Report from the Bursar

Melbourne, Australia, in November 1973 found him working for the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works where he stayed until 1980, spending some of that time on the design of Sugarloaf Dam. In 1980 he returned to his native country, now Sri Lanka, to head up the Kotmale Hydroelectric Project for Sir William Halcrow again.

On his return to Australia at the end of 1983, he set up Ranji Casinader and Associates Pty Ltd, Consulting Engineers. This was the most satisfying and rewarding part of his career. He worked as adviser, reviewer and team leader to UNDP, Asian Development Bank and various Asian government institutions and engineering companies for dams, hydro-electric and water supply projects from Western Samoa to Iran and parts in between, until 2010, when he eventually retired just a month short of his eightieth birthday.

He is much mourned by his children from his first marriage, his grandchildren Rosheen and Simon, and his second wife Jennifer.

Jennifer Casinader (Ranji’s widow)

Gwyn Arch MBE (1951)

Gwyn Arch was born in Southampton on Easter Sunday 1931, the son of an Anglican priest and a teacher. In his formative years he moved to Birmingham and, during the war, was evacuated to Ceredigion before settling in Suffolk, where he attended Ipswich School. There he learned to play the piano and began to compose music.

Following national service, he came up to Selwyn in 1951 to study English. He quickly became the pianist in the Cambridge University Jazz Band and started a dance band. He then went to Wadham College Oxford to study to be an English teacher and there too became the pianist for the jazz band and started composing music for university musical and theatre productions. It was also there that he met Jane, whom he married in 1957. They had two sons, David and Jonathan.

Gwyn’s first teaching job was at Rickmansworth Grammar School. Although an English teacher, he continued with his passion for music, running choirs and writing music for shows. In 1964 he became head of music at Bulmershe College of Education in Reading. There he formed the internationally successful Bulmershe Girls’ Choir and continued to promote music for schools, writing several cantatas which were televised and continue to be performed to this day. He also became the conductor of the South Chiltern Choral Society and started the Reading Male Voice Choir. Following retirement from Bulmershe in 1985, he formed the Central Berkshire Girls’ Choir. Gwyn’s choirs have raised thousands of pounds for different charities. To enhance the repertoire of these choirs, Gwyn started arranging songs for youth, girls, male voice and mixed voice choirs. More than 700 of his arrangements and compositions have been published over the last fifty years and are now performed by choirs from all over the world. Because of ill health he stopped conducting in 2014, but continued to arrange music for choirs right up to his death.

Gwyn used his energy and enthusiasm to inspire music-making. He understood that making music was much more than following notes and words on a page. He knew that making music collectively is one of life’s great pleasures and that choral singing can bring diverse people together and enhance the lives of singers and listeners. In 2006 his contribution to youth and choral music was recognised with the award of an MBE.

Gwyn died peacefully at home on 6 June 2021, aged ninety.

Dr Jonathan Arch (SE 1982)

David Boston OBE (1951)

David Merrick Boston was born in 1931 in Salisbury to Jessie (née Ingham), a nurse, and Merrick, a GP. Evacuated in wartime, the family lived in Cape Town where David attended Rondebosch School. He came up to Selwyn in 1951 to read History. After graduating, he returned to South Africa on a postgraduate scholarship but, appalled by the apartheid regime, soon returned to the UK.

David’s appointment as Keeper of Ethnology at Liverpool Museum in 1956 launched an outstanding career. Among objects retrieved from wartime storage, he found a rare seventeenth-century Benin head. Publicity about the bronze, which became one of the museum’s star objects, led to his meeting Catharine Parrinder, who worked for the British Council. After marriage in 1962, they moved to London for David’s appointment as Assistant Keeper of New World Archaeology and Ethnography at the British Museum. In 1965, David became Director of the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, which he would lead until his retirement in 1993.

The Horniman, which originated in the ever-expanding personal collection and the family home of the millionaire tea importer, Frederick Horniman, had moved to its current purpose-built setting in 1901. David would extend the scope of the museum’s already-remarkable ethnographical and natural history holdings. He was, according to Michael Houlihan, his successor as Director, ‘the curator’s curator – a catalyst, a researcher, a lobbyist, a storyteller, an enquirer’. Respectful of the cultures of indigenous societies, he brought in craftspeople from all over the world to demonstrate their skills. Notable acquisitions included a sand painting by Fred Stevens, a Navajo artist and medicine man and a spectacular 20ft-high red cedar totem pole, carved in 1985 by Nathan Jackson, a Tlingit Alaskan. He acquired from the family of the early music pioneer, Arnold Dolmetsch’s collection of 131 instruments, including Dolmetsch’s first harpsichord, made at William Morris’s suggestion for the 1896 Arts & Crafts Exhibition.

David saved from dereliction the magnificent Victorian conservatory from the Horniman family home, erecting it in the museum’s gardens. Houlihan suggests that David also probably saved the museum itself. Certainly he secured its future. Early on, he had organised storage for the bulk of the collection to allow for temporary exhibitions and teaching at the main site. When, in 1985, the abolition of the Greater London Council threatened the museum’s funding, David’s imaginative educational provision, which had welcomed generations of local schoolchildren, proved persuasive in his lobbying for direct government support.

Appointed OBE in 1976, David was twice vice-president of the Royal Anthropological Institute and served on the committee of the International Council of Museums. After retirement he took the tenancy of Quebec House in Westerham, the childhood home of General James Wolfe. He also organised conservation work in

Westerham’s medieval church and on the war memorial. Family holidays, usually to places he was researching, had included train journeys across Europe and an expedition from Canada to South America. In retirement he and Catharine continued their adventurous travel and, into his last months, he was still planning new trips.

David died of cancer on 13 March 2021. He is survived by Catharine, their children, Janet, Peter and Andrea, and grandson, Liam.

Peter Royle (1952)

Peter Arthur Royle came up to Selwyn from Stockport Grammar School to read Theology but quickly, as he claimed, ‘the music took over’. He graduated in 1955 and took his MA in 1957. I do not know much about his time at Cambridge but realise it was a formative, important and enjoyable part of his life. His subsequent musical compositions suggest he was locked into the musical styles of that period of the 1950s. He sang in the Selwyn Chapel choir and was secretary of Cambridge University Musical Society for some of his time at Cambridge.

He outlived most of the Cambridge musical contemporaries with whom he had contact and some of whom we met from time to time over the years. He was very proud of being addressed by Vaughan Williams as ‘a noble horn’ during a performance of Pilgrim’s Progress in 1954 with Dennis Arundell. He was a horn player of some ability but rejected advice to consider life as a professional player and spent his entire career as head of music in various secondary schools throughout the country. He was not ambitious, preferring to employ his wide-ranging skills in a variety of educational contexts.

He readily composed music for the various school ensembles he found himself conducting and he enjoyed teaching French, Latin and RE. Latterly, as head of sixthform studies, his personal skills were put to use in guiding and supporting students towards appropriate university courses and, at Blackburn College, in supporting lessable students from many backgrounds to acquire the study and language skills required for their various goals. (To this end he learned Urdu.) He was a lifetime lover of the countryside and the hills and spent many hours walking in the Peak District, the Lakeland fells and some Scottish peaks. He climbed Scafell Pike for his eightieth birthday.

His commitment to his Christian faith and his love of the liturgy and its music were always with him. He spent brief periods as a lay clerk in Blackburn Cathedral under John Bertalot, and Hereford Cathedral under Dr Melville Cooke. He was a lifelong pacifist. We had a long and happy marriage and he conscientiously supported our two sons to achieve academic excellence in their chosen careers. He was a kind and loving family man despite his eccentric quirks and sometimes introverted demeanour.

His musical compositions and other writings give an insight into a deep-thinking, sensitive and complex person. He wrote at night and made little noise about his compositions, which I have now rescued from a rusty filing cabinet in the garage. His active and happy life was overshadowed at its end by Alzheimer’s disease. He was aware of the cruelty of this disease and until his final year fought bravely for seven years to understand and live with it. He died on 16 August 2020. His brain was donated to dementia research according to his wishes and he had a woodland burial at Corscombe in Dorset.

Jennifer Royle (Peter’s widow)

The Reverend Canon William Andrew (1953)

William Hugh Andrew (Bill) was born and raised in Cornwall, initially being home schooled by his mother before studying for his School and Higher Certificates at Blundell’s School in Tiverton. Before coming up to Selwyn to read Geography in 1953, Bill had decided that he wanted to follow his faith into ministry with the Church of England and so, having graduated, he moved to Ridley Hall to complete his training for holy orders.

Bill was ordained at Guildford Cathedral in 1958. He started his path in the ministry at St Mary’s, Woking, where he met and married his wife Mary in 1960. They moved to The Good Shepherd Church in Farnborough in 1961, the daughter church of St Peter’s. This was Bill’s first chance to lead his own church, developing his leadership style based on a Bible-based ministry. In the following years, their children Sarah and Stephen were born and then, as a family, they moved in 1964 to St Paul’s, Shanklin, and lived on the Isle of Wight for the next seven years. In 1971 Bill moved to St Mary’s, Weymouth. It was during his time in Weymouth that Bill was elected by his peers to be one of the diocesan representatives to the General Synod, where he served two terms.

In 1976 Bill was appointed vicar of St John’s, Parkstone, a training parish with two curates and a daughter church. During this time he was made a canon of Salisbury Cathedral in recognition of his work in the various parishes as well as his contribution to the wider church community at the General Synod. Then Bill started to become involved with the religious programmes on BBC Radio Solent, initially as a contributor to their weekly magazine show but then, over time, he became a trainer/editor for the Thought of the Day output as well as producer for broadcasts of church services. The Bishop of Salisbury recognised his flair for broadcasting and, in 1982, asked Bill to move to St Mary’s, Alderbury, so that he could work at the BBC for two days a week alongside his parish work. In 1986 he was appointed Communications Director at the Bible Society. Whilst he was no longer working as a minister, he could often be found preaching at weekends on behalf of the Bible Society at various churches around the UK.

Bill retired in 1997 and then moved to Hordle in the New Forest, where he and Mary enjoyed retired life while being attached to All Saints, Hordle, and St Andrew’s, Tiptoe. Bill preached his last sermon in 2018 on the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination.

Bill passed away peacefully in August 2020, with his family knowing that whilst he had left his life with us, he has joined his God for eternity.

Steve Andrew (Bill’s son) PART FIVE