet Koornhof, a former Rhodes scholar who was a South African government minister, from the list of guests due to meet the Queen. A furious Koornhof then refused point-blank to attend the party, which drew 1,500 existing and former Rhodes scholars. Many who knew Fletcher speak of his kindness. He allowed one confused scholar, for instance, to change his course of study three times. He was also known for his generous hospitality. With his wife, Jinny, he introduced scholars’ Sunday lunches, cared for students who were ill and fussed over the homesick. Any who stayed in Oxford over Christmas would be handsomely entertained. Fletcher was skilled too at putting at ease the overawed parents of scholars when they visited Oxford. Any new scholar bewildered by the independence of thought demanded by the tutorial system would find solace with the Fletchers. Over tea and cucumber sandwiches, they would gently demystify such strange English customs as drinking sherry and taking port after dinner, and decode nuances of Oxonian vocabulary such as the various possible meanings of the word ‘quite’. The American architect Ila Burdette recalled how Fletcher ‘guided all of us the old radleian 2016
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