Letters, Poetry & New Releases 2023

Motorsport: A Family Tradition

The Mortimer family is one steeped in transport history. My father Charles Knight Mortimer (1927, D) attended Radley at the turn of the last century and, although the family had no motoring history, this is a profession that he chose to pursue. In the early 1930s motor racing had already been going for over twenty years and as the family lived in Dorking, only a short distance from the Brooklands racing track, my father decided that Brooklands was where he needed to be. He rented a small workshop at the track and very soon had bought himself his first racing motorcycle, a 175cc Fernihough-Jap, with which he started his two-wheel career.

This was, in fact, a very uncompetitive motorcycle and was the last belt driven bike ever raced at Brooklands. He soon progressed to Norton, AJS, and Brough Superior motorcycles, gaining the coveted Gold Star awards given to any rider that could lap the banked outer circuit at over 100mph average, which he achieved on both 500cc and 1000cc machines. In late 1937, my father decided that he had gone as far as he could go on motorcycles at Brooklands and started racing cars until the outbreak of war in 1939 curtailed his activities.

Brooklands was the headquarters of the aeroplane makers Vickers-Armstrong and, in the immediate pre-war era, this was where he met my mother Jean Mary Summers, 10 years his junior. Her father, my maternal grandfather, was Capt. Joseph ‘Mutt’ Summers, the famous chief test pilot for Vickers. He had done the first flight of the world-renowned Spitfire aeroplane from Southampton in 1935. Mutt was also great friends with Barnes Wallis of the Bouncing Bomb fame and, during WW2, it was Mutt who did all the test flights with the early prototype bombs, dropping them from a Wellington bomber at Chesil in Dorset. Mutt is portrayed in the Dam Busters movie by actor Patrick Barr (himself an OR, 1922, C*).

After the war my grandfather continued his career in aviation and performed the first flights of the Vickers Viscount and Valiant commercial aircraft amongst others and was awarded the CBE for his work in aviation. He is also in the Guinness Book of Records as the pilot achieving a record 54 first flights.

Both Mum and Dad raced cars in the early 1950s, so one of my earliest memories is sitting on a pit counter and watching them racing at Goodwood. Therefore, it was inevitable that when I left school I would take up racing which I did shortly after my 16th birthday in 1965. Fortunately, I had a natural talent for the sport which I had inherited from my parents and by 1969 I was British Champion in the 125cc class. In 1970 I committed to a full season of world championship racing riding 250cc and 350cc privately entered Yamahas and was picked up by the Yamaha factory in 1971. My first Isle of Man TT win came that same year followed by a further seven wins on the Island over the next decade. Although I failed to win a world championship, I was fortunate enough to finish runner up in the 125cc class in 1972 and was classified 3rd in the 125cc and 350cc classes in 1973 and 1976. I am also lucky enough to be in the Guinness Book of Records as the only rider ever to have won races counting towards the world championship in the 125cc, 250cc, 350cc, 500cc and 750cc categories, a record never to be beaten as the Moto GP World Championship only has three classes in the modern era.

My father passed away in 1996 aged 83 having written five books on motoring, motor racing, motorcycle racing, motor yachting and book collecting. I retired from racing after 15 years in 1980, and built up the biggest specialist motorcycle transport businesses in the UK which I sold three years ago. My retirement years have seen me return to my real passion in life and I am now putting back into the sport that has offered me such a great life. I currently run a motorcycle racing school for children aged 8-14 (including, coincidently, the son of a Radley staff member) in the UK and Spain, alongside a modern semi-retired racing professional Danny Webb.

* For more about actor Patrick Barr, see p.42 Chas Mortimer, son of Charles Knight Mortimer (1927, D)

Wartime Radley

I have been invited by the editor to write a short account of Radley in Wartime. My main memory is that Radley just went on as usual, as a pretty self-contained community. That is true, as a school has a regular timetable pattern of lessons, games, mealtimes and, in Radley’s case, Chapel. What changed was the world around it.

In 1939, when I joined, Great Britain was the unchallenged major power in the world. We ran an Empire covering some 40% of the world’s population and had no great competitors. Germany had been disarmed after WWI, Russia had had a revolution and lost a small war with Finland, America had retreated into isolation, and France had not fully recovered from occupation in WWI, and was divided politically.

While Germany under Hitler had broken many of the 1919 peace settlement rules, very few people realised the extent of their ambitions and powers. The first six months of the war was called the ‘phoney war’ and the joint power of Britain and France was expected to lead to a re-run of 1914. All this was cruelly shattered in 1940, when Britain found herself isolated and without allies to face Germany, which had been joined by Italy and had formed an alliance with Russia. Britain was alone, but with its highly supportive Empire.

Clearly, many Radleians would be required to join in battle, and Eastbourne College was evacuated from the Channel coast to Radley. Curiously, this had little effect on Radley and the only obvious effect was their occupation of Smale’s Social (H) and some alterations to meal and class times. Lessons were not shared and they were seen by us juniors as a different tribe, although they came from a similar social background. We called them the Bogs.

The OTC (CCF) became more important and we all soon knew how to take a Sten gun to bits and reassemble it. Dickie Waye was the CO and ran it very well. Senior boys joined the Home Guard and Radley came onto a wartime footing.

But the essentials did not alter. We still had cold baths and early morning school before breakfast, and corporal punishment continued. I am afraid I felt myself a little sissy as I was never beaten; we all rather admired young Forster Browne who got a Pup’s beating for breaking the 2nd XI pavilion windows with a catapult. Boys were kept firmly in their places in those days. One of my happier memories was the Chapel singing and the Social Orchestra competition. I discovered that, as the only instrument player, I was the whole of Hope’s Social orchestra, and I had to perform solo. So, I learned a Bach sonata by heart and stood up all alone to play. This was my musical making; I went on to win the Wharton Cup for Piano and became a competent flautist. For this, many thanks to Ronald Dussek, the Precentor, and ‘the Goat’, Mr Goater the bandmaster, who taught wind instruments.

One must not omit the Dons’ Plays and I still recall seeing Joe Eason and ‘Tiny’ Southam, two highly respected Social Tutors, doing a joint knees-up act to the song I must go to Moscow, accompanied by a very catchy tune by Ceddy HammondChambers-Borgnis. I also remember summer holidays in camps bringing in the harvest and how heavy a corn stook was when heaving it onto a horse-drawn trailer. Petrol was severely rationed.

But I suppose my most important memory of the time was my friendship with Richard Ohlenschlager (1939, E) and John Knox (1939, E). We were all school prefects together and shared two studies – one for work and one for social. Along with John Talbot (1939, G), we all went to Oxford together to volunteer to join the Royal Artillery on call up, literally took the King’s shilling; we remained friends for the rest of our lives. For that, we all had to thank Vyvyan Hope, our Social Tutor, who guided us on our way. He was the most efficient man I ever met and the man to whom Radley owes much of its present prosperity by the timely instigation of the Land Appeal, which he pursued with his customary energy, ensuring the continuation of Radley’s green belt, as envisaged by its Founders.

It was all a long time ago.

James Gunn, OBE (1939, E)

Of Battledress and Blackberries

This ancient photograph has a story behind it. It shows the inspection of Radley College Combined Cadet Force by General ‘Legs’ Lathbury in the summer of 1965. The Air Force Section stands nearest to the camera and the Totally Terrifying flight sergeant Steve Fairbairn is at the far right of the picture. Walking behind the general is Warden Milligan and the officer in battledress is Ranulph ‘Dickers’ Waye who taught me – or tried to teach me –most of the German that I know.

Dickers was known for his disparaging diatribes: “Fairbairn, you have less brains than a flea!” or “Fairbairn, you are quite transparent; I can see straight through you like a plate-glass window!” I especially remember an early morning class when he asked me cryptically, “Eeeh, Fairbairn, do you like blackberries?” Suspecting that this unusual question belied a prickly remark, I mumbled something to the affirmative, and Dickers promptly replied, “Well, there’s no need to come into my class looking as if you have just been crawling backwards through a bramble-bush!” It turned out that I had merely forgotten to brush my hair.

I really got on quite well with Dickers and ended up winning the Sixth Form German Prize, so he must have been doing something right. Prizes were books of one’s own choice and I remember the Warden’s raised eyebrows when he presented me with my book and noticed that my German prize was a book on Art History that I had found in Blackwell’s in Oxford a few days previously.

So much for German, but for the last fifty-odd years it has mostly been Art – as a profession – and Icelandic – for everyday communication –which all goes to show that you never know your luck!

Stephen Fairbairn (1961, E)

Tragedy at RAF Swanton Morley

In August 1965, five Radleians from CCF RAF section, together with 25 or so boys from other schools, went to a gliding camp for a week at RAF Swanton Morley, in Norfolk. We should have had the time of our lives, and mainly, we did.

But on 18th August, Jonathan Spencer flew into the ground and was killed. It is believed that Jon stalled the glider at a low altitude whilst approaching to land. Those old gliders required a rather unnaturally steep angle when landing, I think he was a bit low and was trying to clear the various obstacles near the edge of the airfield by flattening out his glide … this leads to a stall in fairly short order and no height to recover. I had flown that aircraft immediately before Jonathan, and I have never forgotten that.

I am not quite sure how we all carried on at the time. But we did. Things were very different then. No counsellors. Nobody sued anyone. I don’t even remember a policeman coming to put striped tape around the scene.

It didn’t cause me or anyone I was aware of, to change their attitude to the flying side of the CCF. Indeed, I went into the airline business in Operations Management as a career, albeit in a non-flying capacity. I spent most of my time in Bahrain and Dubai with Gulf Air and Emirates.

It was a difficult thing to see. I can recall it vividly. It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered the location of his grave, purely by chance. I have a friend who lives in Norfolk, and he came across his grave in the churchyard at Swanton Morley, in the small section reserved for RAF Servicemen. I have found it most moving to see this. I think it incredibly brave of his parents to bury their only son at that location, so far away from his home.

Richard Bailey (1962, D)

The Value of Early Encouragement

During the first week of Autumn term 1962 the playing fields were too wet to use and other forms of exercise than rugger had to be chosen. As a new boy I was assigned to Midgets under the Don-in-charge, Morris Wyles. We were divided into ‘forwards’ and ‘three quarters’ and sent on a cross-country run. Coming through Memorial Arch to finish the run I was amazed to discover that I was the first forward home and was presented with a box of Black Magic chocolates by Morris. This was the first competition that I had ever won in my life, and what a sweet surprise for my first week at Radley!

I must also have shown some ability in the gym because the physical training instructor told me that he was looking for a Captain of the Gym Team for 1966, four years away. But much as I enjoyed gymnastics, I wanted to be a wet-bob.

My big handicap for rowing was that I was too small and was destined to become a cox, but I wanted to row! I also believed that coxing would ruin my voice. Although I never exceeded 10 stone 2 pounds whilst at school, I still won the sculling Head of the River in 1966 and rowed bow in Hedsor 1 that year.

By protecting my voice I was chosen to sing the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City at the opening of the Carol Service in 1962, and went on to win the Ferguson singing Prize for Trebles in 1963. That would not have happened without the coaching of Richard Deakin who set Rupert Brooke’s poem The Soldier to music for me and selflessly entered the composers name as ‘Anon’. My voice broke shortly after this and I would go on to sing the Three Kings solo at the Carol Services in 1965 and 1966.

Somewhere in between all the above I found time to study, but more on that another time.

I continued to love long distance running but it took me another 35 years before completing a full Marathon. From the age of 50 I completed a total of five: Houston, London (twice), Amsterdam, and Rotterdam (where I achieved my personal best marathon time of 3h 40m). My distances came down over the years and I was still competing in 5k races right up until last year, age 73, when I needed a new hip. Now my doctor has forbidden any further running, but there’s still speed-walking and cycling … John Gammage (1962, A)

Starehe Boys Centre, Nairobi

Readers might be interested in a Radley success story that originated some 50 years ago with Dennis Silk’s interest in a charitably-funded Kenyan school based in the slums of Nairobi, the culmination of which has come to light on a recent visit of mine to Kenya.

I am not clear as to how Dennis’s contact with Starehe Boys Centre came about, but he made the school the focus of a Radley fundraising effort in the mid-seventies. I recall a 30 mile ‘whole school’ sponsored walk along the Ridgeway as part of the effort, and Richard Morgan (my Social Tutor) encouraged C Social to sponsor a pupil, Philip Godana, through a year at Starehe, at a cost of £90.

This link with Starehe sparked in me an interest in the Kenyan school and I applied to Starehe to become a volunteer teacher for the year between my leaving Radley and starting my degree course. I travelled out to Kenya in September 1977, to work at Starehe, and met Philip Godana. A bright and charming 16-year-old.

Many years later it crossed my mind that it might be interesting to find out how Philip had fared after leaving Starehe, to see if his enhanced education had been an effective game changer for a young Kenyan from a one-parent family with a minimal income. I had no contact address but that of the school, and an e-mail message to Starehe in 2005 went unanswered for many, many months. Finally a PO Box number for Philip’s primary school in Northern Kenya was forthcoming and I wrote, hoping that my letter would be forwarded to reach him. It did.

Philip had become a teacher and then an MP in the Kenyan Government, for the pro-democracy Orange Democratic

Movement party. Married, and with four children, he was working tirelessly for the people of his home area, Moyale, supporting their ancient culture and heritage, which was being rapidly eroded by the then current political practices.

In 2011, a few years after making contact with Philip, I made one of my regular trips to Kenya, and planned to meet up with him. Unfortunately, we found ourselves to have been travelling, both on the very basic and somewhat dangerous public transport of the day, in opposite directions, on the same road and at the same time, missing each other’s mobile phone calls en route. A rendezvous was therefore impossible as I was leaving the country the following day.

Three years later he was killed in a robbery at his Nairobi home, most probably a politically motivated murder. His mother, wife and children all survived the robbery attack.

The ‘success’ of this narrative, despite Philip’s death, lies in his four children, two of whom I met along with his widow in October 2022, on my most recent return to Kenya.

His eldest daughter, Orge, who works, with a very clear and determined ambition, in the finance department of a large coffee house chain, and Godana, his son (a recently qualified lawyer), were inspiring examples of what an education can do. Twin daughters Bala, a lawyer based in The Hague, and Balafu, a nurse with Medecins Sans Frontieres for some years and now working in hospitals in the USA, were unable to meet with me, for obvious geographical reasons, but they are clearly equally as successful as their siblings.

The letter that I received from Philip in 2007 stressed his struggles to provide a good education for his children, at a time in his working life when his income was irregular. I’m sure his education at Starehe gave him so much more than the national educational provision in Kenya at the time would have done, and he passed on to his children the benefits that he himself had gained at school.

On a taxi journey during this recent trip of mine to Kenya, I talked with my driver of this story of Philip and his education at Starehe Boys Centre. Remarkably, the driver’s elder brother had also been funded through Starehe and, as a result through securing a good job, had been able to provide the money to pay the fees for his younger sibling, the taxi driver, to attend his local school (as opposed to not being able to attend at all). The taxi driver refused to accept my fare, in gratitude for the help that C Social had provided for a young Kenyan, all those years ago.

Mike Woodhouse (1972, C)

Jeremy Holt (1945, E) – OR, don, artist

A tribute by Duncan Forbes (1960, B)

The name and memory of Jeremy Holt is very much present in my mind because for the first time ever I have seen a painting attributed to him for sale at auction. It’s at Burstow and Hewett in Battle, Sussex, and is described as an oil on canvas, boat on a lake, 20" x 18", framed. Estimate £100 -150.

The painting bears the studio stamp of Jeremy Holt, 1965, and I’m told over the phone that it bears the comment in pencil ‘pond near Bampton’. That is where he lived and had his home and studio because I remember him taking us there one summer afternoon in his open-topped Mercedes in what must have been the summer of 1964.

J.J.Holt. He taught us Art in our first year at Radley and, at the time, I could not imagine a more brilliant and suave individual. I remember him explaining perspective lucidly and on another occasion he showed us copies of The Studio magazine with illustrations of work by Alan Reynolds and the challenging canvases slashed by Lucio Fontana. He had an end of term art quiz for which the prize was ‘a tanner’: sixpence, and to my surprise I won it.

Later, he showed us some colour photographs of the society portraits he had completed in America and I was astonished by his versatility and verisimilitude. Lucky those wealthy and perceptive enough to be painted by him. I did not know then that he had trained at Chelsea and Camberwell. There was a picture of him in games kit hanging in the corridor in E Social. An adolescent, black and white, snub-nosed J.J.Holt in what must have been the late 1940s. In 1947 when I was born, he must have been sixteen or so.

Insouciant, charming, talented, casually brilliant and smooth, he stepped onto the stage during a staff entertainment known as the Dons’ Plays in a white suit with a guitar to a resounding cheer and he sang ... well, what does memory imagine he sang? Little Bitty Tear? No. Big Rock Candy Mountains by Burl Ives (‘where they hung the jerk/ who invented work’), and Foggy Foggy Dew, or was it Puff the Magic Dragon? He seemed utterly nonchalant and totally in command of his audience. It was he who explained to me what the terms ‘toffee-nosed’ and ‘chocolate box’ meant.

I remember him in the corrugated-iron, redpainted old art-school which needed a paraffin heater in winter. He was a tall man with engaging grey eyes, a retroussé nose and a genial grin. In the disused Fives Courts, he painted a portrait of the Sub-Warden, the Reverend Charles Neate, who was nick-named rather cruelly ChromeDome for his polished bald head. It seemed an astonishing likeness to me and it was exhilarating to watch the work of Jeremy Holt in progress.

I remember him saying to me once, ‘How can we get you to spend all your time on this?’ He was referring to art and the remark meant much to me, even though I have spent so much more of my time on the word.

He had a kind wife and, if I remember rightly, two young children in that house in Bampton. I think he left schoolteaching in the summer of 1964 to concentrate on his own work and the next I heard he had died in a car crash sometime in 1965, during the summer of my last year at school.

Too many years later, I wrote a couple of poems which tried to recapture what Jeremy Holt had meant to me, both of them inadequate as memorials to a very special person who died long before he could achieve his full potential. One day I hope there will be a retrospective and memorial exhibition to commemorate his unfulfilled talent. It interests me that Cobbold & Judd Fine Art, the one gallery currently advertising some of his work for sale, describes him as follows:

Jeremy was an exceptional draughtsman. His landscapes show a mastery of colour and a love and understanding of the countryside both in England and Spain. Born in 1931, he studied at Chelsea and Camberwell, becoming the art master at Radley College. He enjoyed a growing reputation at home and in the USA before his untimely death in 1965.

Art School

With a red corrugated iron roof and a paraffin stove, it contained pot plants and a battered kettle suitable for still lifes, a paint-bespattered basin and a pungent studio smell. Sometimes a radio played –or is that an afterthought and memory of elsewhere? –but it might well have done beside the Art School skull. Various nicknames it had, that archetypal head. We wondered whose it was and where it might be from. Artist and teacher both, Jeremy Holt couldn’t tell (alas now also dead, killed in his charming prime in a car-crash near his home). It had two brass hinges on and the cranium lifted off to reveal the receptacle or pit where brain would have been: small with a yellow smell. We did all the usual things like Hamlet imitations and made our morbid jokes till we were set to draw the holes where the eyes had seen and register the dark constructions of the bone so that the following week when we drew Robert Grange, cheerful smiling Bob who volunteered to pose, we could also understand the skull beneath the face and hold it in our minds.

Jeremy Holt

Smooth was the word people used and smooth he was without doubt in his white American suit, especially with the guitar, posh voice and casual wit.

The family money came from shipping and brewing though it seemed appropriate that he should teach us art and be skilled in portraiture. Brilliant I realise now.

Once he painted at speed over a pupil’s oil some green geranium leaves and when not knowing whose I criticised the style as slick and superficial he readily agreed with a knowing look and smile.

He also took us once to his Bampton studio before the seat-belt days in the open-top Mercedes in which he was later killed, killed in his charming prime.

And whom did he leave behind? A widow and his children. She too I remember as kind and beautiful in a restrained and very English way.

There were some paintings too, gentle Thames valley scenes of migrant birds in flight and flocks of starlings against soft watermeadow skies.

I realise that if he were still alive today Jeremy Holt would now be an elderly painter of over 90. As it is, he is arrested in the memory as a brilliantly talented individual in his elegant, humorous and youthful prime.

Neither poem is adequate to what I wanted to say, but they bring memories back for me even if they do not create them for others.

And now that I look at it again, with hindsight, the tranquil lake scene seems to have greater depths. The sunlight on the surface is counterbalanced by darkness and reflected shadows, while the small and solitary figure in the frail boat looks humanly vulnerable but can also be re-read as the ferryman Charon on the River Styx, or on a lake near Bampton.

Duncan Forbes (1960, B)