Obituaries

Michael Harris (1947)

John Harris (1950) writes: My brother Michael died in June shortly after celebrating his 90th birthday with his family.

It was my good fortune to follow three years behind him at school, and also at Emmanuel College. He was able to explain many aspects of school life, so that I knew in advance what to expect, including, for example, at Scout Camps at West Runton when they resumed after the war. Yes, we had to take our ration books!

As a Sixth Former he was part of a fire-watch squad. Exciting times!

Medical students could defer national service, so he went to Emmanuel College straight from school: unusual in those days. After reading medicine there, he did clinic training at University College London Hospital, where he won a prize for his skill at diagnosis.

This most un-military man was then commissioned as a Captain in RAMC, and served in Egypt and Cyprus which were both having troubles in the mid 1950s. It was there that he developed his interest in obstetrics and gynaecology, later becoming a Member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. He worked, among others, at Hillingdon Hospital, before becoming a GP in West London.

He married Evelyn, also a gynaecologist, in 1962, and they raised two sons. She sadly died young in 2001. He later had a partner, Rosemary White, who also died before him, in 2018. His last years were spent in a retirement home near Watford.

He cared deeply about family, and is survived by his two sons and four grandsons, who were very attached to him. As a grandparent I have had plenty of opportunity to observe sibling rivalry between youngsters. I think it is to Michael’s credit that there was none of that when we were growing up.

Barry Mason (1949)

Christine mason writes: Barry Mason was born on 9 April 1932 in Cambridge, the son of Edna & Arthur Mason, who, with his brother Ernest started the famous Fitzbillies cake shop in Trumpington Street in 1920.

Although Barry had a readymade business to go into, he decided to try Music as a career, playing trumpet. He studied with Ernest Hall – a well-known and respected trumpet tutor – in London and soon found work playing in clubs and dance halls with various bands and musicians.

In 1956, he played trumpet with the Ken Stevens Band, and they won the All Britain Dance Band competition for that year. In 1958, he was one of many musicians who decided to work and travel to New York on the legendary Queen Mary playing in the resident bands on board. Once there, the three day turnaround allowed him to see and hear all the famous jazz musicians of the day. Barry did this for a year, travelling back and forth and hearing most of his idols in the jazz clubs of New York.

In 1959 he joined the Joe Daniels Band at Butlins in Skegness for the summer season, and a residency at The Samson & Hercules Ballroom in Norwich followed in 1960 with the Cambridge Band of Ken Stevens. Barry changed from trumpet to trombone and stayed with them until 1972, when he married their vocalist Christine Vance. As a married couple they worked together in Big Bands and eventually their own Quartet, travelling all over the UK playing jazz.

They had two sons, Bradley and Elliot, and Barry taught them both – Bradley on trumpet and Elliot on Trombone. Both won scholarships to study at the famous Berklee Jazz College in Boston Massachusetts, from where they both graduated. Both boys are now professional jazz musicians, living and working in New York, following in the footsteps of the father whose tuition and encouragement led both his sons to a musical life.

John Paton-Philip (1943)

nicholas Paton-Philip writes: John was born in Cambridge, with an older brother and a twin sister. When recalling his time at The Perse, he mentioned the sports teacher writing in a report that “Philip was not a very good rugger captain but always seemed to be at the right place at the right time!”

He got a first class degree in Agriculture from St John’s, Cambridge, but his ambition to become a rugby blue was dashed after falling off a horse while trying to impress members of the

rugby team. He was advised by the doctor who reset his fractured wrist that rowing was the best rehab activity.

Every cloud has a silver lining and John was chosen to row as a last minute replacement for CUBC in the 1945 boat race. The Light Blue crew was victorious. The next year he was elected President. His future wife remembers watching that race from the bank, not realising that her husband-to-be was sat in the stroke seat of the trailing boat!

In 1946, John was reluctantly persuaded to take up a lecturer’s post at Chadacre Agricultural Institute, a small training establishment in Suffolk, endowed by the Iveagh family – part of the Guinness family. This started his lifelong association with the long dark drink with a white top!

In 1949, he became estate manager for another Guinness property in Northern Ireland. It was during this period that his father suggested that John spend Christmas with a radiology colleague in Belfast. There were two daughters, neither of whom showed much interest in him. It was not until the older sister’s dog went missing in the snow on Christmas Day, which John went out alone to find, that Margaret realised he was something of a special man.

In 1952 John married Margaret in Belfast and in 1958 they moved back to Chadacre with their four children, for John to take up the post of principal. He dedicated the next 22 years to the development of the two-year course. John also persuaded his governors to fund the building of a chapel, which embedded an extra spiritual dimension.

John was also reacquainted with rugby, as all students were expected to play. There were weekly matches and John would turn out to referee the home games, much to the dread of the away sides, as many an expletive was uttered about his visual capacity!

In 1980 he took early retirement and moved to south west Scotland, to fulfil a dream to become a hill-side shepherd, with two working border collies, which gave him 10 years of great satisfaction.

John was a great encourager, a humble man, who lived out his Christian beliefs. In last years of his life, John suffered from vascular dementia, spending the final three years in a care home. This did not stop his interest in his large extended family, with whom he was able to spend a memorable joint 90th birthday with Margaret and many of their local friends. He retained his sense of humour and his love of food right up to the end.

John died on 1 November 2018. He is survived by Margaret, and their four children, Deborah, Nicholas, Jennifer and Rachel.

Gerald ‘St John’ Penney (1944)

Charles Penney writes: My father, Gerald (known as “StJohn” from University days onwards), was born in Norfolk and then brought up in Ickleton Vicarage close to Cambridge. After The Perse, where he had been a Senior Prefect, he followed his father, the Rev. A.E. Penney, to Queens’ College, Cambridge where he read Natural Sciences as a medical student followed by his Clinical studies at Guy’s Hospital in London.

Following National Service in the Royal Navy, in 1954 he became a GP in Bishop’s Castle on the Welsh borders where he stayed for the rest of his life – he knew it was for him when a visit on his first weekend on duty involved a bumpy ride at night on the back of a tractor across a steep field to reach a remote farmhouse.

He was a pillar of the local community, serving as GP for 41 years, as Town Councillor for 46 years, as Mayor for 11 years and as Deputy Mayor for a similar number of years, on South Shropshire District Council for seven years and on various local medical committees. He took a particular interest in introducing several generations of trainee GPs into the art of rural General Practice and was actively involved in many a local cause, including successful campaigns to save the local community hospital and to preserve the site of the old castle.

He was the consummate family GP, dispensing advice on the vicissitudes of life as much as medicines. He maintained an interest in Cambridge and the surrounding area throughout his life, having last visited the City on Remembrance Sunday in 2018 (which was followed by a visit to Ickleton). He died on 19 March 2019 aged 92, having lived independently at home until his final few days in the same community hospital that he had helped to preserve. He is survived by his four sons (three of them qualified doctors, one a lawyer) and 10 grandchildren, his wife (Belinda) having predeceased him in September 2017.

ian Pollard (1963)

rufus Pollard writes: Ian was born in Cambridge on 9 June 1945. Having forged his mother’s signature on a permission slip, he entered and passed the 11 plus, winning a scholarship to The Perse. During summers he worked with the Cambridge University Estates Department; whilst also giving tours of the colleges to guests from his grandmother’s lodging house.

Ian then went on to qualify as a chartered surveyor, before setting up his own property development company – Flaxyard Ltd. The company went on to enjoy considerable success and was responsible for a number of high profile “post-modern” buildings including Marco Polo in Battersea, and Homebase in Kensington. Ian set out to give commercial architecture a monumental civic dimension, to make architecture “fun” and thought provoking. Ian wanted to make people smile, to brighten up their day, and to make work environments exciting and stimulating places to be.

Ian’s own personal style matched that of Flaxyard’s most flamboyant buildings, and in 1993 he was voted one of Britain’s Best Dressed Men by Esquire magazine. He even modelled on the Paris catwalk for the designer Kansai. Ian liked to challenge convention and created a unique work environment, combining work and home life in a way that wouldn’t become the norm until a few decades later.

Sadly, however, Flaxyard was impacted by the recession of the late 1980s and the company was forced to downsize and relocate. In 1994, Ian and his partner at that

Stanley Price (1949)

Philip graham (1949) writes: Between the 1960s and 1990s, with his wonderful talent for spotting the comic potential in almost any situation, Stanley Price (1949), who died from postoperative complications, aged 87, was one of a small number of successful British writers for screen, stage, and television. He began his writing career as a journalist, as well as publishing four sharp satirical novels. He then turned to writing for Hollywood studios. Screen credits included Arabesque (1966), starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, Gold (1974) with Roger Moore, and Shout at the Devil (1976). These were followed by a stream of comedies for the West End stage, beginning with Horizontal Hold, (1967). This was followed by The Two of Me (1975), with David and Clive Swift, Moving (1981) with Penelope Keith, and Why Me? (1985), with Richard Briers, also followed by a TV series. time, Barbara Haworth, moved to Abbey House, a Tudor-style estate in Wiltshire.

There, Ian and fellow gardener Martin Roberts worked ceaselessly to create a series of formal garden spaces and a more naturalistic riverside garden. They opened to the public in 1997 and have since seen almost three quarters of a million visitors.

Ian was an avid plant collector, an accomplished musician – teaching himself to play the flute at 60 – and a prolific reader, accumulating his own library of over 2,000 books at Abbey House. When asked what one thing he could not live without, his response was, “Being outside in the fresh air”.

Ian suffered a devastating stroke in March 2015, which left him unable to walk. His eldest son Rufus, took on the responsibility of caring for him & managing the gardens, which will continue to be open for the future, in honour of the legacy that Ian has left. Ian is survived by his five children: Juliette, Samantha, Arushka, Rufus and Kian; and grandchildren, Ashley, Kiaran, Jason.

Stanley then turned to writing for television. After adaptations of the Noël Coward plays, Star Quality, What Mad Pursuit and Bon Voyage (1985), he wrote Close relations (1990) which won the award for the best screenplay at the Rheims International Screen Festival, and Genghis Cohn which won the same award in 1995 as well as a US ACE Cable TV award. This was followed by A royal Scandal (1996) shown on BBC1. With astonishing versatility, he then wrote three notable works of non-fiction, Somewhere to Hang My Hat, (2002) a hilarious account of his Irish-Jewish childhood in Dublin, The road to Apocalypse: The Extraordinary Journey of lewis Way (2011), written jointly with his distinguished historian

son, Munro Price, and James Joyce and Italo Svevo The Story of a friendship (2016).

Stanley was born in Stamford Hill, London in 1931 to Morris (Jim), a GP in the East End, and Gertrude (née White), known as Gyp. He first attended The Perse from September 1942 until March 1943, boarding at Hillel House, the Jewish boarding house. As revealed in his memoir, at the end of that Easter holiday, he refused to return to school, locking himself in the lavatory at home in Dublin for several hours with the complete works of Conan Doyle and resolutely refusing to come out until his parents promised he could attend a day school. Eventually they agreed. However, he then returned to the School in September 1947, again boarding at Hillel House until it closed in 1948 when he went into digs.

Stanley was the Player King in the notable 1949 Perse Players production of Hamlet, in which Peter Hall played the title role. As well as acting, he played rugby for the 1st xV and was captain of the tennis team. After leaving school in 1949, and doing National Service in the Army, he read History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he wrote sketches for the Footlights. Shortly after graduation he married Judy Fenton, an Evening Standard reporter, whom he had met at Cambridge where she was studying at Homerton College. In 1957, the two of them moved for three years to New York where he worked as entertainment correspondent for life, conducting interviews with numerous celebrities including Marilyn Monroe.

Stanley combined being one of the funniest men of his generation with great warmth of heart. A very large number of people counted it a tremendous privilege and pleasure to have known him as a life-enhancing friend.

He is survived by Judy, Munro and his brother, Ashley. David Winch (1948)

sally Winch writes: Dad lived to the grand old age of 87, despite being a life-long smoker (he managed to stop a couple of years before he died). With longevity in the family – his mother lived until 99 and a half – he may have gone on longer if he hadn’t suffered from COPD. However, he felt he had had a good innings and was lucid to the end, always keeping his trademark sense of humour. When asked why he had several razors brought to the care home in Suffolk where he spent his last year, he said “one for each hair”. The mark of a good joke from dad was the volume of the groans from those around him.

Dad was born in Cambridge, living in Hurst Park Avenue with his family of Suffolk origin. He was sent to The Perse after a surprise legacy arrived from great aunt Lucy in Australia, and never looked back. He loved The Perse, cycling to school and learning to love rugby in particular. He went on to Gonville & Caius, where he read Law, and only slightly regretted not having to leave home.

He married Marjorie Clarkson, a teacher, and they initially lived in Shelford, then moved to Suffolk for work, where dad became a country solicitor, having to step into the breach after the sudden death of junior solicitor Francis Wayman’s father at Wayman & Long. Dad’s desk was surrounded by piles of books and he doodled artistically on his blotting pad while working on cases. He had many faithful clients, and after leaving the firm at 65 carried on working from home until the age of 70.

Dad settled very well into Suffolk life, buying a medieval house, and learning about its history with my mother. He was an interesting source of knowledge about Suffolk history, and worked hard for the village of Stansfield, acting as parish councillor and instigating fundraising to save the church tower, which became a project involving many villagers and fundraising with copies of the prints of the church by John Piper.

Dad was also involved in all kinds of fundraising events, on one occasion cycling from London to Brighton. He had a great civic sense, and was a very kind and modest man. He and my mother always loved walking holidays, music and he was a tireless helper in the garden my mother loved so much. For many years he was also a keen wine maker, his wines feared by those who knew their potency.

in Memoriam

Peter N Betterman (1956) died 2019, aged 79 years

roy a carter (1949) died 3 April 2019, aged 87 years

David a Dilley (1948) died 18 May 2019, aged 87 years

robert J Milne (1949) died 12 June 2019, aged 87 years

raanan Sivan ‘ronald Silver’ (1939) died March 2019, aged 97 years

Gerald r Walker (1965) died September 2019, aged 73 years

this list was up-to-date when we went to print. Obituaries may be read in full on our website: perse.co.uk/obituaries