OP Obituaries

This document contains obituaries for OPs and former members of staff If you wish to submit an obituary, please contact Philippa Dunford-Jeffs.

2022 Christopher Vyle 1937-2021 (Temple 1955) Ian Heddle 1957-2022 (School House 1975) See page 2 Jeremy N T Howat 1935-2022 (School 1954) John Burdon (The Rise 1955-60) died January 2022.

Michael Collins (School House 1952-1957) died 12 January 2022.

Ian Heddle 1957-2022 (School House 1975) Ian attended St Olave's from 1965 and St Peter's from 1970 to 1975, mainly as a day pupil in Queens then headed by David Kirby, and for part of the Sixth Form in School House, where he boarded.

Although Ian was bright academically and achieved four A-levels, it was in sport that he reached his zenith. He participated in rugby and cricket in various teams, but it was squash that gave him the opportunity to excel.

In December 1972, the St Peter's under-16 squash team, Jonty Rounthwaite, David Phillips and Ian won the Bath Cup – played at the Bath Club in London – the major UK schools team competition.

Also, that same December, Ian won the Junior Evans – played at the RAC Club in London – the major UK individual competition at under-16 level.

Ian's working life encompassed a number of occupations but it was as a personal tutor for the past thirty years that he brought out the best in a diverse range of pupils seeking entry to schools, at GCSE and A-level.

Ian was predeceased by his wife Josiane, and is survived by his children Emilie and Peter, and his brother Andrew.

2021 David G Young (Grove 1955-1959) died 1 December 2021.

William J Bottomley (Grove 1956-1960) died 30 November 2021.

David G Jesper (Temple 1949-1953) died 10 December 2021.

David A MacPherson (School House 1945-1955) died 17 November 2021.

Noel M Ward (Temple 1943-1949) died 31 October 2021.

George AW Heppell (Temple 1934-1938) died 17 October 2021.

David Kirby (Grove 1952-1958 and Former Staff) died 7 October 2021.

J Murree E Walton (Manor 1946-1954) died 14 September 2021.

John O Armstrong (Manor 1954-1960) died July 2021.

Peter D Perks (Dronfield 1971-1973) died 9 July 2021.

Malcolm Willstrop (School House 1950-1955 and Former Staff) died 3 May 2021.

Malcolm J McCallum (School House 1949-1954) died 28 April 2021.

Richard Hobson (The Manor 1942-1945) died 26 April 2021.

Richard P Morris (Dronfield 1964-1968) died 12 April 2021.

Clive K Smith (School House 1948-1953) died 8 March 2021.

John Robert Coles 1946 – 2021, (School House 1959-1963) died 27 February 2021.

See page 3 Russell Mainds (Queen's 1976-1979) died 18 February 2021.

Leland D Edinger (School House 1942-1947) died 15 February 2021.

John B Weightman (The Manor 1948-1953) died 14 February 2021.

John Malcolm Raylor, (The Manor 1947-1951) died 11 February 2021.

See page 5 Donald Hardisty (Temple 1940-1947) died 21 January 2021.

Guy Shuttleworth (Former Staff) died 21 January 2021 See page 6

John Robert Coles 1946 – 2021, (School House 1959-1963) died 27 February 2021.

John was born in Peterborough and attended Westwood House School aged 5. In 1955 he joined his brother David as a boarder at St Olave's and in 1959 he moved to School House, St Peter's. He enjoyed school, especially the rugby but was not particularly keen on the academic side of things! He was always cheerful and often mischievous - once disappearing under the floor of his classroom to the amazement of his teacher and the amusement of the class! He was a popular and effective wingforward in the 1st XV in 1963, leaving school in December 1963.

He started work as an Estate Agent in Peterborough, mainly with agricultural properties. Then followed 2 years at College in Bournemouth where he qualified as a Chartered Surveyor. He joined Edward Bailey and Son in Newark, initially working as an auctioneer at Newark Cattle Market. He became a partner and then also took on the management of rented property. In 1982 the firm was taken over and he stayed for 1-2 years before joining 3 others in setting up a new firm in Nottingham where he practiced until 1994 when he teamed up with a friend, Chris Butterfield, an accountant.

They set up a company called Evenbrook Properties. After many months of trying, they raised a large loan to enable them to buy a portfolio of rented properties from Nationwide Building Society when it became a bank. Over the years Evenbrook has developed into one of the UK's leading Build to Rent private rented property businesses - letting and managing around 600 residential properties and a 660-bed student campus at their urban village development in Handsworth Green, North Birmingham.

Once John was invited to an "Away-Day" by Saville's at a marina on the Hamble. In order to save time, he hired a helicopter and landed nearby. He had a great day after which the other guests made their way to a pub in Itchen. Wondering how to get there, he returned to the helicopter and the pilot flew him there, landing in an empty car park. Being a good lawabiding citizen John bought a pay-and-display ticket which he stuck on the helicopter. Later they flew home. A few days later, he received an irate letter from the chairman of the parish council asking why he had "parked" the helicopter in the car park - John wrote back explaining that there was nothing on the notice-board at the car park banning helicopters, and anyhow he had bought a ticket!!

Rugger has played a large part in his life - 1st XV at school, at College and later he played rugby for Peterborough RFC 1st XV and also for some time organised a team of OP's to play in the Peterborough sevens. He played for Newark Rugby club for many years and was President in 2020. His generosity to the club is there for all to see - "The Evenbrook Stand" and the "John Coles Bar"!

He attended the Hong Kong Sevens for 10+ years. A major event at the Sevens was a large corporate lunch for bankers and lawyers in Hong Kong. It was known as the 'long lunch' for obvious reasons. At the end of the meal, John ran an Auction of Promises at which vast amounts were bid for many luxuries such as super holidays all over the world. Over the years he raised nearly £3 million for various charities, especially Help the Heroes!

He had a ski chalet in Switzerland and enjoyed many happy holidays there with his family and friends. He has two sons and a daughter for whom he was a very proud father. He enjoyed shooting very much and often shot 2-3 times a week. He and Chris Butterfield built a Safari Lodge in Mozambique in very primitive conditions with 170 men and few, if any, machines. John flew out every six weeks to supervise the construction!

John has always been a generous supporter of both St Peter's School and the Old Peterite Club, both financially and with his time. John enjoyed every opportunity to come to the School and attending Old Peterite events. In 2008 John set up the Coles Family Scholarship to be awarded to pupils who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to attend St Peter's, and access a St Peter's education. John was a Governor of St Peter's from 2010-2015 and served particularly on the Property & Finance Committee where his professional experience was much appreciated. John was always proud of his connection to the School.

John was Old Peterite President from 2018-2020 and one of his aims was to ensure that all events were open to Old Peterites of all ages. In recent years John funded the Old Peterite Christmas Drinks, mulled wine following the service of Nine lessons and Carols in York Minster, and had volunteered to fund the London Drinks due to take place in 2020. John was a huge supporter of the Old Peterite Club and had followed in his brother's footsteps as Old Peterite President, the first Old Peterite brothers to both hold this title.

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Kindly written by Nick Blackford (1964)

John Malcolm Raylor, (The Manor 1947-1951) died 11 February 2021.

31.viii.1933-11.ii.2021 Born in 1933 to Harry and Ella Raylor, John attended Nunthorpe Grammar School and then St Peter’s School, where he excelled in multiple sports, first captaining the Colts in rugby, and then playing on the first XI at hockey and the first XV at rugby, and serving in the C.C.F. as Drum Major.

After National Service, he joined the family business (H. B. Raylor & Co. Ltd.), rising to a directorship, which he held until 2017.

Outside the business, John’s passions were sport, community, and service.

A true son of York, he served for two decades as non-executive director of York Waterworks (1979-1999) and in 1995-1996 as Governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers. But John’s greatest love was freemasonry. After initiation into the Old Peterite Lodge in 1961 he was entered multiple lodges and orders, rising to the top of several. His period as Provincial Grand Master of Yorkshire, North and East Riding (1991-1995) is still regarded as a crucial one for the province. Though John was a mason to his core, he always had time for friends and family, who will remember him as a gracious host, a convivial companion, a consummate gentleman.

Guy Shuttleworth 1926-2021, (Former Staff) died 21 January 2021.

An appreciation by Michael Ranson (1960) Guy joined the staff at St. Peter’s in September 1957 from Mill Hill school to teach mathematics. He was born in Blackburn Lancashire and had a very distinguished school career at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School Blackburn winning a scholarship to Kings College Cambridge.

He was a brilliant sportsman and won a double blue at Cambridge at Cricket and Soccer and played for the University for three years between 1946 and 1948. He played Soccer for Corinthian Casuals and was in the team that played in the Amateur Cup Final at Wembley in 1956 against Bishop Auckland. (Attendance 84,000!!!) He also won an England cap in 1949 He played cricket for a number of clubs He was in the Lancashire 2 nd Xl when they won the championship in 1946, played in the Lancashire league from 1944 to 1950 and subsequently played for the MCC and the Free Foresters amongst others.

When he arrived in York, he received a letter from Sam Bartram the York City manager asking him if he would play for York City. on a part time basis!! He politely refused as he wanted to focus on his teaching career and so devoted the rest of his life to teaching pupils at St Peter’s How lucky we all were.!!!

I was one of the first of many of his pupils, to benefit from his enthusiastic teaching. Full of fun and encouragement, but an insistence on hard work and discipline. He was subsequently Head of Maths for a number of years and responsible for developing and modernising the curriculum.

Guy, of course, took an active part in the sporting life of the school especially coaching the younger generation in all sports including Rugby. The round ball game was not really appreciated in the 50’s at St. Peter’s but Guy could play and coach all different sports. There is evidence that, when he was at Mill Hill, he experimented with kicking a Rugby ball with his instep and that he could kick it as far and as accurately as the traditional way. It was only years later that this method was adopted as the norm throughout the game!

He also contributed hugely to all aspects of school life and in the Common Room. He was Housemaster in Queens for 4 years in the 1960’s and then the Manor 1969 to 91 and there follows an appreciation from Kevin McCarter and Andrew Beadnall who were pupils during his time there.

One of the reasons Guy came up to York was to be close to Tanya who he had met sometime earlier. It was well worth the move as they have enjoyed 62 year of a wonderful married life. She was involved in all aspects of life at St. Peter’s and supported him throughout, his career especially in the Manor. Guy had two children who attended St Peter’s, Neil and Sally. His grandson is Ben Chilwell who plays for Chelsea and England.

Guy and Tanya introduced and ran the very successful Community Services activity which benefited many local elderly and handicapped people and helped to inculcate the ideals of Service into the School. Subsequently he and Tanya were both heavily involved in fund raising for so many worthwhile causes.

Despite his huge successes Guy was forever modest, never forgot his roots, and was always true to his principles, of equality and fairness founded on his strong Christian faith.

My abiding memory of Guy was when I invited him to Test matches at Old Trafford with David Kirby and after lunch he always disappeared for a few minutes. Where was he? He had stepped into the kitchens to thank the kitchen staff personally for the meal.

He was a true gentleman and an example to all who knew him.

Guy Shuttleworth – An Appreciation: Andrew Beadnall (Manor 1973) My greatest good fortune as a boarder in Manor was having Guy Shuttleworth as Housemaster and Tan as his wonderful ‘consort’. The very fact that it will soon be 48 years since I left St. Peter’s and I am now honouring the memory of this great man speaks volumes of the impact he had not only on my life from 1969-1973 but also all of those lucky enough to have Guy as their Housemaster.

In the early 1970’s boarding school life was a much different harder place than today’s more relaxed times. Guy whilst always commanding great respect from the boys in the House was incredibly fair and approachable to all and the tremendous pride Guy and Tan held for Manor was instilled in us all.

Guy oversaw an exceptionally well run House with a strong duty of care to all the boys. In a boarding House of 60 aged from 13 to 18 there had to be rules to be followed and whilst these were adhered to Guy allowed the boys more individual freedom as we progressed from being a junior in the 3rd form to upper sixth. I can recall asking Guy in my final year for permission on some occasions to leave Manor and visit the school library or another House when I’m sure he knew we were heading to the ‘Old Gray Mare’ on Clifton Green! All of us however knew not to take advantage of Guy’s inherent fairness. That easy smile could quickly change to a steely glare!

Guy and Tan created and encouraged a homely atmosphere for their boys organising House parties and suppers for individual years in their private quarters. Recalling all of this now it was no wonder that all the other boarders at St. Peter’s wished they were in Manor!

Guy was the perfect school and Housemaster and I am sure all of us who knew him will mourn his passing and always remember him with thanks and great affection for making our years at St. Peter’s so fulfilled and happy. RIP Guy. Snapshot of Guy Shuttleworth from the Class of 1969-74 - Kevin McCarter (1974) Michaelmas Term 1969 and Guy Shuttleworth stood before us in the table tennis room we used for House Assembly looking distinguished, trim and (yes)wearing Oxford Bags-despite being a Cambridge Man. He had a newspaper article ready to read out. As we know boys just reaching thirteen years of age find anything funny or ready to mock. Thus, we gave him the very original nickname on account of his VW: 'Beetle' .

We had arrived at the Manor at a crossroads moment in the School -being the last year group to do Head of House Fag duties, wear white detachable collars with studs and started to hear rumours about girls joining the school-alas this wasn't to be until 1976.We were to

roar into the purple clad 1970s ,purchase loons from the ad section of New Musical Express ,hotfoot it down to Harry Fenton's on Coney Street and buy the latest LP from the Progressive Section in Sound Effect on King's Square. We used the red telephone box at the top of St Olave's Road to reverse the charges home. Telephone number: 23089X. Some of us queuing would pretend to have a girlfriend. A further 100 yards up from the telephone box there was Whitings Delicatessen where one of us racked up the not inconsiderable amount of £15 in one term. His father was not pleased.

Yet over next five years we had one constant and that was Guy and his wife Tanya. We felt safe and cared for at all times. He was very fair and would always listen to our requests and sometimes cheeky replies. Our admiration and respect came from other areas. Guy, as has been written elsewhere, was a genius at getting boys of weak mathematical ability through the O-level. Three of us only passed maths because of him. He was patient with those like me who were in 'Remove' urging us to never give up. An outstanding sportsman himself he strode easily across any type of playing field as the referee. With Roger Depledge he was aware of the skills and interest he gave to The Manor as his Assistant Housemaster. He saw the importance of the charity work Tanya brought to the Manor. We relished their lavish food feasts given to us throughout the years. When he retired in 1989 the Memorial Hall was crammed full with grateful Manorites.

Guy Shuttleworth was no ordinary Housemaster or teacher. Forty-seven years on eight of our year still meet two or three times a year. We know this is in part because of the solid foundation he began to give us in 1969: a loyal, happy, and engaging community.

2020 Andrew S Rennie (The Manor 1966-1971) died December 2020.

Owen C Wetherell (School House 1950-1955) died 28 December 2020.

Kenneth JA Featherston (Former Staff) died 16 December 2020.

Robert I Collinson (The Grove 1946-1955) died 5 November 2020.

Bryan R Martinson (School House 1954-1962) died 18 October 2020.

George WR Alderson (School House 1956-1961) died 12 September 2020.

Leslie M Creer (The Manor 1963-1968) died 18 August 2020.

Robert M Stork (School House 1949-1954) died 8 June 2020.

Guy P Rushton (Linton 2000-2002) died 27 May 2020.

Robert L Bruce (The Manor 1957-1963) died 24 April 2020.

Anthony M Kendell (The Rise 1945-1950) died 21 April 2020.

Leslie P Dobson (The Grove 1956-1961) died 20 April 2020.

Iain ST Dutton (The Grove 1954-1959) died 2 April 2020.

Alfred C Stubbs (The Rise 1951-1955) died 1 April 2020.

Richard Sharpe (Temple 1967-1972) died 22 March 2020 See page 11 Patrick Masser (Temple 1942-1949) died 20 March 2020.

John Rigby (Former Staff) died 17 March 2020.

Dan Woods (Former Staff) died 3 March 2020.

John Hutt (Former Staff) died 19 February 2020.

Nigel P Thornton (The Grove 1956-1961) died 13 February 2020.

Henry C Marshall (School House 1947-1955) died 11 February 2020.

Anthony W Raylor (School House 1950-1959) died 4 February 2020 See page 15

Charles William David Green (Temple 1945-1950) died 26 January 2020.

Richard Sharpe, (Temple 1967-1972) died 22 March 2020.

Richard Sharpe, who has died in post as Professor of Diplomatic in the University of Oxford, was a brilliant man who would have made his reputation in any field.

The fact that he chose medieval history belonged partly to the satisfaction of pure intellectual enquiry in an area where he felt a contribution was still possible, and in part to a boyhood spent surrounded by the antiquities of York. His engagement with the middle ages owed more to the gifts of imagination than, perhaps, he would have admitted or his colleagues would have guessed.

Diplomatic, defined as the study of the forms and formulas of ancient and medieval correspondence and conveyances, is a demanding specialism which requires a suite of technical skills. Richard saw no satisfaction in an historical argument that had not sought out the sources of evidence and understood them in their physical reality. His celebrated expertise as a textual critic allowed his published work to move with equal authority from late antiquity through the entire middle ages and into the modern period. It is difficult to think of any other British historian of the last fifty years who could march with such authority over so vast a territory.

Richard Sharpe was born in 1954, at York, the only son of John Sharpe and his wife Dorothy, who together owned and ran the family pharmacy. Dorothy was the pharmacist, the first woman to have graduated in pharmacology at the University of Manchester. Richard had an elder sister, Jean, and a happy beginning in a family with distant Methodist roots.

Responding to an early aesthetic piety which never left him, he was drawn rather to the older certainties of Anglican worship and the elegant cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. Evensong at the Minster and a brilliant schoolboy career at St Peter’s School (founded, he was pleased to think, by St Paulinus in AD 627) shaped an interest in the institutions of national life.

A scholarship followed at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and then AngloSaxon, Norse, and Celtic, quickly adding the medieval Celtic languages to his roster. Early medieval Ireland would become the first focus of his work. In a time of glittering prizes—he was Head of the River, a champion on University Challenge—he began a doctorate on the earliest Irish accounts of St Brigit, a fiendishly complicated exercise in textual criticism that had defeated all comers. The first hurdle he clipped was the competition for a research fellowship at Trinity. The college would always remain for him the land of lost content, but he would admit that the subsequent search for a position forged a more ambitious and versatile scholar.

Like so many research students in the 1980s, when university jobs were few and far between, he was creative in searching out other opportunities. A year at the Public Record Office, then still in its historic venue on Chancery Lane, was followed by a position with the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin From British Sources. He was exposed there to the rich variety of Latin texts composed in the British Isles between Gildas in the late fifth century

and Thomas More in the early sixteenth. He gained a mastery not only of the more predictable Latin of letter collections and sermons but also the energetic language of muster rolls, tool inventories, ship manifests, miracle books, and private deeds. These texts appealed to his interest in the essential realities of the past: the nature of tools and weapons, shrines, the boundaries of estates, the workings of water clocks. It also furnished him with the means to publish in later years a masterly bibliography, his Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (1997).

His reputation was first made in the 1980s with a string of articles on the early Irish church, which redrew the subject and whose ramifications are still being worked through today. The book of his thesis, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives (1991) was a virtuoso piece of textual and linguistic analysis, while a book in the Penguin Classics imprint, Adomnán of Iona’s Life of St Columba (1995) brought Irish and Scottish Christianity vividly alive for general readers.

The delayed publication of his thesis came at an opportune moment. In 1989 the charismatic Reader in Diplomatic at Oxford, Pierre Chaplais, retired. Richard was in a sense entirely untrained for the position, which required specialist expertise in medieval charters and letters. Yet the appointment committee recognised in him, not least in his remarkable monograph, a gifted forensic scholar able to unlock and exploit the intricacies of medieval texts. He was appointed Reader in Diplomatic and Fellow of Wadham College in 1990. In 1998 he was made Professor of Diplomatic.

He threw himself into his teaching, immersing himself in the forms and functions of AngloSaxon and Anglo-Norman charters. He became, almost by default, a historian of the British Isles in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. (Used to the testing limitations of evidence from the ‘Dark Ages’, Richard was not reluctant to express his view that the study of English political history after the publication of Magna Carta was ‘mere journalism’.) Unencumbered by historical orthodoxies, his mastery of charter material was the foundation for a significant contribution to the study of political history under the Anglo-Norman kings, providing important new insights into the workings of administration, the operation of law, and the business of kingship.

Medieval texts and their books formed another branch of his learning. His work on medieval British libraries, nearly all of them broken up and scattered at the time of the Reformation, involved an enormous effort of reconstruction to discover what was available to be read where in medieval England. That led him also to a study of the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries, particularly the Welsh polymath Edward Lhwyd (1660– 1709) and the father of Irish antiquaries, Roderic O’Flaherty (1629–1718), whose correspondence Richard treated to a monumental edition.

There were occasions when he was compelled to restrain his interests. A study into inscriptions in early medieval Rome beckoned, but was resisted, another on the textual transmission of the Latin Fathers: simply too much to do, on too many fronts, in too many fields. Even so, the range of his publications, more than two hundred of them, testifies to his prodigious reach. Books unfinished at the time of his death include a monumental edition of the royal acts and charters of Kings William II and Henry I, a book of essays on the early history of St Mary’s abbey in York, a defining survey of medieval libraries in Great Britain, and a catalogue of every work printed in Irish between 1571 and 1871.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003, on whose committees he could indulge his enjoyment of machination and the intricacies of form and protocol. (The same talents were employed by a grateful university when he held office as Junior Proctor in the millennium year.) More recently, he had been elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. He was President of the Surtees Society from 2002. Politically, he was liberal, and was a member of Oxford Town Council between 1987 and 1995, where he was a strong supporter of the rights of Headington freeholders to erect giant fibreglass sharks on their roofs. He felt such a thing could only add to the gaiety of the Oxford skyline, and enjoyed the self-answering objection of another councillor: ‘But if we give this shark permission, then everyone will want one!’

His certainties, expressed with wit and sometimes a bluntness, commanded authority. He had a view on everything and it was always thought out from first principles. Not one naturally inclined or necessarily attuned to the joys and perils of small talk, he might take conversational refuge in the discussion of his research. There was an aspect of display to his table-talk, which could range in only minutes from vowel changes in Old Irish to the English hymnal to potted histories of obscure East Anglian landed families. But the sometimes austere exterior concealed depths of sentiment and a matchless sense of humour. A man who prized the English landscape and cherished the quiet nobility of its parish churches, he spent the spare time he gave himself exploring the landscape. A fell runner in his youth, in later years he was a prodigiously well-informed walking companion, be it in the Hebrides, the Veneto, Ireland, Rome.

His intellectual capacities, extraordinary learning and dislike of cant may sometimes have provoked a sense that he was unapproachable. He was in fact, as those who knew best can testify, the kindest and most generous of men. He was a loyal friend and a generous mentor. He was happiest, perhaps, when ‘making progress’, his favourite watchwords, but when the books were closed for the day he cherished no less friendship and laughter, a reflex of his vivid enjoyment of scholarly community. Although the delights of the table were not one of his central preoccupations, he greatly enjoyed fine wine, in particular Pol Roger champagne, and was deservedly proud of his scrambled eggs. He never married but is mourned by a wide circle of colleagues, friends, and admirers around the world.

Richard Sharpe, scholar, was born on February 17, 1954. He died after a heart attack on March 21, 2020, aged 66.

[Drafted by Hugh Doherty and James Willoughby, with comments by Alan Thacker, Bill Stoneman and Cristina Dondi.]

Anthony W Raylor (School House 1950-1959) died 4 February 2020.

Classic car enthusiast, Member of York Vikings Rotary Club. Much loved husband, father and grandfather. Following a private cremation, a Celebration of Tony's life will be held in St Peter's School Chapel, York on Wednesday, March 4th at 2.00pm. Family flowers only please, donations may be made in lieu if desired to The British Heart Foundation. Please use Marygate Carpark. Enquiries to J G Fielder & Son Funeral Directors, Easingwold, Tel: 01347 666505.

2019 Clifford Carolin (Queen's 1952-1956) died 2019.

David Sutcliffe (Temple 1952-1955) died 2019.

Terry Wasden ( The Rise 1955-1960) died 22 December 2019.

Peter E Jackson (Temple 1959-1962) died 4 December 2019.

Peter Moat (Queen's 1955-1958) died 23 November 2019.

Clive Hodsdon (Former Staff) died 21 November 2019.

Richard G Armstrong (The Manor 1952-1959) died 20 November 2019.

Eric HN Turner (The Grove 1951-1956) died 12 November 2019.

W Brian Hawkins (The Grove 1950-1954) died October 2019 See page 18 John Rodger Frost (The Rise 1938-1942) died 29 September 2019.

Michael Veal (Temple 1952-1956) died 22 September 2019.

Camron Miller (Former Staff) died August 2019.

John Maw (Former Staff) died 2 August 2019.

Edward AK Denison (Temple 1941-1946) died 16 July 2019.

See page 19 Hugh WJ Rigg (The Manor 1947-1952) died July 2019.

Peter Critchley (Temple 1972-1982) died 18 June 2019.

James D Carr (Temple 1958-1963) died 5 June 2019.

See page 22 David K Hodd (The Grove 1951-1955) died May 2019.

Richard D Palframan (Manor 19470-52) died May 2019.

David Pattison (The Grove 1950-1955) died 7 May 2019.

Morag Wilson nee Lyall (School House 1993-2003) died 5 May 2019.

Ian P Scott (Temple 1940-1943) died 26 April 2019.

Alan Black (The Grove 1956-1960) died 14 April 2019.

R John Bulcock (Former Staff) died April 2019.

Sheldon Bonner (Former Staff) died 20 March 2019.

See page 23 Alan Scott (Former Medical Officer St Peter's School) died March 2019.

W Robert Ibberson (The Rise 1949-1954) died 21 February 2019.

James R Hewitt (The Grove 1975-1980) died 16 February 2019.

Georgina Terry (Former Staff) died 17 February 2019.

Peter DR Gardiner (Head Master 1967-1979) died 5 February 2019.

See page 24 W Peter Anelay (The Rise 1940-1945) died 21 January 2019.

Richard T Middleton (School House 1957-1960) died 15 January 2019.

W Brian Hawkins (The Grove 1950-1954) died October 2019.

13 October 1936 - 17 October 2019 Born in York, Brian Hawkins had lessons on the violin with his mother, who had studied the instrument at the Royal College of Music and taught at Bootham and The Mount. After attending St Olive's, he became a day border at St Peter's, where he received strong support from his music master, Freddy Waine. He became a member of the NYO and changed his instrument to the viola, which he went on to study at the RCM in 1954, with Cecil Aronowitz. On leaving in 1960, he was awarded the silver medal of The Most Worshipful Company of Musicians. The next five years were spent in Scotland with the Edinburgh String Quartet, before returning to a very busy musical life in London.

Brian Hawkins was a founder member of the London Bach Orchestra, a member of the English Chamber Orchestra and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and Principal viola with the London Sinfonietta. He was also a member of several chamber groups, including the Vesuvius Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble, the London Oboe Quartet, and the London Virtuosi, and was in a family trio and piano quartet with his Tunnell cousins, John, Susan and Charles. He was appointed Professor of Viola and Chamber Music at the RCM in 1967, where he became an influential, dedicated and popular teacher. He was Head of Strings from 1992 until his retirement in 2002 and his broad musical experience and knowledge enriched the entire string faculty. Teaching, examining, and adjudicating, continued well into his retirement.

Edward .A.K. Denison, OBE TD MA, (Temple 1941 - 1946) died 16 July 2019.

Delivering his eulogy at Teddy Denison’s service of thanksgiving at Bossall on 13th September, Ashley Burgess, a friend of many years, prefaced his remarks by saying that Teddy was a ‘remarkable man’ and indeed he was since in the almost ninety-one years of his life he achieved an extraordinary amount, touching the lives of many people, either in the help and encouragement he gave them or by influencing institutions that were affecting them. He was a strong character, a man of many parts, invariably good humoured, generous, compassionate and wise but, above all, always prepared to give time to people who had a doubt or a difficulty.

Teddy was born on 13th September 1928 and spent his early years in York. He entered St Olave’s School in September 1936 and later progressed to St Peter’s. His school years were clearly energetic and happy; as well as doing well scholastically, he enjoyed sport, in particular boxing and shooting, joined the CCF, edited the Peterite, acted in the school play and was prominent in the debating society. In February 1945 he opposed the motion ‘Women can no longer be regarded as the weaker sex’ which was defeated - an early sign of Teddy’s powers of advocacy? He became Head of Temple House and Vice-Head of School.

After St Peter’s he was called up for National Service and was commissioned into the East Yorkshire Regiment. Posted to Vienna, he had the distasteful task of returning Russian soldiers who had been captured or who had deserted, to their own country to face an uncertain future. A life-long interest in soldiering remained with him from that time and was to continue in a strong commitment to the TA when he commanded the Third Battalion of the PWO Regiment of Yorkshire and later became its Honorary Colonel. After the Army he read history and law at Brasenose College, Oxford while winning a Blue for boxing.

Teddy’s professional career largely revolved around his work as a solicitor, first with Denison Suddards and later Denison Till, a leading York legal firm of which he was in due course the senior partner. In parallel he developed an interest in politics being elected to serve on both the District and the County Council. His political interest manifested itself in other ways and, had the opportunity arisen, he might have considered an involvement at Westminster. His respect for politicians may not have been universal but his wish to influence those who entered that particular arena was always to the fore with comments usually pithily delivered!

But it was to St Peter’s School that Teddy always gave his undivided attention. His alma mater and its future wellbeing were ever at the top of his agenda developing over time into a strong desire to ensure that the school should thrive. His twenty-three years as a governor and later Vice-Chairman when he served alongside five headmasters, three Deans of York -

the ex-officio chairmen of the Governing Body - and three bursars, saw many radical changes to the way in which the school was governed and future developments in size and scope were decided and executed. Co-education, the 1989 Appeal, the Chillman Building, the acquisition of Clifton Preparatory School, the purchase of Linton Lodge as a boarding house, the advent of league tables, the creation of a Foundation to fund and support wider philanthropic policies and the opening moves to purchase the site of Queen Anne’s School to permit an expansion of the campus, all occurred during Teddy’s time on the Governing Body. However, his most enduring legacy was perhaps reform of the school’s articles of governance. Since time immemorial the St Peter’s Governing Body had always been chaired by the contemporary Dean of York. Leading up to the Millennium Dean John Southgate and Teddy agreed that such an arrangement was no longer appropriate in a world where school governance was demanding increased commitment from those involved, greater continuity and growing transparency. As a result, after many years as Vice-Chairman, Teddy became the first elected Chairman in 1995, a position he held for five years until retiring and being appointed a Fellow of the school. Nearly thirty years involvement with an institution he cherished.

So how will Teddy be remembered by those who knew and worked with him? Andrew Trotman who began his time as Headmaster when Teddy became chairman, records their embarking on joint leadership of the school when Teddy ‘gave great support stipulating clear guidelines and teaching the value of building networks’. Robin Pittman, Andrew’s predecessor as Headmaster always appreciated their relationship while not holding back from challenging Teddy when he felt that necessary. As a result each respected the other.

Nick Shepherd, appointed a governor by Teddy, admired his ‘business-like approach and his ability to steer the school through some challenging times, realizing that modern day schools needed to adapt to the market place.’ Similar comments have been made by others.

Finally his citation as a Fellow recorded that he would be remembered for many different reasons not least that ‘he was a modernizer, a natural chairman – possessing both enormous charm and great powers of persuasion - never afraid of the challenges faced by the school and well able to guide the Governing Body through many difficult decisions.’

Most of those who are successful in life have the good fortune to benefit from a happy and settled home life. Teddy had that in abundance with Mary too associating herself with St Peter’s almost as much as Teddy, although in different ways. Their children and grandchildren equally enjoyed an involvement with the school and the family’s support for St Peter’s could truly be described as second to none. We all – family, school, friends and colleagues – can say that we have lost a good and respected personal friend, a man who had time for everybody and who could always see the bigger picture and, when appropriate, actually did something about it.

Major General David Murray Naylor CB MBE DL Editor’s note: Murray Naylor was appointed to the Board by Teddy and served as his Vice Chairman before succeeding him as Chairman in 2000.

James D Carr (Temple 1958-1963) died 5 June 2019.

Warwickshire CCC and Cricket Board were sad to inform us of the sudden passing away of Jim Carr, aged 74.

Jim loved cricket and put a lot of his energies into serving the game in Warwickshire. He was the Warwickshire Under 11s Team Manager during the 1990s to 2000 and took teams with the likes of Moeen Ali and Chris Woakes in them as they started their journeys towards professional cricket. He had a great rapport with everyone he met including all the players and coaches he worked with, all of whom remember him fondly. He had a good eye for spotting talent and wrote in the WCB yearbook for 2000/1, ‘Special mention must be made of Chris Woakes who was not originally selected but who was called on late in the season and showed great promise with bat and ball and in his fielding'.

In the mid to late 1990s Jim and Colin Greetham set up a Primary Schools Cricket Programme in Sutton Coldfield coaching voluntarily in 14 schools, introducing hundreds of children to the game and linking them into local clubs over a period of four years. He served as North Birmingham Schools Cricket Association for four years and helped a number of secondary schools receive coaching. Jim was indeed, a key supporter of WCB in its early formative years and passionately believed in the opportunities it would create for young cricketers. The support he showed WCB was hugely important given some negativity and resistance to its formation.

After his retirement as Head Teacher of Marsh Hill Junior & Infant School in Erdington Jim worked at Bishop Veseyʼs Grammar School (and latterly at Handsworth Grammar) where he took a leading role in cricket and booked out the facilities for years always helping Warwickshire and community groups along the way. A left-arm pace bowler, Jim played for the now defunct Birmingham Municipal for 20 years and also played a number of years for Four Oaks Saints and Streetly.

His enthusiasm for cricket, his engaging and positive personality and his great storytelling touched and improved many peopleʼs lives within Warwickshire Cricket and he will be greatly missed. We wish his family all the very best at this difficult time.

-He was a very fine sportsman (see the 1962/63 Honours Board), was one of the original Pandas, had a distinguished teaching career and was massively involved in coaching and promoting youth cricket development in Warwickshire. Moeen Ali and Chris Woakes of the current England squad blossomed under his tutelage.

-

Gordon Gildener

Sheldon Bonner, (Former Staff) died 20 March 2019.

Sheldon started work with us in November 2014. He was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour in December 2016. He supported George who acted as Head of Grounds as he was able between operations and treatments in the interim for the next year before retiring due to ill health. He was hugely committed to the school, loved working here and always pushed himself and his team to deliver the best playing services possible for pupils here. He was a singer - was on X factor, he had articles published about the school in an industry magazine, he led us to 2nd place in two national industry groundsmanship awards (he was so cross that he got sick before we won!!), and lifted the standard of the grounds hugely in a very short period. His impact on the external environment in such a short period of time is a huge testament to him.

Peter DR Gardiner, 1927 – 2019, (Head Master 1967 - 1979) died 5 February 2019.

“It has sometimes been said that it is impossible to be both a gentleman and a good headmaster, but at St. Peter's the dilemma has not existed: we remember him as both.”

The above sentence, penned by Leslie LeTocq (Deputy Head at St Peter’s for many years) is taken from his tribute to Peter in The Peterite, published in 1979, the term after Peter’s departure from the school.

Typically for Peter, his next destination was not to add to his distinguished career the glittering prize of headship at a top-name public school, but to return to a senior teaching role in a school where he believed he could make a difference: Stanborough Comprehensive in Welwyn Garden City. One of his pupils there, the yet-to-be-award-winning-poet, Glyn Maxwell, remembered Peter as a teacher who inspired him, writing in a 2010 Guardian article: “We were different generations: I was the old at their worst: mind made up, black-or-white, full of myself, bad habits. He was the young at their best: open, innocent, self-effacing, eager to share.”

There could be no finer encomium for an educator who, during his twelve years as Head Master of St Peter’s (from 1967 to 1979) in so many ways rejuvenated the school, bringing to it the youthful and forward-looking spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a staunch champion of the arts at a time when academic rigour and success on the sports field seemed to many to be the watchwords in this traditional establishment. Under his aegis, the art department gained a new and expanded home (in a beautiful touch of irony, above the cricket pavilion). Music began to play much more of a role in school life – in the formation of a wind-band alongside the school orchestra, in the promotion of choral singing both in and out of chapel services, in the encouragement of musical competitions and the participation of pupil-musicians in social events. Peter himself often performed or directed, for example becoming a ‘Gentleman of Japan’ in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, or narrating his own performing adaptation of Dickens’s short ghost story The Signalman.

Perhaps Peter’s finest contribution to arts in the school was his championing of the creation of a separate Drama Centre in the old school gymnasium, along with the appointment of a drama specialist to the staff. Although his personal love of the arts clearly played a part in this transformation (his 1948 Cambridge first-class degree was in Classics and English Literature, and he was a lifelong devotee of classical music, particularly opera), it is just as clear that his vision for the centrality of the arts as part of a well-rounded 20th and 21stcentury education was spot on, as the school’s current generous facilities for these bear witness.

The school’s old strengths, though, did not go unsupported; during Peter’s time as Head, preparations to rebuild the science block and to refurbish classrooms in St Olave’s began, the swimming pool was modernised, and a Sports Centre was built, with a wall for mountaineering – novel at the time. School numbers rose by 16%.

Before St Peter’s, Peter was assistant master and housemaster at Charterhouse. During his time there, in 1963/64, he spent an exchange year at St Stephen’s School in Virginia, USA. This was the period of great social change in America, and civil rights was a major talking

point; 1963 was the year of John Kennedy’s assassination and the year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Peter subsequently attended one of Martin Luther King’s rallies). One cannot help feeling the philosophy of the civil rights movement spoke to the soul of this liberal intellectual schoolmaster, as a great deal of his accomplishments in changing the ethos at St Peter’s seemed to come from a profound respect for the dignity of others. During his time there, the old ‘fagging’ system was finally laid to rest to be replaced by a more egalitarian rota of ‘house duties’. The wearing of school caps was abolished, the use of corporal punishment was considerably reduced, a system of parents’ meetings was set up, governors’ meetings became more consultative, staff and pupils alike were treated as individuals, and encouraged to blossom and for their voices to be heard. Critical among these acts of equality was the introduction of girls into the sixth form in September 1976 and – something Peter was particularly proud of – the recruitment of the first full-time female member of staff to the Senior School.

As a teacher, Peter was inspirational. His love of his subjects (particularly English and drama) shone through in his encouragement of pupils to experiment in their reading and theatregoing. Two examples spring to mind: his championing of the translated works of the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn at a point when they were just becoming popular, and his Assembly recommendation to the whole school to go and see Peter Schaffer’s controversial play Equus when it arrived at the Theatre Royal, fresh from its London debut. He had a way with words himself: the poetry seems to be under lock and key, but everyone could delight in the sixth-form dress code being couched in terms of being “of conservative cut and hue”.

Who else would have put it like that?

Peter’s astonishing intellect and curiosity – coupled with a gentle but Puckish sense of humour shone through in everything he did, and this can perhaps best be summed up in a small incident one day in school Assembly. Announcing that the Car Club would be meeting that Saturday to receive a visit from the owner of a Jensen Interceptor (the muscle car of the early 70s), Peter leant over to the sixth-form Chairman of the Club, and in a stagewhisper asked “Or is that Yensen, Simon?”: with subtlety and humour, out-nerding the nerds.

Barry Creasy (St Peter’s 1971–1976) -

Howard Gatiss (St Peter’s 1971–1976)

Memorial Service Peter Dod Robin Gardiner 1927–2019 Charterhouse School (Master and Housemaster) 1952–1967 St Peter’s School (Headmaster) 1967–1979 Stanborough School (Deputy Headteacher) 1979–1992 Took place at 14:30 on Saturday July 13 2019 at Charterhouse School Chapel, Godalming, Surrey, GU7 2DX. The service included tributes from Peter’s family and friends, as well as from ex-pupils of all three schools. It was followed by refreshments at Charterhouse.

2018 William J Burdass (The Rise 1946-1951) died 27 December 2018.

Alexander Brining (Temple 1958 - 1962) died 22 December 2018.

John Roland Maxwell (The Grove 1953-1957) died 22 November 2018.

Philip G Matthews (Temple 1943-1946) died 2 November 2018.

Katherine M Hannah (Queens 2004-2009) died 17 October 2018.

See page 29 David G Senior (Queen's 1969-1974) died 5 October 2018.

Ian F Bartlett (Queen's 1970-1973) died 5 October 2018.

Roderick Robert Nelson (School House 1949-1954) died 30 September 2018.

See page 30 Ian Ross Pullan (School House 1971-1976) died 23 September 2018.

Peter Robin Sykes (The Rise 1942-1947) died 13 September 2018.

Robin Callum Groves (School House 1945-1949) died 31 August 2018.

Frederick B Hudson (The Rise 1950-1954) died 19 August 2018.

Ernest Gordon Brown (The Rise 1943-1948) died 17 August 2018.

David Raymond (Temple 1960-1963) died 7 August 2018.

Christopher P Spencer (Queen's 1956-1962) died 13 June 2018.

David Swale (Temple 1943-1946) died 17 May 2018.

David Haxby (The Rise 1947-1953) died 12 May 2018.

Guy E King-Reynolds (Temple 1937-1942) died 9 March 2018.

Frederick E Dennis (The Rise 1939-44) died 5 March 2018.

Roger Coates (The Rise 1951-1956) died 25 February 2018.

See page 31 John Clive Hilton (School House 1942-1947) died 12 April 2018.

See page 32

Geoffrey Dodsworth (Temple 1940-1945) died 28 March 2018.

See page 34 Derek Welford (School House 1942-1944) died 1 January 2018.

Katherine M Hannah, (Queen's 2004-2009) died 17 October 2018.

Katherine Mary Hannah, who was 27, died in a car accident in Byron bay Australia on the 17th October 2018. She was out there continuing her career as an occupational therapist in mental health and exploring the adventures Australia had to offer.

Katherine’s wicked sense of humour, generosity and compassion for others will be greatly missed.

She was born in York and educated at St Mary’s RC primary school Malton then St Peter’s school York.

She was in Alcuin house at St Olave’s and a member of Queens house for her time at St Peter’s. School friends remember Katherine as fun, caring and there for you through thick and thin.

The above qualities led Katherine to do occupational therapy training at Sheffield Hallam and her career took her to Leeds, Manchester, Guildford, London and Byron Bay Australia. She escalated to a senior OT at a young age holding the position of bariatric lead and sitting on the trust council for the Royal Surrey county Hospital. She was beloved by colleagues and patients. It was her ambition to improve the lives of mental health patients through her work and outside hobbies. She planned to run a marathon for the charity Mind amongst other endeavours.

Katherine lived life to the full and was an unforgettable character. She was the life and soul of every party with a diet coke in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Where there was mischief there was Katherine, where there was glamour there was Katherine and when a friend was needed there was Katherine.

Katherine Mary Hannah was a much beloved daughter, sister and friend and her loved ones were very proud of her. She will be greatly missed. Her family and friends wish to continue Katherine’s ambitions and celebrate the fulfilling but sadly short life she led. They plan to fundraise for the charity Mind and continue her fight to improve healthcare for patients suffering from mental health conditions.

Roderick Robert Nelson, School House 1949-1954) died 30 September 2018.

Born April 21, 1935 in Longbenton, County Borough of Newcastle upon Tyne. He died on September 30, 2018 aged 83.

He attended St. Peter’s from 1949 to 1954 (School House). After leaving St. Peter’s he registered for National Service before serving two years in the Navy. He then began his career as an Engineer. He enjoyed a long career in the oil business working for Texaco, Amoco and BP in countries all over the world starting in Trinidad and Tobago, then England, Iran and Egypt.

He had four children, two grand daughters and one great grandson.

Roger Coates, (The Rise 1951-1956) died 25 February 2018.

The former senior partner of law firm Buller Jeffries has died aged 80.

Roger Coates was a solicitor of the Supreme Court for 50 years and held the role of senior partner with Buller Jeffries from 1973 until 2012.

Born in Nottingham, Mr Coates attended school in York and, after completing his A Levels, secured five years' articles of clerkship with Neal Scorah, Siddons & Co in Sheffield, which later became part of DLA Piper.

After reading law at the University of Sheffield and graduating with first class honours in 1959, he joined Buller Jeffries in 1965 and became its senior partner in 1973.

Between 1970 and 1980, he was also Deputy Coroner of Birmingham and throughout his long career acted in cases covering fields such as industrial disease, construction and commercial litigation.

In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Birmingham Legal Awards, the same year that Buller Jeffries merged with DWF where his daughter Caroline is now a partner and head of insurance and automotive.

Mr Coates then acted as a consultant for two years before finally retiring in 2014.

Mr Coates died on February 25 and is survived by his wife Anne, daughters Joanna and Caroline, son-in-law Peter and grandchildren Rory and Harriet.

A memorial service and a celebration of his life was held on Wednesday March 14 at at St Peter's Church, in Wootton Wawen.

John Clive Hilton, (School House 1942-1947) died 12 April 2018.

Clive Hilton was born in Sunderland in August 1929 to Joe and Rosetta Hilton, The Hiltons or Erdbergs, as they were originally named, had emigrated to the North East of England from Poland in the late 19th century from the small town of Ozorkow in the province of Lodz. Our own family also emigrated to England around the same time, from the very same town of Ozorkow. Around 75 years later in 1960, Clive’s younger brother David Hilton was to marry my sister Ruth and the two families, unknown to each other in 19th century Poland, were brought together once again.

And so it’s been across these years. Ruth and David had three sons, All of us have together, across the years, shared happy times as well as extremely sad times. We shared the sadness of Clive’s brother David’s untimely death at the age of 38 in a motor accident and from that day, Clive resolved to support Ruth in bringing up three little boys of 2, 5 and 8 - Clive’s dedication to this role was beyond exemplary. No birthday was ever forgotten. No crisis ignored. We all gave of our best, but Clive’s attention was ever-present.

Clive grew up in Gosforth, Newcastle and after attending Ascham House Preparatory School in the 1930’s and after two years at Newcastle Royal Grammar School and evacuation to Penrith early in the Second World War, he went off to St Peter’s School in York. There he developed a love of the stage, acting with fellow pupils, the Dench Brothers and he knew their sister Judith, now Dame Judy. After leaving school, National Service and a spell in the family business, Clive went to London, working for many years at the Times Book Shop in Mayfair, frequented each and every day by royalty, the aristocracy and luminaries of the arts, stage and screen. Great fun.

Returning to Newcastle in the late fifties Clive became a long-standing devotee of the historic People’s Theatre, opened by Geo Bernard Shaw in 1911. There he acted in and brilliantly directed numerous plays including Royce Ryton’s ‘Crown Matrimonial’ about the Abdication Crisis of 1936 – like dear Rosetta, he adored the Royal Family; there was Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’, as well as his ‘Lady in the Van’, superbly directed by Clive, now in his mid-eighties only a year and a half ago, in November 2016. At the People’s centenary, Clive organised a visit by Sir Ian McKellan. The tea party was both memorable…. and quite hilarious.

He worked tirelessly for the Newcastle Jewish Players, raising their standard as an amateur dramatics society to a high level. He loved his telly, especially the soaps, recognising the huge effort which went into the writing and production of these and loving the occasional appearance of high profile actors; and he loved his daily Times newspaper.

Apart from the family to which he was utterly devoted, Clive leaves behind a myriad of friends all over Britain. He would often spot a favourite play and travel to small theatres around the country such as Scarborough or Kendal – Edinburgh, for the Festival. He knew people all over the place. He regularly attended the Annual Association of Jewish exServiceman’s Parade at the Cenotaph each November, missing only last year’s. For many years he worked tirelessly for Age Concern in the East End of Newcastle.

The gift he would appreciate above all others was a pot of chutney. Clive himself was bit like chutney; a bit spicy….many more ingredients than meet the eye….and overall, completely

sweet and leaving you - wanting more. A most generous brilliant and unique man, whom it has been an honour to know.

David Goldwater

Geoffrey Dodsworth, (Temple 1940-1945) died 28 March 2018.

York-born merchant banker and former Conservative MP Geoffrey Dodsworth has died, aged 89.

Born in 1928, he attended St Peter’s School and later worked as a Chartered Accountant at Barron & Barron in York until 1963 - with two years in the army from 1946. He became Justice of the Peace for York, in 1960, aged 32, becoming one of the city's youngest magistrates.

In 1964 he became deputy leader of the Conservative Group on City of York Council and was a member for six years.

He had a daughter Helen with his first wife, Isabel Neale who died in 1967 after a long illness. In 1971, he married Elizabeth Beeston and they had two children, Simon and Mary.

He set up a group of companies in the export and import trade in 1963, later becoming managing director of Grindlay Brandt’s Ltd. (a Merchant Bank), in 1974, and director of Grindlays Bank Ltd. (now ANZ), that same year.

In 1988, he set up Dodsworth and Company Ltd in 1988, specialising in equity and bank funding for asset and project finance.

He was an MP for South West Hertfordshire from 1974 to 1979, holding office in the backbench Shipping and Shipbuilding Committees and was Joint Secretary of the Finance Committee among other positions.

Mr Dodsworth, a Freeman of the City of London, was Chairman of the Vale of York constituency Association in 1998 and stood for North Yorkshire County Council in 1997. He retired after undergoing a heart bypass in October 2002.

2017 Anthony Camfield (The Rise 1942-1948) died December 2017.

John A Dent (The Rise 1932-1937) died 3 November 2017.

Anthony Gray (School House, 1966-1969) died 8 October 2017.

See page 36 Paul Smith (School House, 1955-1959) died 18 May 2017.

Nona Blenkin (Housemistress of Dronfield 1985-1993), died 13 March 2017.

See page 37 Alexander McCallum (The Manor 1954-1959), died 6 March 2017, aged 76.

See page 38 Peter Dench (Temple, 1938-1943 and St Olave’s School from 1935-38), died 18 January 2017, aged 91.

See page 39

Anthony (Tony) Gray, (School House, 1966-1969) died 8 October 2017.

A colourful character, and loving brother, who lived life to the fullest - not least as both an old St. Olave's and St. Peter's student that excelled in swimming and rugby, always rising up to a challenge. Guided his younger brothers, Ian, Neil and Martin, through their school years, always lending a shoulder when needed.

Tony (as he was fondly referred to as) had a career in the oil industry, working for the major players (Shell, Agip, ConocoPhillips, Maersk, Total, Enterprise Oil, BP) in operations, and later as a consultant in various parts of the world; North Sea, Iran, Nigeria, Angola, Libya, amongst others, facing difficult challenges and times. He was a hands-on leader by example and much sought after, always finding a new challenge throughout his career.

Early in his career he worked at the Aberdeen Drilling school as a tutor/lecturer.

He has left behind his dear wife (Susan Watmough) with whom he had two adorable, athletic and, now grown-up and successful children; Nicholas and Chloe. From a former partner both Tony and Susan raised his twin boys (Andrew and Michael).

In his leisure time (away from work) he loved water sports (skiing and boating) trailing his second love, his boat (Miss Chloe) from Scotland, to and from Beaulieu-sur-mer, on the French Riviera.

He sadly passed away on Sunday, 8th October, 2017.

Supplied by Ian Gray

Nona Blenkin, (Housemistress of Dronfield 1985-1993), died 13 March 2017.

Upon Nona's retirement from St Peter's in 1994, Housemaster of Dronfield, Peter Taylor, wrote the following in the Senior Common Room bulletin: Nona Blenkin originally joined St Peter's as Warden of Alcuin; at that time, the hostel for the sixth form boarding girls. This was a challenging post: in fact, it amounted to being an assistant to all four of the boarding Housemasters to whose Houses the girls were attached.

As one of the four, I can testify to the care and considerable degree of tact which Nona demonstrated during those years.

Following the introduction of full co-education in 1987, Nona was appointed Resident Assistant Housemistress of Dronfield, the newly designed girls' boarding house. It was in this role that I was able to observe and appreciate Nona's caring and understanding approach.

She played an important part in the success of the house during her six years in residence and will be remembered with affection by the girls in her care. It was also while she was in Dronfield that Nona was able to put her considerable cookery skills to good use during her popular cookery classes. In addition to her responsibilities in Dronfield, for a number of years Nona organised the School's Community Service programme.

Outside School, among other interests, Nona enjoys walking and painting. There will be few idle moments in what we all hope will be a long and happy retirement.

Alexander McCallum (Manor 1954-1959), died 6 March 2017, aged 76 Alex McCallum was born in Darlington, County Durham, UK coming to board in Manor, St Peter’s in 1954. He went on to graduate from Oxford University with a degree in Geography in 1979.

Alex married Karen Thomas and they went to live in New York City’s Greenwich Village for many years before moving to Exeter, New Hampshire in 1993.

Alex enjoyed a successful career in the financial world. He started his career in financial journalism, moving to financial public relations before starting and running his own business Alex McCallum & Associates for over ten years. Alex truly enjoyed his work and was still actively managing financial websites, writing insurance asset management newsletters and working on the financial futures Market Forum.com website.

Alex was a true people person and had made many friendships in his life. His hobbies when he wasn’t working included reading and watching sports. In his youth Alex played quite a bit of Rugby, Cricket and Hockey.

Alex died on 6 March and is survived by his loving wife, Karen ‘Kate’ McCallum, four children and their spouse, six grandchildren and thirteen nieces and nephews.

Peter Dench (Temple, 1938-1943 and St Olave’s School from 1935-38) passed away aged 91,18 January 2017, During his time at St Peter's, Peter performed in the school play, Anthony and Cleopatra, inspiring his younger sister, Judi, to take up acting.

After St Peter’s, Peter studied medicine at Cambridge, following in the footsteps of his father, Reginald, a York GP. Peter went on to have a long and distinguished serving as a doctor with the military, becoming one of the first medics ever to use a military helicopter, during the Malayan conflict. In 1977, he visited Buckingham Palace to receive the Territorial Decoration, awarded for long service.

Back in York, Peter worked at a maternity hospital in Acomb before becoming a GP, working at surgeries on Priory Street, Rawcliffe Lane and Kingsway North. He would later move to Green Hammerton, with his wife, Daphne, for the last decade of his career.

Upon retiring, Peter continued to serve the York community as a guide at the Minster until his mid-80s. He is survived by his children, Simon and Louise

2016 Robert Wood (Alcuin 1952-56, The Manor 1956-61), died 27 October 2016, aged 73.

See page 41 Alan Crawshaw Brown (The Rise 1938-1942) died 29 September 2016.

Clare Wise (Queens 1981-1983) died 13 September 2016.

See page 42 Philip Liversedge (The Manor 1959 – 1962), died 13 September 2016.

See page 43 Richard Crowther (School House 1942 - 1946), died 21 August 2016.

Roger William Peacock (entered St Olave’s in 1948; School House, 1958) died 18 August 2016, aged 75.

See page 44 Gordon Curtis Norris (School House 1939-1945), died 2 August 2016, aged 89.

See page 45 Thomas Boulton OBE (The Rise 1940-1943), died 1 July 2016, aged 90.

See page 46 Dr Godfrey Earlam Lester Graham (School House 1932-1937), died 23 April 2016, aged 96.

See page 48 Robert John Gibson (St Olave's 1938-1944, The Manor 1944-1949) See page 53

Robert Anthony Bowness Wood, (Alcuin 1952-56, The Manor 1956-61), died 27 October 2016, aged 73.

Robert Wood was born in Horsforth, near Leeds, coming to board at St Olave’s in 1952.

Bright and inquisitive, with a retentive memory, he usually came top of his form, J2B, despite doing almost no work - his nickname at School was 'Dizzy'. He really came into his own when he joined the school Scouts, which fired his enduring love of nature and everything outdoors while allowing him enough space for a healthy disrespect for authority.

He became a Queen's Scout.

At the age of seventeen, Robert acquired an A35 Van which, with friends from school, he took camping, climbing and skiing, first in Scotland and the Lake District and, then, all over Europe. He remained a keen traveller and hill-walker throughout his life. He also retained a broad-ranging love of music from his school days, later becoming President of Dundee Chamber Music Club.

On leaving St Peter's, Robert studied medicine at Leeds University, playing for a local hockey team and spending much of his free time in the Yorkshire Dales. He worked as a junior doctor in a variety of medical posts across the UK, followed by a year working in Chicago and then a spell in Glasgow.

Robert took up a senior lecturing post at Dundee University's Medical School in 1976.

He bought a house with a good wine cellar looking south across the river Tay to the fields of Fife, and stayed there for there for the rest of his life. He continued his NHS work as a Consultant General Surgeon at Dundee's Ninewells Hospital and, after retiring in 2008, continued lecturing in human anatomy at St. Andrews University.

Robert is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, children Chris, Tim, Alison and Susannah, and by nine grandchildren.

Clare Wise (Queens 1981-1983) died 13 September 2016.

Clare died on 13th September 2016 age 51, after living initially with breast cancer, which returned as bone cancer in 2015. A successful film industry executive and production consultant, she worked for the UK Film Council and was vice president of international production at Universal Pictures. She was an extremely bright, lively, funny, independent and outgoing woman also known for her distinctive Titian hair.

Born in Newcastle in 1964 to architect parents, she was very close to her younger brother Greg (OP Queen’s 1979-1984) who was an unfailing and devoted carer to her in the final months of her illness. She wrote a witty, honest and inspiring blog throughout, which Greg finished when she became too ill to continue herself and resulted in him publishing a book of their joint writing: ‘Not That Kind of Love’ (2018) Clare was one of the early in-take of girls to St Peter’s in VIth form between 1981 and 1983 and was appointed Head of House in Queen’s, going on to achieve a double first in history from Bristol University.

The stage was in the genes for the Wise family as Clare can be found playing lead roles at school as Plaintiff in Trial by Jury in 1982 and Estragon in ‘Waiting for Godot’ in a production in 1983 - when both she and Greg (who had played Rosencrantz in ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’) were awarded Richard Atkinson Memorial prizes for drama in the same year. She was an avid reader and was also awarded a scholarship to St George’s School in Newport Rhode Island USA for 2 terms.

She is survived by her brother Greg. Both parents died a few years earlier.

Philip Liversidge (Manor 1959 – 1962), died 13 September 2016 Philip Liversidge (Manor, 1962), passed away on 13 September 2016. Less keen on the academic side of school life, Philip was a very keen rugby player, well respected on the pitch, and a keen rower. He was well liked by his peers, and never afraid to stand up for what he believed in.

Philip was extremely proud of being an Old Peterite, and returned to St Peter’s for OP Day on several occasions, including the opening of The Manor extension in 2015, where he thoroughly enjoyed catching up with old friends.

Philip is survived by his wife Kay and his children Sarah and Katie.

Roger William Peacock, (entered St Olave’s in 1948; School House, 1958) died 18 August 2016, aged 75.

Roger William Peacock (entered St Olave’s in 1948; School House, 1958) was the archetypal all-round Peterite. Alongside the standard pursuits of cricket and rugby, he was a keen swimmer, sat on the committee of the Young Farmers’ Club, participated in the School play, and was a member of the School’s RAF section. Although stories of his school days from St Olave’s and St Peter’s are perhaps unrepeatable – “they were a very unruly lot!” – he was happy at school, and made some very good friends, whose friendship continued throughout his life.

He moved on from St Peter’s to the Royal Agricultural College (as it was then) at Cirencester, before returning to the family farm at Malton, where he had been born, and where he was to spend the rest of his life with his wife Joan, and their children John (Dronfield, 1987, died 2006) and Julia, a teacher.

Roger had a love of all country sports, especially shooting, but he loved fly fishing best of all, and was able to enjoy both with old school friends. He was well liked; more than four hundred friends and family attended his funeral. He was a countryman, and a good friend, and is very greatly missed by all who knew him.

Gordon Curtis Norris, (School House 1939-1945), died 2 August 2016, aged 89.

Gordon Curtis Norris was born at Brayton, Yorkshire in 1926 and was educated at St Peter’s School and Worcester College, Oxford. After military service in the Rhine Army as a lieutenant with the 1st Battalion the Green Howards and the 5th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, he was permitted to relinquish his regular commission to join the Colonial Administrative Service in 1952. Norris served variously in the Federation of Malaya, British North Borneo/Sabah (both now part of Malaysia), the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. In 1988, he retired to Sydney, Australia. Norris was principally employed as a District Officer, with short spells in secretariat posts and as Curator of the Sabah Museum. After 1978, he specialised in judicial functions and served as a Magistrate in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides. About 14 years of his service were spent in colonial administration and 22 years with post-independent governments. Norris was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and the Vanuatu Independence Medal.

Thomas Boulton, OBE (The Rise 1940-1943), died 1 July 2016, aged 90, 1925 to 2016 Old Peterite, Thomas Babbington Boulton, a modernising anaesthetist who helped found the Royal College of Anaesthetists, sadly passed away this summer. We take a look back at his time at St Peter’s and some of his many remarkable achievements in the medical profession.

Thomas Boulton was born on 2 November 1925 in Bishop Auckland and he attended St Peter’s School from 1940 to 1943, where he became “senior scientist” of the school, winning the BMA Medal. Heavily influenced by his three great grandfathers and grandfather, all of whom were doctors, Thomas went on himself to study medicine at Cambridge University.

During his time here at St Peter’s, he was a member of Rise House and was also L/Cpl (Signals) in the Junior Training Corps, in the Home Guard Platoon (West Yorkshire) and Honorary Secretary of the Science Society – all roles in which he described himself as being undistinguished!

One memory he had shared with us in recent years was of a boy called Ainley being taken up by a crane and pulley in a cement bucket to inspect the Chapel’s bell tower for damage following an air raid!

In 1950 Thomas joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in the “Malaysian emergency”. Responsible for 6,000 men, Thomas was the only qualified anaesthetist between Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. It was during this period, when there were no gas cylinders available after a flood, that Thomas discovered the possibility of using the “draw over” procedure for anaesthesia. Using ambient air, rather than compressed gas as the carrier, and using any kind of container he discovered, it is possible to make a vaporiser which allowed for safe anaesthesia in the absence of hospital equipment.

Thomas was instrumental in setting up a course on anaesthesia in developing countries and he helped develop the Triservice anaesthetic machine for use in the field. It was adopted by the British Army and used in the Falklands war.

At St Bartholomew’s Hospital, he brought in the first intensive care unit for post-operative patients. His other innovations included leading a resuscitation service for the whole hospital and creating an improved way to anaesthetise dental patients.

In the 1972 Thomas became the editor of Anaesthesia and was later president of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI) from 1984-86. He also joined negotiations to break with the Royal College of Surgeons and create a separate Royal College of Anaesthetists.

On retiring from the NHS in 1990, Thomas was appointed president of the History of Anaesthesia Society and became the AAGBNI’s archivist. In 1999, he also published a 700page history of the AAGBI which earned him a MD from Cambridge University. Thomas Boulton was awarded the OBE for services to medicine in 1991 and is survived by his wife Helen, their daughter Angela and two sons, Adam and James.

Dr Godfrey Earlam Lester Graham (School House 1932-1937), died 23 April 2016, aged 96.

Address at the funeral of Earlam Graham 13.5.16 A couple of days after Earlam died, we were together as a family in Wigan to make the arrangements for today and to clear his room at Lakeside. In the course of our tidy up, Hugh passed me a bundle of papers that I said I would sort at a later date and a few days later, idly leafing through the pile of old christmas cards, photos, and letters, a few newspaper clippings, yellowed by age, caught my eye. One, probably from the Yorkshire Post and dated in the summer of 1937, had a headline that read “Graham’s Good Innings”.

How fitting, I thought, for the life we celebrate today – even if cricketing metaphors generally don't play well with me (largely because I can think of nothing worse than standing in front of three sticks and having a hard ball hurled at me at speed). Anyway, I read on. This was the report of a cricket match between the MCC and St Peter’s School, York where Earlam was educated from 1932 – 1937, becoming Head Boy, captaining most of the sports teams and leaving to go on to Oxford University. No pressure there, then, for his five children as they grew up!

The article described how GEL Graham, the Captain of the First XI, “played a very good innings of 42” and went on to state that “his confident batting must have made a good deal of difference to the rest of the side”. Sadly the clipping was truncated before I could read who won the match but that short observation helped me reflect on the qualities of the man whose life we celebrate today. It seems to me that a great player not only makes an impact of his own but also brings confidence and security to the rest of the team. This is a theme to which I will return.

Godfrey Earlam Lester Graham was born in 1919 and carried that distinctive set of forenames with him through life. Always known as Earlam and later, once grandchildren appeared, as Whirlie. His upbringing was in that extraordinary period between the disasters of two world wars. He was the middle of three children – Rosalie and Pieter both pre deceased him. His father was, as both Earlam and Pieter were to become, a well known and respected doctor in Wigan. Ones senses that the demeanour of home life was perhaps a little Victorian, certainly as far as Earlam’s father was concerned, and it is likely that the young Earlam blossomed in the environment of his boarding school, particularly at St Peter’s of which he spoke fondly and in which he maintained a close interest for the rest of his life.

Sport was all but he was no slouch academically and he went on to Oxford to study medicine and to gain a blue at hockey.

From Oxford he moved to St Mary’s Hospital, London, to complete his clinical training. Life must have acquired a more serious measure at that stage, not only in his studies but in wartime London. He graduated in 1941 – taking a shorter course than usual because of the necessities of war time. But it was not all work and even the stories of fire watch on the roof of the hospital attracted a Boys Own Paper veneer – whether he really did shove incendiary bombs off the roof with his bare hands is a moot point but it made a good story. But life for Earlam then was, I think, really about love. It was at Mary’s that a petite, efficient young nurse from the Welsh valleys came into his life. This was a match that, as we all know, blossomed and flourished for almost 70 years. Earlam and Nansi married in London in July 1945 but very shortly afterwards Earlam, by then commissioned into the Royal Army

Medical Corps, was posted overseas, to India, at the start of a separation from Nansi that lasted almost 18 months.

Earlam served in several places in India and was then sent on to Japan, arriving after the Japanese surrender and in the aftermath of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are photos that Earlam took of what was the city of Hiroshima. They are characterised by an eerie desolation and destruction as far as the eye can see. How can we tell what impact that sight had on a 26 year old, recently qualified doctor? It is difficult to know as he almost never discussed it but I might suggest that it was an important influence on the priorities he showed to his family and to his community for the rest of his life. Experiencing devastation on that scale can surely only make one more committed to the safety and care of those one loves and for whom one has responsibility.

On his return from Japan in 1946, Earlam and Nansi moved to Wigan, rapidly settling into the community. Earlam, like Pieter his brother and Billy Bennett his brother in law, joined his father in general practice. These were the days of ‘Call the Midwife’ when poverty and pride went hand in hand across large parts of the community. Earlam, Pieter and Billy were called out at nights and weekends, delivered babies (and there are some here today who were delivered by Earlam) and they took on all the challenges that general practice threw at them. They were in the thick of it when the NHS began.

Earlam probably felt the greater responsibility of seniority especially when his father died unexpectedly at an age we would now describe as young. He and Nansi moved into Netherby House in Upper Dicconson Street, next to the surgery, and the life of their growing family became emeshed with the work of the practice and the lives of the P Grahams, the Bennetts and many good friends. Nansi dispensed tea and sympathy (or was it brandy) to patients and visitors alike, for many friends and visitors to the house were also patients. The door was always open, sometimes too literally, and Earlam and Nansi’s generosity was legendary, and apparently never-ending. Jane, Hugh, Sue, Wendy and Nick were effortlessly slotted into Netherby life. Dinner parties were frequent and lively. Sunday lunch acquired a status which lasted long until the latter days at Croft End. Vast amounts of meat; five, six, or seven vegetables; an unhealthy dessert; and then, always at the end, “the nibble of cheese” that Nansi would press on her groaning family and guests. How many Rectors of Wigan and their curates were nourished at that table as Earlam and Nansi exhibited their extraordinary support for this lovely church and its work. Earlam was churchwarden here for what seemed like an eternity and, if truth be known, was rather reluctant to step down, serving far, far longer than is now permissible under Church ordinance.

In retrospect, it would probably be seen that Earlam briefly resisted many of the changes seen in the Church of England over the past 50 years but was then generally quite quick to embrace them, recognising that it was his task to support the Rector and the church in moving onwards – and in the process perhaps even convincing himself that he was actually in the vanguard of modernisation! Interestingly, Nansi once told me that Earlam would have made a good priest. I agree in many ways although it was a vocation highly unlikely to have been achieved. No one would have been less keen to stand up and address the crowd: public speaking was just not his thing. As an aside, Earlam once told me himself that at one stage he actually wanted to be a dentist but that his father would not have had it. Having

seen some of the products of his DIY work (and who can forget the home made coffee tables with their wonky legs, graced with tiles of dancing Spanish ladies), I can only suggest that the teeth of the people of Wigan were actually rather safer with him as their doctor.

Earlam kept up his hockey for many years and some of his other enthusiasms were encouraged and permitted by the presence of the children – the trips to Bellevue for stock car, speedway and the funfair; drives to Southport to get shrimps; the latest gadget; and later, the must-have electronic gizmo. How many cameras, phones, and computer accessories worked their way into the dining room at Croft End, a veritable treasure trove of Toby jugs, pewter mugs, decanters, drug company tatt, photograph printers and internet routers. Single handedly Earlam probably kept PC World, Toy & Hobby, and Tesco in business for at least 25 years. But it was this childlike enthusiasm that provided a link to his grandchildren for whom a trip to Croft End was almost better than Disney World. The warmth of the welcome, the sheer indulgence of the care and the excitement of the latest gimmick just could not be beaten.

Life for the Earlam Grahams also embraced Cawsand, a holiday destination near Plymouth that was the venue for many happy family holidays and a place of welcome to so many others. It has acquired the status almost of a second spiritual home to the whole family and has provided some of everyone’s happiest memories. The tectonic plates had shifted when Earlam and Nansi moved from Netherby House to Croft End. They lurched a little again when the house in Cawsand was sold but wherever Earlam and Nansi were, life was characterised by that same sense of generosity and nurture – and at Croft End there was the garden too (and finally, central heating!). Such happy days and so many good memories of family parties that always included a wider circle of others.

I spoke earlier of the qualities apparent in that cricket match report and observed that a great player not only makes an impact of his own but also brings confidence and security to the rest of the team. Today we all bring our different memories of Earlam, whether as child, grandchild, patient, or friend. We will all have seen him differently but we could easily share some of the qualities we saw in him in common as he cared for and supported those around him.

From a social perspective, Earlam was never happier than having organised or otherwise facilitated a gathering of some kind, but he was not the extrovert. How many times have we seen him stand back, topping up drinks, carving the meat, smiling benignly at the end of the meal table but not wanting or needing to be the focus of attention. How many times at Saturday lunchtime drinks did we suddenly notice that Whirlie had slipped away – some mysterious errand, something to do with a patient, addressing an urgent need for more brandy, or ginger, or both.

But whilst he derived his energy and satisfaction from the comfort and achievement of others, Whirlie rarely said what he thought or felt, and that could sometimes be difficult for the family – and if you really wanted to know where you stood in his approval ratings, it was often best to ask the Rector.

I was never his patient but we know, not just from the lovely things that have been said on the phone, in person or by letter since he died, how important he was to those that were.

He was a rock. He was pragmatic. Empathetic but not emotional. And he got things done. He would always pick up the phone to someone at the Infirmary to get something sorted out.

He went the extra mile but wouldn't have thought he did….. it just came with the territory; its what you did; and it mattered. How many here saw and felt the benefit of his kind and skilled care.

But where was the inner man? What did Earlam draw on for his own internal energy and sense of being. The first and obvious answer must lie in his wonderful relationship with Nansi. But the second must be in his Christian faith. Like so many of his era, this was rarely, if ever, articulated. Talking about his faith would have been almost the last thing he would have done. Perhaps there are a few here who heard at first -hand something of his spiritual journey but, for the rest of us, we can only seek evidence for a man with a deep belief. In recent years Earlam not only endured the burden of increasing age, he experienced the loss of Nansi and, soon afterwards, the untimely death of Jane. He grieved quietly, with dignity and without self pity. It was, I suggest, the mark of someone with a deeply held confidence in the life hereafter. An acceptance and a recognition of the limitations of this world and the expectations of a world to come.

The passage from Micah, read by Katie ended with these words: “….and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God”.

Surely this was such a man.

May he rest in peace.

-

Mike Stevens

Robert John Gibson (St Olave's 1938-1944, The Manor 1944-1949) (St Olave’s 1938 – 44, The Manor 1944 – 49) Eric Thompson, who was at school with John Gibson, has informed us of the death of John.

John went to live in Canada after attending Trinity College, Dublin. He married in Canada and is survived by his wife, Judy and his two daughters Caroline and Jane.

John became famous as Dr. John Gibson, an expert in Marine Biology and an ardent Conservationist. He was awarded several medals of distinction by Newfoundland for his work.

He and Eric became friends in 1939.

When John died in May this year, Eric went to Newfoundland to pay his respects to John.

There was a gathering of over 100 people and tributes were paid by leading figures of the community.

Tribute to John Gibson, given by Eric Thompson in St John’s Newfoundland There is an old saying that no prophet is accepted in his own country. That is a quote from the Bible and was true for Jesus of Nazareth who had ideas which would radically change the world for the better - and still do where they are used - but He was rejected by the authorities of his own nation.

Now, I couldn’t say that Dr. Gibson was ever rejected, by his country or by me; in fact I have greatly admired him all his life. His ideas may sometimes have met with local opposition, but he was generally respected and had four prestigious awards for his contribution to Conservation. But to me he was never Dr. Gibson, he was just the little eight year old boy who befriended me when I first went to boarding school. And we have remained friends ever since.

John’s father was an officer in the Army in India and he wanted John to have an English education. So he came to St Olave’s at the age of seven - one year earlier than the normal age of entry. As a result, by the time I got there, John was already a seasoned pupil and knew all the wrinkles of how to survive. So, even in those days, he showed me great kindness and that remained an essential part of his character.

He was always adventurous, whereas I was a timid lad from a country village.

In St Olave’s we often went unlawfully outside the school grounds to look at life in a local stream. John had an innate love of biology, especially aquatic life. He had several aquaria at home and he made remarkably accurate drawings of fish all over his school exercise books, for which he was often rebuked or punished. Near the stream was a tree-stump from which

John learned to jump across the stream. I was too timid, but he showed great patience as he tried to teach me. Look, he said ‘It’s as easy as falling off a log.’ In proving it to me he landed in the middle of the stream and I had to go and surreptitiously sneak some new socks from the dormitory, which was forbidden because of wartime cutbacks. So there we have, even in those early days, two other facets of John’s character - his sense of adventure and his patience with the less gifted.

On another occasion John had found something absolutely fascinating in the stream and was busy trying to get me to be equally fascinated by it. As a result, we were nearly late back for roll-call and took a shortcut through a gap in the hedge around the school fields. This led us across an area where they dumped the grass cut off the playing fields. John, being light and athletic, bounced cheerfully over the crust of the silage. Eric being slower and heavier, sank into the smelly depths. For a moment I thought I would sink into oblivion but John came back and helped me out. It was then his turn to sneak some socks for me from the forbidden area.

This highlights two more of his characteristics – generosity and timelessness. When I say timelessness, I mean that he often left did things until the last moment. For example, He was due to go to a summer course of the naval section of the cadet force and when he should have been going to the station he was still feeding his fish. His family were beside themselves with anxiety that he would miss his train. John, however, looked at them, smiled and said ‘Well, well, how time flies’. John often found it amusing when people got into a great flap while he kept his cool. Of course, he did catch the train.

As I have already hinted, all his life John has been an enthusiastic teacher. When he came to stay with us, or I came over here (Canada), he always taught me something new.

When going round in Yorkshire, he would look at a culvert under a road bridge and carefully explain to me why it ought to be at least ten centimetres wider.

Once, when I came to visit, as soon as I arrived, tired and dusty from the flight and the rough dusty road to Matamek he said, ‘You aren’t tired are you?’ gave me a pair of boots and rucksack with the beer in it and we set off through the forest to an unknown destination. After about half an hours’ walk, when I was feeling really tired he said to me, ‘Oh dear, I think we are lost, I’ve no idea where we are!’At that moment there was a whoop of welcome and some colleagues from the research station came and got us into a boat where we rowed across a beautiful silent lake whilst drinking a welcome glass of champagne. John always had this lovely sense of humour, and irony. We spent the night with a camp fire on a safe island as we ate a barbecue and drank the beer which I had carried so dutifully. To add to the scene, I saw the most gorgeous array of the Northern Lights - something I had never seen before and have never seen since. Life with John was always a new experience of reality, no silly frills and fancies.

Finally, I will just mention that, on another of my visits, John took me to see the caribou, an animal which was also new to me, and afterwards we finished up fishing in a stream. Now I had never fished in my life. With great patience, John taught me how to cast a line and in the end I caught a fish. My one and only fishing triumph. It was in fact only a minute brown trout and we carefully let it go back on its way. John once told Caroline that Eric didn’t fish.

She opened her eyes in amazement and said ‘Then how did you come to meet Eric?’

There is much more I could say, about John and his late brother William and the many adventures they shared. There have been many tributes paid to Dr. Gibson, and mention of his awards for conservation and biological knowledge. But, to me, he will always be the John Gibson I have known for 77 years. In one of his last e-mails to me, he said that we had been more like brothers than friends.

It was the poet, William Wordsworth, who wrote ‘The child is father of the man’.

I hope that I have just shown John as a child and a man of kindness, patience, determination, adventure, unflappability, reality, a love of the outdoors, and a great sense of humour. And you can’t ask for a better friend or brother than that.

2015 Sir Donald Barron (Governor 1966-1978, Vice Chairman 1978-1981), died 30 December 2015, aged 94.

See Page 57 Colin Stuart Elston (The Manor 1950-1954), died 30 November 2015, aged 79.

See Page 59 Trevor Wilkinson (The Grove 1948 – 1953), died 15 May 2015, aged 79.

See Page 60 James 'Jim' Starkey (School House 1957 – 1963), died 13 March 2015, aged 71.

Richard 'Dick' Hubbard (St Peter’s School staff 1968 – 2002), died 6 March 2015.

See Page 61 Michael Watson (The Manor 1952 – 1960), died 19 February 2015, aged 72.

See Page 68

Sir Donald Barron, (Governor 1966-1978, Vice Chairman 1978-1981), died 30 December 2015, aged 94.

Sir Donald Barron, who died recently aged 94, served as Governor of St Peter’s School from 1966-1978 and Vice Chairman from 1978-1981. He was awarded a Fellowship of the School in 1991 and went onto become a Foundation Trustee from 2000 to 2002.

Donald James Barron was born in Gorebridge, Midlothian; his father Albert was an actuary and his mother, Elizabeth, a teacher. He attended George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh.

During the Second World War, Sir Donald was commissioned into the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. On promotion to Captain, he was adjutant of 5th Battalion KOSB during a long period of hard-fought action across Holland and Germany during the winter of 1944-45, until shrapnel necessitated a stay of several months in hospital.

On his return to Edinburgh he completed a bachelor of commerce degree and qualified as a chartered accountant with the firm of Dewar & Robertson.

Although he started as a Scottish accountant he was, according to one colleague, “a marketing man by conviction”. As a leader and manager his approach echoed that of the Quaker founders of Rowntree Mackintosh, and he showed great “sympathy for people as individuals”.

Sir Donald Barron joined Rowntree & Co in 1952, becoming chief accountant in 1956, a director in 1956 and chairman in 1966. Under his careful management, the company successfully navigated the launch of new products, the takeover of Mackintosh, and unwanted attention from Philip Morris and General Foods, although, despite his dearest hopes that Rowntree & Co would remain British, the company was eventually taken over by Nestlé in 1988.

In 1972 Sir Donald also joined the board of Midland Bank, and in 1982 he took on the challenge of its chairmanship. His success in a challenging role was marked by his appointment to the Board of Banking Supervision by the Bank of England, and on which he served until 1989.

From 1957 to 1962 Barron was a leading member of the York Academic Trust, formed to work towards the creation of a university in the city. He later served as treasurer of the University and as a pro-chancellor from 1982 to 1995. His contribution is commemorated in the Donald Barron Court, a residential block at the university named after him to mark his outstanding support for the university.

Retirement from Rowntree Mackintosh did not dim his passion for helping others, and from 1981 to 1996 he was Chairman of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the charity which funds research into housing and poverty issues.

He was also a director of 3i, the private equity firm, and of Canada Life Assurance; a member of the University Grants Committee and the council of the CBI; a governor of the London Business School; and a past governor of York’s Company of Merchant Adventurers.

He was knighted in 1972, and was a deputy lieutenant of North Yorkshire.

Sir Donald Barron received Honorary Doctorates from Loughborough University in 1982, Herriot-Watt in 1983, CNAA in 1983, Edinburgh in 1984, Nottingham in 1985 and York in 1986.

In 1991, Sir Donald Barron was one of the first Fellows appointed by St Peter’s School in recognition for his exceptional service to the School. One of his colleagues on the Board of Governors said that: “He was a very committed and great servant of the School. He came into my ken as a new sort of governor – one that, instead of being remote and seldom setting foot in the school except for Governors’ meetings, took an active part in the running of the School in the ‘70s when inflation seemed perilous for the school. This was a steady cautious hand on the tiller as well as the enterprising guru of the Finance Committee in difficult times. The sheer time he was prepared to spend in the School was phenomenal. He was frank, but always good tempered and reasonable”.

Always a man of great vigour and determination, Sir Donald kept fit into old age with tennis and golf. He married Gillian Saville in 1956; she survives him together with their three sons, Alastair (Queen's 1971-76), David (Queen's 1972-77) and Roderick (Queen's 1974-79), and their two daughters, Julia and Felicity.

Colin Stuart Elston (The Manor 1950-1954), died 30 November 2015, aged 79.

Dad was born 14/10/1936 and attended St Peters between 1950 and 1954. He was in Manor House as a boarder during that time as his family lived in Newcastle. He progressed to Newcastle University where he studied dentistry and became the youngest dentist to qualify. Whilst at the University he met my mother and they moved to Redcar, Cleveland when he qualified to open a dental practice. He practiced dentistry all his working life, ably assisted by my Mum, in the North East where he was well known and respected both within and beyond the profession. My brother and I were born and grew up on the coast in Saltburn. My brother Richard followed Dad’s schooling attending Askham House in Newcastle and then moving on to St Peters into the Third Form and also into Manor House. I joined the School in 1976 as a day pupil in Queen’s House. Subsequently, having married a Peterite, our children attended the school also in Queen’s House. I think Dad was always very pleased to have been the start of the family line at St Peter’s.

He was a very proud family man and always encouraged us all to achieve our best. He is survived by my mother Elizabeth, my brother Richard, my husband Kevin and I and six grandchildren Michael, Andrew, Katherine, Emily, Helen and James. We will all miss him dearly.

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Sue Miller nee Elston, Queen's 1978

Trevor Wilkinson (The Grove 1948 – 1953), died 15 May 2015, aged 79.

(Grove 1948 – 1953) Trevor spent his formative years in New Earswick, York and completed his schooling at St Olave’s and St Peter’s before entering the Royal Navy for National Service.

After this he decided to be an Architect and studied at Leeds College of Art whilst working as a Trainee with British Railways. Eleven years later he was qualified and within a year had set up his own practice in York latterly at 90 The Mount.

The office had many interesting projects, one being the restoration of Wesley’s Chapel in London, the home of World Methodism, and later Oxford Place Methodist Chapel in Leeds. York Crown Courts was another restoration job and in between these he built supermarkets and office blocks. At its height, Trevor Wilkinson Associates employed 21 staff.

In his spare time Trevor loved classical music – he took singing lessons in London and sang in various choirs; but architecture always took first place. Cricket was also a great love and he was on the Cricket Committee at school for a number of years.

Trevor retired at 55 and was able to spend part of each year in Naples, Florida enjoying the sun. His last years were difficult after major surgery but he was looked after at home by his wife, Julia and their children Deborah and Guy.

James 'Jim' Starkey (School House 1957 – 1963), died 13 March 2015, aged 71.

Passed away peacefully at home on 13th March 2015 aged 71 years. Much loved husband of Marta and very dear father of Charles and Simonie.

Richard 'Dick' Hubbard (St Peter’s School staff 1968 – 2002), died 6 March 2015.

Trying to write a suitable obituary for Dick is not the simplest of tasks as he had fingers in so many pies. The following are edited excerpts from the wonderful eulogy given by friends and colleagues at the service of thanksgiving held in the chapel at St Peters on Monday 30th March. I very much hope that the following conveys the wonderful spirit that was present in Chapel on that day.

- Paddy Stephen Though Dick would occasionally claim he was brought up with the Beatles and could put on a Scouse accent with the best, he was born on the Wirral. For the first 4 years of Dick’s life his father was away on bomb disposal duty; despite this his father Eric (always known as Will) became Dick’s closest friend and mentor.

Dick’s mother taught him at Prep School where – so he said – he only once failed to refer to her as Mrs Hubbard – when he cycled at speed into a lamppost and the lamppost won. He was told off by Mrs H, first, for carelessness, damaging his uniform and his face and, second, for calling her ‘Mum’ in School.

Dick’s paternal grandfather owned a flourishing catering business on Merseyside. When he died, Dick’s parents asked him whether he would like eventually to take over the business.

Dick – then aged just 14 - said ‘No’: he wanted to be a teacher – and the rest is history.

Though he did occasionally look up Greggs share prices and compare the pay and bonuses of the Directors with a Schoolmaster’s salary!

After School, Dick took a year out before University to teach at a boarding school in deepest Wales. It was there – to put distance between himself and the older pupils who were of his age – he acquired his 60 a day Senior Service habit – a habit that persisted into his early 30s when he gave up smoking and “invested” the money he thought he would save in a TV, Landrover and minivan!!

-

Adam Ogilvie

I first met Dick at Manchester University in 1961 where a group of six spent three years together in Halls. Dick was the catalyst because he was the eldest by a whole year, had a year’s teaching experience and was therefore – supposedly – much the most mature in our group, and he had a car – a green mini.

Dick and I argued constantly about the relative merits of rugby (him) and hockey (me) and I was later cheered and vindicated to learn of his conversion to hockey and of his infinite joy at having some plastic grass named after him!

We left University in 1964 and went our separate ways but always kept in touch. Dick never changed physically and always had the same calmness, sense of humour and reliability. It was as if there were never any gaps in our friendship. I bet he was a great House Master. Dick was never a “passing friend”. He and Jen have always been there. He will never “Go” in my mind.

-

Chris Davis, a close friend from university

Dick was one of the first people I met when I arrived at St. Peter’s in 1970. I was immediately struck by his kindness, helpfulness and enthusiasm. I have many fond memories of the times spent with him. Here are but a few.

In the late 1970s I moved close to where Dick and Jen lived. At that time I had a yellow MG Midget. It was a bit like a motorised roller skate: totally unreliable and impractical, but seemed like a good idea at the time. One particularly wet winter the River Derwent burst its banks and I was stranded on the far side on the bridge. I dutifully phoned School to tell them of my plight; then settled down to a leisurely breakfast and the prospect of a lazy day off. About ten minutes later there was a knock at the door and there stood Dick with a smile on his face: “Good morning dear chap. I’ve come to take you to School!” He had driven through the flood in his beloved Landrover.

Later on we decided to car share and I picked Dick up one frosty morning to do the commute. Dick was quite a big man and to see him getting in and out of the MG was something to behold. As we approached the junction in Skipwith, I lost control of the car on the ice and pirouetted some way down the road. I was badly shaken. A calm voice came from the passenger seat: ‘Do you think you might try that again, but this time without showing off’. The rest of the journey was made as if nothing had happened.

Dick and I shared many experiences together both in and out of School. On one occasion we were on the North Yorkshire Moors with a group of boys doing their Duke of Edinburgh award. On the first night, at about 1am, there was a mighty row going on outside the tents and I got up to find a Girl Guide Leader fetchingly dressed in a cagoule, dressing gown and wellies haranguing Dick. Apparently, some of our boys had discovered a Girl Guide camp down the valley and had decided to make a nocturnal foray!

Dick didn’t often lose his cool, but that night he had a distinct sense of humour failure and proceeded to get all the boys up and out of their tents. One guilty party was easy to spot as he was bleeding profusely from a number of wounds. Whilst making his escape from the Guide camp, he had run into a barbed wire fence. Dick, with a barely suppressed smile, applied neat iodine to the youth’s wounds with spectacular, extremely vocal results. We then took him to Scarborough hospital; by this time it was about 3am and whilst the youth was being repaired by the medics, I went in search of tea, which I duly found and returned to the waiting room. Dick was dozing in a chair when I handed him his tea: “I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, but I suppose a large Scotch and a bacon sandwich is out of the question?”

Dick was a gentle man, a caring man, a very good friend and I will miss him.

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Mike Dawson

“I hope I haven’t done too much harm,” these words were said by the actor Paul Eddington some years ago when asked what he would like his epitaph to be. Dick quoted these words to me a few weeks ago and clearly liked the thought that lay behind them.

Dick’s life can be simply described as ‘serving others’. For 32 years he was a schoolmaster at St Peter’s and, although that word sounds a little old-fashioned today, it conveys the idea of

a total commitment to the education of young people in the broadest sense. There was hardly an aspect of school life in which Dick was not involved. As Head of Careers, Dick built up an enthusiastic, modern and dynamic department into one of the most important in the school; while as Housemaster of Queen’s, Dick walked that tight-rope between friendliness and support on the one hand with firmness on the other. For several years Dick was the Senior Common Room Secretary, a difficult role sandwiched between management and his colleagues - a role he carried out with wisdom and sound judgment. He welcomed and nurtured new members of staff, while supporting longer serving colleagues admirably.

I shall especially remember the trips we took to the First World War Battlefields with fourth formers and adults over the years. We must have done over fifteen of these trips. Dick’s understanding and interest in the history of this period was remarkable and he imparted that knowledge with enthusiasm and humanity.

But there was so much more during his time at St Peter’s: hockey must take pride of place but rugby and rowing feature too. Then there was his involvement in school plays as a joint producer and technical director. The production of “Oh What a Lovely War” stands out as one of the most memorable productions in my time at St Peter’s.

A tribute from the cast of “Kiss me Kate” recorded; “The producer, Mr Hubbard, is wellknown throughout the theatrical world as a really good egg. He keeps the quality of his own on-stage abilities a closely guarded secret, but as a master ventriloquist he has enticed some amazing performances from a load of dummies.” Dick was a housemaster at the time of the first intake of girls and went out of his way to help the girls integrate and develop the confidence they needed to fulfil their potential.

Always up for a party; Dick was in charge of the May Ball to celebrate the 1350th anniversary of the founding of St Peter’s, issuing instructions to all and sundry, including the Head Master at the time who meekly did as Dick asked.

I should also mention that somewhere in all this in his spare time Dick managed to teach Physics. Dick’s strengths were his open, friendly and smiling nature. He was a diplomatic person whose personal skills were his greatest asset. People instinctively liked and trusted him. He was always supportive and non-judgemental. Even now I find it difficult to remember him without a smile on his face. Dick’s enjoyment of life came across in everything he did. The fortitude, stoicism and humour in bleak moments that he showed throughout his illness were remarkable. For Dick life was always about other people, never himself and this was true even in the darkest moments of his illness. The last time I saw him was on the Sunday before he died. Jen was at his bedside holding his hand, the Six Nations was on the Television and he was drinking a lager. He seemed at peace with the world.

Dick’s spirit will always be with us. His light will always shine for us.

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Richard Drysdale

Dick was a founder member, 36 years ago, of York Vikings Rotary Club. Dick was Viking’s Sergeant at Arms for many years – that is to say he had to dress up and speak in a loud voice

at formal functions (and frequently compared it to teaching Set 3). He took part with enthusiasm in all Rotary activities, but for years declined invitations to become Club President (“it’s really not me”). A couple of years ago he relented and agreed to become President Elect. Once he had accepted the invitation, he looked forward with pleasure and anticipation to his Presidential year and in particular the planned visit to the German Club with which York Vikings is twinned. His illness put paid both to the Presidency and the visit.

However, he thoroughly enjoyed entertaining the German Club at his home when they last visited York – an excuse for another party.

Leukaemia killed Dick’s Father which led to his involvement with York Against Cancer where he became Chair of the Education Committee, a job he relished (ever the teacher!) and included visiting diverse groups from primary school children to Working Men’s Clubs to raise awareness of the need for prevention and early diagnosis of the disease.

Not for Dick a quiet life following his retirement. He was closely involved with Askham Grange Prison. The Independent Monitoring Board and Prison Staff have sent this tribute: “Dick served as a member of the IMB at Askham Grange Women’s Prison for nearly 11 years and was Chair of the Board for three of them. Whenever Dick’s name comes up in conversation the same words are used to describe him: Gentleman, considerate, kind, caring, solid, thoughtful and fair. Dick cared passionately about Askham Grange, the women in his care and the staff that made Askham work so well. He was much loved and respected by the prison staff and residents. He had such an engaging personality and had the ability to communicate to all levels of society in a way that made every individual feel comfortable and at ease.

Most Christmas Days during Dick’s time on the IMB he spent at the prison, his last Christmas Rota Duty was in 2011. He was there in the morning with home-made mince pies for all of the staff on duty and insisted on staying to help serve the residents their Christmas meal. He served the vegetables with his usual warm and cheery manner and wished all of the girls as happy a Christmas as they could wish for although separated from their loved ones, despite him being there himself away from his own family. When lunch was served he would have been happy to drift out without a fuss had we not known it was his last Christmas at Askham Grange. However Graham Holgate was not going to let that moment pass and announced to all of the dining room that this was his last ever Christmas visit and told of Dick’s service here, there wasn’t a dry eye in the House when all of the residents whooped, cheered and clapped. A sight rarely seen in prison!

Dick was humble in his short thank you as if to say “Ah, it was nothing”.

We know it was much more than that!!”

The tributes to Dick from colleagues in these organisations have been many and generous.

For Dick’s part, he always said he was humbled by the dedication and selflessness of the colleagues he met. He was also acutely aware that a different toss of the dice might have meant that he was the one needing the help and support. ‘There but for the Grace of God....’ he often used to say.

Jen has received many tributes to Dick; the same phrases occurring over and over again: steadfast, smart, funny and engaging; kind and considerate; a gentleman; a gentle man;

generous with his time for everyone; inspirational. He touched many lives, an amazing and remarkable man.

But he wasn’t a saint, unless stubbornness is a saintly characteristic. Ask anyone who ever tried to get him to change his mind once he had made it up. And he was not always good at sharing his fears and anxieties, even with those he loved most.

Indeed it was his original intention not to have any funeral service at all! However he relented; Over the last 18 months I have received such help, support, friendship and indeed love from countless people, I have been overwhelmed and humbled and I have realised how selfish I have been with my funeral arrangements..... I shall leave it in the hands of my wife, Jen, who will know what to do, especially with the Wake!

His only three stipulations being; There should be some decent Champagne It should be bought sale or return from Majestic ‘because they provide the glasses and wash them up’, and The refreshments should be provided at School to avoid having to pay corkage.

Dick made no bones about his love of Fizz. It had nothing to do with show or fashion but stemmed from his Father’s life long conviction that it cuts through the grease of fish and chips better than vinegar, and over the years many have come to agree.

Dick’s resilience shone through many times during the last two years not least in January when he visited his former home at Sutton, which he knew would be for the last time. The visit was ostensibly to collect paperwork, but was really to collect his little black bomber – his new Mini Cooper S – which he was desperate to have at North Duffield. On the way back, thinking it must have been hard for him to leave, Jen asked whether the visit had made him sad. ‘Only a little bit, but not really’ he said ‘because we are going home’.

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Kem Peel

From time to time, Dick took Chapel here at St Peter’s. Some of you may recall his producing a live kitten to the accompaniment of Louis Armstrong singing ‘What a wonderful world.’ No kitten today, but if Dick were here he would say something like: “If anyone wants to remember me, you can do it best by making the most of this wonderful world.” And he would remind us that British Summertime and light evenings have just arrived to lift the spirits; and he would say – just get on with it.

His was a faith which was expressed most fully through his work for the welfare and the flourishing of others, both in his professional life as a schoolmaster, and in his rich life beyond his professional career

Over the last few months, Dick made clear on a number of occasions that there was one piece of music which he wished to be played at the end of his thanksgiving service. He was referring to a recording of Gracie Fields singing ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.’ For a period I was not quite sure whether Dick was serious about this – or whether it was merely an idea which amused him. The last time I saw him, I asked him – and was left in no doubt that that was indeed what he wanted. He had chosen it for Jen’s mother’s funeral; it went down well then, and he had decided that it would do very nicely for him. Bunyan spoke about trumpets sounding on the other side. I rather think that, today, there will be laughter sounding on the other side.

Dick would, I think, share the sentiments behind the remark about a life lived so fully and so generously: ‘don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened’ – and thank God for it.

-

Steven Harvey

Michael Watson (The Manor 1952 – 1960), died 19 February 2015, aged 72.

Passed away peacefully on Wednesday 19 February, aged 72 at Calderdale Royal with partner, Irene at his bedside after a long illness bravely borne. Older son of the late Fred and the late Joan Watson of Ilkley, father to Jonathan, Jamie and Lucinda and grandfather to Joshua, Olivia, Alexandra and Coco.

2014 Robert Atkinson (Temple 1949 – 1953), died 20 December 2014, aged 79.

See Page 70 Murray Hodd (The Manor/Grove 1946 – 1951), died 27 November 2014, aged 82.

See Page 71 Norman McDermid (School House 1940 – 1945), died 30 September 2014, aged 87.

See Page 72 Peter Campbell (The Rise 1933 – 1936), died 9 September 2014, aged 94.

See Page 73 David Procter (The Manor 1952 – 1957), died September 2014, aged 75.

See Page 75 Gordon March (School House/Grove 1945 – 1949), died 20 August 2014, aged 82.

Edward 'Ted' Portlock (Rise 1950 – 1956), died August 2014, aged 82.

See Page76 Malcolm Wroe (The Rise 1958 – 1963), died 22 July 2014, aged 69.

See Page 77 Arthur 'Jack' Collins (School 1944 – 1951), died 1 July 2014, aged 79.

See Page 78 Anthony 'Tony' Isherwood (The Rise 1950 – 1956), died 23 June 2014, aged 77.

See Page 79 C Anthony 'Tony' Wood (Queen’s 1963 – 1968), died 18 June 2014, aged 64.

Simon Cooper (Temple 1969 – 1974), died 1 May 2014, aged 57.

William 'Bill' Graham (The Manor 1944 – 1948), died 30 April 2014, aged 84.

J Derek Taylor Thompson (Temple 1939 – 1945), died 28 April 2014, aged 86.

Robert Atkinson (Temple 1949 – 1953), died 20 December 2014, aged 79.

My brother, Robert Burrow Atkinson died peacefully in York Hospital at 11.00am on Saturday 20 December, aged 79.

An outstanding long-distance runner with a Roger Bannister action, he won many school trophies, but it was as an exceptionally gifted classical pianist that he will be most remembered.

After National Service in the RAF, & several years with the Midland Bank, he became landlord of The Black Swan in Peasholm Green, all the while playing the piano with dance bands & at many light operatic events. He excelled as an accompanist, his seemingly bluff manner hiding a very good sense of humour.

Besides listening to his classical music, which would at times move him to tears, he enjoyed reading, with Dickens a special favourite, and was a very skilled model-maker, taking infinite pains to replicate the details of each ship.

He faced his last few years with admirable stoicism, in the loving care of his wife Anne. Our prayers and thoughts are with her, and their four children Guy, Louise, Rachel and George.

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Dick Atkinson (Queen’s 1958 – 1962)

Murray Hodd (The Manor/Grove 1946 – 1951), died 27 November 2014, aged 82.

Murray passed away on 27 November 2014 after suffering from Dementia and Pancreatic Cancer. Life became very difficult for him towards the end but he was lovingly cared for at home by his wife Barbara.

His funeral at St John's Parish Church was one of great celebration for his life and his friends and colleagues were hugely supportive.

Murray leaves behind two sons, Jonathan and Edward who are happily married to Yorkshire girls with children Noah 4yrs, William 3yrs and most recently Alice Matilda who is 12 weeks old.

A week would never go by without a reference to the happy days spent at St Peter's School and the privilege of being a student there.

Norman McDermid (School House 1940 – 1945), died 30 September 2014, aged 87.

Archdeacon Emeritus, Norman McDermid, former Archdeacon of Richmond passed away on 30 September at the age of 87. Norman spent the whole of his 62 years of ordained ministry, both in post and in retirement, in the Diocese of Ripon.

He was a vicar in Bramley, Knaresborough and Kirby Overblow, before becoming the Archdeacon of Richmond from 1983 to 1993. After his retirement he continued to preach and lead services in Bedale and the area.

Peter Campbell (The Rise 1933 – 1936), died 9 September 2014, aged 94.

Peter passed peacefully away on 9 September in Lister House, Ripon. He was 94 years old and had a hearty life until January when he got a bad bout of pneumonia. Peter was born in Hull in 1920 to Rose and Gerald Campbell – he was the youngest of five children.

His early years were spent at High Skirlington Farm in Hornsea. It was here that he fell in love with farming, learning all aspects of “the trade”. His father was a hard task master but Peter was a fast learner and soon earned his father’s respect.

After going to the local primary school he was sent as a boarder to St Peter’s where he excelled in sport – especially cricket and rugby. He was in the same house as the legendary Yorkshire and England cricketer, Norman Yardley and they played together in the school’s first XI. Before the war broke out, Peter had been working in Hull at one of the oil mills but travelled to Brough airfield as a VR. By 1939 he had accumulated a considerable number of flying hours but missed out on the Battle of Britain because a Wing Commander had contacted the CO at Brough saying he was looking for a pilot to join his squadron. Peter flew a variety of fighter planes including tiger moths, hurricanes and spitfires. On one memorable occasion his spitfire squadron, on patrol over France, were jumped by Messerschmitts. Peter’s squadron leader was shot down and spent the rest of the war in captivity. Peter’s plane was badly damaged but he managed to get away. Nursing the plane over the channel he had to put down in a field, choosing one with a haystack at the end to act as an arrester. The outcome was that he was put on a charge for not making it back to the home station! A lot of the flying was giving convoy support to supply ships coming from the USA. This involved flying far out into the Atlantic, without the benefit of radar, to escort the convoys into Britain. During this time he spent about six months in Texas teaching young US fighter pilots the art of shooting down enemy aircraft.

In 2004 Peter was thrilled when his son took him to the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon with log book in hand. Peter even pointed out that some of the exhibit numbers were wrong! The museum even asked if they could take copies of his log book. It has now been donated to the museum for all to see. Peter also enjoyed a trip to Bletchley Park. The highlight there was finding an illustration of a spitfire with his squadron’s markings.

Towards the end of the war he married Beryl and together they had a son, Ian and a daughter, Julia. They had 58 years of happy marriage. The family lived in Lincolnshire for about 15 years – Peter was a poultry specialist for BOCM, the animal food sector of Unilever. In 1959 they moved to Hull. It was during this time that Peter took a keen interest in golf. He eventually became a member of Kirk Ella Golf club after serving his apprenticeship on the public courses around Hull. It was here that he got the first of his three holes in one!

In the early 1970’s Peter and Beryl moved to Burton Leonard and it was here that he became a member of Harrogate Golf Club. He was a chairman of greens for several years and was responsible for improving the drainage on some of the greens. Peter really valued his membership of the club and was still actively playing until about 12 months ago.

Peter was a very early member of the Knaresborough Art Society and held several key jobs.

His favourite subject matter was landscapes – especially scenes in the Yorkshire Dales which he seemed to know like an encyclopaedia! Wherever he went in his car, he would take his sketch pads with him. He would often pencil sketch on site and then in the winter finish them off with paints. Christmas cards to family and close friends were original paintings of seasonal scenes. Peter liked the personal touch.

Peter and Beryl were volunteers for Meals on Wheels in Knaresborough, often delivering to people quite a few years younger than them! Sadly Beryl passed away in 2002 but Peter faced up to the future with stoicism.

The biggest frustration he had in the latter part of his life was his increasing deafness – it started during the war but gradually got to the point where even hearing aids were no longer effective.

Peter adored his two grandchildren – Brahim and Hannah. He was very disappointed not to be able to attend Hannah’s wedding to Robin last year due to his failing health. Peter was a regular attender at St Andrew’s Church in Starbeck so his strong faith held him in good stead for whatever road lay ahead. He will be very sadly missed.

David Procter (The Manor 1952 – 1957), died September 2014, aged 75.

David gained a First from Liverpool University in Electrical Engineering. He stroked the University 1st IV and 1st VIII for two years. He spent 24 years working for BBC Engineering as a system designer of large London TV production studios. He also lectured at the Engineering Training Department.

To escape the London commute he pursued a long held wish to teach, firstly at Kent College in Canterbury and then returning to Yorkshire to teach his favourite A level subjects; physics and electronics.

Having been a member of the Chapel choir, a love of church music followed him throughout his life, he sang in London Choral societies and various church choirs. Church work was high on his agenda. In later years he served as churchwarden as St Mary’s, Alne before retiring to Thornton-le-Dale. He was an early supporter and long tome donor to the 627 Society at St Peter’s School.

David died following a long fight with cancer, leaving his wife of 46 years, Patricia, daughter, Beth and son, Simon.

Edward 'Ted' Portlock (Rise 1950 – 1956), died August 2014, aged 82.

Ted was born in Hereford on 10 March 1937 and schooled at St Peter’s where he became Head Boy in his final year. It was at St Peter’s that he first became involved with two passions that would stay with him throughout his life – rowing, where he competed for the school boat club, and aviation where he flow Tiger Moths as a schoolboy air force cadet.

Ted completed his national service in Canada as part of the RAF Flying Training Programme.

After this he read Land Economy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he was once again active for the college boat club, forging a link that was never severed. After graduating he continued to return to Emmanuel at least once a year to coach the college’s crews for the ‘bumps’ races each spring.

After university he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Forestry Commission where he spent most of his working life on the land agency side of the business. Ted’s job took him all over the UK, from Scotland to Hampshire, to Suffolk, to Cheshire and finally to South Wales. Once in Cheshire in 1980 he never moved the family home away from Chester, choosing instead to commute to South Wales on a weekly basis.

In Chester he returned to competitive rowing, becoming part of a successful veteran’s squad at Royal Chester Rowing Club, winning many trophies in the process. Whist working away during the week in South Wales during the early 1990s he met Lorna and when a shoulder injury led to early retirement from the Forestry Commission, Lorna relocated to Chester where they lived a very happy life, finally marrying in November 2012.

Ted continued to be involved with rowing, returning to Cambridge to coach at Emmanuel College and he was a regular attender at Henley Royal Regatta until the last few years when a debilitating back injury curtailed his mobility. However he was always able to muster the energy to get to his favourite place of all – the pub! He was never happier than when he had a pint in his hand and took great pride in having been one of the earliest members of CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale).

Ted is survived by his wife Lorna, sons Nick and Chris, and step daughters Jackie and Clare.

Malcolm Wroe (The Rise 1958 – 1963), died 22 July 2014, aged 69.

Malcolm was born in Nuneaton in 1945, the son of a pharmacist. Whilst living as a boarder at St Peter’s School he became a chorister at York Minster. He carried a passion for music and signing throughout his whole life and even went on to study singing at the Royal College of Music.

After taking on a variety of temp jobs in London, he became a stage manager in the West End for hit productions such as ‘Noises Off”, ‘Allo Allo!’ and ‘Evita’. His job allowed him to mingle backstage with the likes of Tim Rice and Elaine Page.

In 1980 Malcolm met Ann and they were married a year later. During a Neighbourhood Watch meeting in the early ‘90s Malcolm volunteered to set up a youth club at Queen’s Crescent Community Centre. Its sole purpose was to provide a place for young people to meet, play and study.

At the same time Malcolm was facing a very difficult personal challenge; he had just been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and was supposed to be taking it easy. After his initial diagnosis he was given just six weeks to live. Incredibly Malcolm lived for a further 23 years, battling his disease with unfailing cheerfulness.

Malcolm was awarded a Camden Good Citizen Award in 2001 as well as an Ambition Silver Award for voluntary service to young people. He is survived by his wife Ann and their three sons Simon, Pip and Tom.

Arthur 'Jack' Collins (School 1944 – 1951), died 1 July 2014, aged 79.

Captain Arthur Irvine, 79 of Williamsburg, passed away peacefully on Tuesday 1 July at Munston Hospice House in Traverse City. He was born on 27 May 1935 in Frodhsam, Cheshire.

Arthur is survived by his wife of 46 years, Roseline; nieces Elizabeth, Sandra, Jacqueline and Roxanne and nephew Peter. He was preceded in death by his parents Albert and Lillian Collins.

Arthur attended the Merchant Navy Cadet Training School on the fixed base HMS Conway, attaining a Class 1 Foreign Going (Master Mariner) Certificate. He worked for Empresa Hondourena de Vapores (formerly United Fruit Co) where he held command of many seagoing merchant vessels that traversed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Later he was a marine cargo surveyor for the National Cargo Bureau and owner of Collins Marine Service.

He and Roseline lived for 35 years in Central Florida and subsequently moved to Williamsburg in 2012.

Anthony 'Tony' Isherwood (The Rise 1950 – 1956), died 23 June 2014, aged 77.

Tony’s memories of boarding school were always positive. He saw it as a rich period in his life and had no regrets about the time he spent there. He spent most school holidays with an Aunt and made the trek overseas once a year to wherever his parents were in residence and where his father served as British Consul in Spain or Morocco.

After leaving St Peter’s, he went to Bristol University, completed a degree and moved to Toronto, Canada. He worked for the government and met his late Australian wife there, married and moved to Australia. He had three children from that marriage, daughters Susan and Kate, son Peter and five grandchildren.

In Australia he spent most of his career working for the Ford Motor Company. He took early retirement and subsequently was ‘hired’ back by Ford as a consultant. He also worked for several other car manufacturers and in the mid 90’s spent one year in Bombay working for Ford to help them establish a partnership with an Indian car company.

Tony met new partner Lynn 33 years ago and for nearly 32 they lived happily together in Melbourne, although they also travelled extensively. When Tony left Ford he had outplacement counselling and was advised to ignore golf and take up a creative hobby. He became interested in jewellery making, and faceting, working with semi-precious stones.

Twice a week he went to a jewellery club to do his ‘work’. He made some beautiful pieces and was very well regarded at his club. The members will miss him as will all of his family and friends.

2013 Christopher Blood (St Peter’s School staff 1992 – 2013), died November 2013, aged 60.

See page 81 Hugh Little (Dronfield 1963 – 1968), died 26 September 2013, aged 63.

See page 84 Peter Richard Stafford Fairclough (The Rise 1962-1967), died 24 February 1996, aged 48.

See page 86

Christopher Blood (St Peter’s School staff 1992 – 2013), died November 2013, aged 60.

Chris was a passionate and also a private man.

Chris’ passion for the trumpet was incredible to see – his trumpet was so much part of him.

Chris has passion in such great measure that it made him one of the very best teachers that I have ever known. He was a man who did not like fuss; in his last few years, he did not like openly discussing the details of his illness and certainly did not want any special treatment.

Of course there was his other passion: aeroplanes (and, by extension, the RAF). He married Della in the School Chapel, dressed in his RAF uniform from his work with the school RAF section of the Combined Cadet Force. His best man was his dear friend, Matthew Grant, who ran that section. He had pictures of planes and insignia in his room at school together with a variety of trumpets from all periods and a vast array of mouthpieces. He could hear a Spitfire flying miles away and be able to tell which mark of Spitfire it was, even before it came into view! When Chris went to RAF camps he was always excited: almost like a schoolboy, he loved the formality of it, the clean shoes, the uniform and the strong structure.

Chris was born in 1953 in Clifton Village, a small, picturesque village situated by the river Trent, just four miles outside Nottingham. It is full of beautiful old houses, and Chris was particularly proud to have been born in a thatched cottage that several generations of his family, as tenant farmers, had lived in. When Chris was about eleven years old, he pestered his Mum and Dad for a trumpet after hearing his Dad, Oliver accompanying his trumpetplaying friend, Alan Wright, on the organ in the Methodist Chapel. ‘You can have a trumpet as long as you practice!’ was the deal, and Chris certainly maintained his side of this bargain for the rest of his life!

Alan became his first teacher, and his regular visits to give Chris lessons became Red Letter Days in the Blood household. After helping his Dad in the school holidays in his blacksmith’s shop and doing a spot of farmyard tractor-driving to earn some extra pocket money, Chris left Nottingham to study the trumpet at the Royal College of Music in London.

During his time at the RCM, he won the prestigious Manns Brass Prize for solo trumpet playing. Whilst Principal Trumpet of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company he enjoyed so much the unique experience of performing The Pirates of Penzance with the company in a private performance in Windsor Castle, where the select audience consisted of the Queen, Prince Philip and other members of the Royal Family.

Chris played in many different orchestras and for West End Shows before moving into teaching as Head of Brass at Bedford Modern School and also at the Junior Guildhall School of Music. Chris moved to York with Tina and their two daughters, Anna and Jenny, of whom he was so proud, in January 1992 as Head of Wind Studies at St Peter’s. Chris’s room was opposite mine and when I arrived each morning he would always be practicing: long notes, scales, and arpeggios. A routine, yes, but a careful and thorough one from which many could learn: a professional routine that ensured that he was always in good shape to play. It distressed him so much latterly when he could not play at all.

Chris insisted on high standards in rehearsal and that everyone was part of a unit, all contributing to the whole. Teamwork in the bands and groups that he ran was an absolutely essential requirement. Above all, in everything that he did he was a professional. He provided excellent brass groups for our Minster services each year and he was so proud when one year he had a brass group that included a complement of five tube and euphonium players.

The school’s first USA Music Tour was in the July of 1993. To see him lick the Wind Band into shape during that year was so amazing, and choosing music that was difficult enough but still possible was an art he had clearly mastered. In that year he also established the Swing Band which is now such an important feature of musical life at St Peter’s. The idea of touring with 80 pupils for over two weeks was quite new to him, and he was not a little apprehensive about the whole thing.

Over the years Chris’s work with the Wind Band was so wonderful. His choice of repertoire was always impressive and imaginative. One of the pieces he loved was Holst’s Suite in E flat – especially the Chaconne from this, which he conducted many times so effectively and memorably. Tim Dunne, one of his early band leaders, affectionately called him ‘Cap’n Blood’; Captain Blood is a film starring Errol Flyn with music by Erich Korngold – a composer much admired by Chris. One review of Chris’s work in The Peterite says ‘also thanks go to Cap’n Blood for his great patience, when most of us, at some time or other, have deserved to walk the plank.’

Chris’s work in St Olave’s in getting new brass and wind instrumentalists started was also notable, and his organising of classes where every pupil had an instrument to play got so many involved in music.

Chris did some notable orchestral conducting – in my time I remember a performance of Elgar’s Overture Cockaigne at the Jack Lyons Concert Hall at the University – an extremely difficult piece played with real flair and precision. Then, more recently, a performance of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony in the Minster – so polished and beautifully shaped. In his last major conducting role, in March 2013, he directed Arthur Bliss’s Kenilworth Suite in the school concert in Leeds Town Hall arranged for Wind Band by Chris himself. It was a wonderful testament to his work with that group.

He was a Tutor in Temple House and inspired much affection in his pupils in his down-toearth, no-nonsense dealings with them. Chris loved bands and would regularly arrange for Army or RAF bands to visit both St Peter’s and St Olave’s, and for our pupils to play with them. This was also another way to encourage others to take up wind or brass instruments.

The Remembrance Service in the Chapel each year is a very special occasion, not least because so many former pupils died in the two World Wars. Chris meticulously prepared the trumpeter for this service each year and also sent out many other trumpeters to similar services around York, all thoroughly rehearsed.

I have seldom seen someone so attached to his particular instrument. In fact he had 16 trumpets altogether! His promise to Alan Wright to practice was always kept, but, far more than that, he placed something of that same enthusiasm in so many youngsters’ heads and

hearts. It is such a sad loss that so many in the future will never experience that special enthusiasm, encouragement and professionalism. Chris’s life touched those of so many others, all of whom will remember him with deep affection.

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Mr Andrew Wright, (Director of Music, 1986 - 2010)

Hugh Little (Dronfield 1963 – 1968), died 26 September 2013, aged 63.

Hugh Little was born in Whitby on 9 May 1950, the middle child of Dr John David Little, a former medical student of Oriel. At the age of four, his family moved to Darlington where Hugh spent his formative years with his parents and his two sisters.

He completed his schooling at St Olave’s and St Peter’s which is when he began to develop his strong faith. Following this, he read Politics at Nottingham University, before returning to Darlington to begin his working life as a newspaper reporter on the local evening paper.

After three years there, he married and left the paper to read Theology at Oriel. It was during his time at Oriel, while exploring a possible vocation to ordained ministry, that he first met David Hope, former Archbishop of York, who was at that time the Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford.

Hugh then returned to reporting in Hull and later taught religious education at a school in West Yorkshire before moving to Ilkley in 1985 where his daughter was born. Hugh immediately became an active member of St Margaret’s Church, Ilkley, raising a great deal of money by various means.

Events organised by Hugh include a celebrity auction, which involved writing to every public figure he could think if to ask for saleable items. Those he approached included Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Terry Waite, Spike Milligan and Maggie Smith.

Other events organised varied from an Elvis impersonation evening, publicised by Hugh appearing in the local paper dressed up as Elvis, much to his family’s horror, to Burn’s night suppers, complete with piper, which were held for many years.

He was an enthusiastic volunteer in Christian Aid week and was probably the best house to house collector in the parish. He went back every night of the week until the residents probably just gave in and answered the door with their donation.

When David Hope retired as Archbishop of York, Hugh was delighted to learn that the exArchbishop was to become priest-in-charge of St Margaret’s.

Hugh collaborated with David Hope to write ‘Better to Travel Hopefully’, a diary of Father David’s time as priest at St Margaret’s which featured many Ilkley residents and whose publication was awaited with some trepidation by those same residents.

Over the years Hugh pursued various careers, his final post being with the Employment Service in Leeds. He loved the Lake District and had several articles published in Cumbria magazine. He derived a great deal of satisfaction in raising money for the Church and other charities and showed much kindness to those who others in life might simply ignore.

Hugh died on 26 September and is survived by his wife, Linda and his daughter Sarah, a chemistry graduate of St Hilda’s, Oxford.

Peter Richard Stafford Fairclough (The Rise 1962-1967), died 24 February 1996, aged 48.

Peter went to Red House School in Norton, Stockton on Tees and then to St Peter's School in York (The Rise 1962 – 1967). In 1970 Peter graduated from Keble College Oxford and shortly after leaving Oxford started work in the family antiquarian book shop in Yarm. Peter died on 24 February 1996 aged 48.