OT Magazine 2019

OT Magazine APRIL 2019

VOLUME 01

Meet the Headmaster

The Q&A: Lord Lisvane

OTs in Science

Get to know Tonbridge's new Headmaster, James Priory and learn about his vision for the school.

George Baker (WH5) discusses the state of British Politics with the Lord Lisvane KCB DL (SH 63-68)

What can I do with my science degree? We hear from 9 OTs in some surprising sectors

INTRODUCING: THE BARTON SCIENCE CENTRE

Step inside our new, state-of-the-art facilities

14

53

46

17

25

07

30

CONTENTS From the Chalk Face

30

07

Step Inside the Barton Science Centre

44

Professional Networking & Tonbridge Connect

10

Scientists Remembered

46

The OT Reading List

14

Meet Our New Headmaster

50

The Art of Beer

17

Q&A: Lord Lisvane

53

A Life of Exploration

21

100 Years of Remembrance

56

Shutter Speed

24

Then & Now: WW2 Pillbox

60

Make an Event of Any Occasion

25

How I Survived SAS: Who Dares Wins

62

OT societies

28

The Tennant Lecture Series

71

Obituaries

04

2

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

In Pursuit of Tonbridge's Scientists

EDITORIAL T OT News Magazine Tonbridge Society Tonbridge School Tonbridge, TN9 1JP +44 (0)1732 304253

Director Andy Whittall andrew.whittall@tonbridge-school.org Design & Editing Katerina Ward katerina.ward@tonbridge-school.org OT Relations Manager Catherine Harmer catherine.harmer@tonbridge-school.org

he Lent Term has been electric at Tonbridge School. In January, the Barton Science Centre opened its doors to teaching and learning, and its impact on school life has been immediate.

Walking around the building, you are more likely to see teachers and students building a Heath Robinson machine side-by-side than you are to see a teacher lecturing at the front of a class in block rows. Best of all has been the boys’ feedback: “Overall it has just made lessons more exciting.”

In March, we became host to NASA astronauts Dr Michael Foale and Dr Steve Swanson who, together with a team of experts, ran a week-long competition for local schools inspired by NASA's own development programme. The week culminated in the official opening of the Barton Science Centre, which brought together nearly 200 guests and ended with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque amid a shower of confetti.

It wouldn’t be right, therefore, to pick any other theme but science for this edition. Kicking things off, From The Chalk Face comes to you via Head of Physics, Phil Deakin. We also pay tribute to Tonbridge’s distinguished scientific history,

looking back through our alumni and highlighting some of the incredible OT scientists who have been commemorated in the new building, as well as hearing from recent OTs who have pursued a scientific career.

And now for the elephant in the room. Brexit. We’re told that this country has had enough of experts…

But how could we possibly experience a year like this without seeking the expertise of OTS President and former Clerk of the House of Commons, Lord Lisvane?

George Baker’s (WH5) interview with him in the aftermath of March’s Brexit votes is not to be missed.

Finally, you may have noticed a shift in style to your alumni magazine. The new-look OT Magazine better supports the kind of storytelling we’re bringing you in order to offer a well-rounded picture of the lives of OTs across the world, focusing on both the professional and the personal. We hope you like where we’re taking it.

As ever, thank you to the many Old Tonbridgians that contributed. If you would like to share a story for a future edition, or our E-newsletter, please do get in touch.

OT Secretary John Gibbs ots@tonbridge-school.org

APRIL 2019

3

FROM THE CHALK FACE 4

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

'ENRICH' BY PHIL DEAKIN, HEAD OF PHYSICS

B ... few of us were allowed to fire rockets thousands of feet into the air at several hundred miles per hour.

eing asked to write From The Chalk Face is a sufficiently daunting task that one naturally looks at past editions to contemplate what to write for this year’s article. Julian Dobson’s 2018 article ended with the word ‘enrich' and it seems only appropriate to pick up the baton where he left off.

The phrase ‘Academic Enrichment’ has recently become rather fashionable in educational circles. It has sadly been hijacked by many schools who claim that a smattering of poorly attended lectures, in some way enhance the quality of their students’ education. Such false attributions are disappointing as they belittle a concept that can really transform a child’s educational experience.

So what is good academic enrichment? The Oxford English Dictionary provides a useful definition for the word enrichment; “…the action of improving or enhancing the quality or value of something…” Good academic enrichment must therefore be a set of opportunities which enhance the quality of a student’s academic experience. The more valuable the enrichment, the more students it will impact, and to a greater extent. This is the philosophy behind an enrichment programme that we have developed in the Physics department over the last few years.

Beyond delivering interesting, well-structured lessons, what sets us apart from other schools and makes the experience worth the considerable school fees?

When casting minds back to our own schooldays, how many of us can say we were allowed to design and build an intricate ‘safe’ to be tested by the best 17-year-old minds across the country? Ten Tonbridgians did just that last year, subsequently travelling to Israel to represent the UK in an international safe-cracking competition. Similarly, few of us were allowed to fire rockets thousands of feet into the air at several hundred miles per hour, again winning a national competition to represent the UK at the Farnborough Airshow. And I was certainly never given the opportunity to present strategic advice to the Head of the RAF, again as part of a UK-wide competition comprising a week’s all-expenses-paid course at Cranfield University.

But it is not all about competition. If you walk through the Physics corridors in the graveyard slot that is ‘after games’, you are less likely to see a detention than an optional class covering special relativity or gas-turbine engine design. Neither are needed for any public examination, but students want to learn more to feed their academic curiosity. Do not be surprised if there is not a member of staff present as these are, increasingly, run and delivered by students.

Students also often escape from the Tonbridge bubble, taking part in trips to the likes of the Diamond Light-Source, Rolls-Royce Defence Aerospace, a nuclear power-station, and indoor sky-diving, to name a few. And how can we tell that ➻

APRIL 2019

5

Only attending the lessons is like opening a beer and just looking at it. Sure, you've made a start, but you're missing the point...

our enrichment programme is not just for the motivated few? Every L6th Physicist conducts his own six-week independent investigation, solely for his own academic interest; they have covered every topic from the spin of basketballs to the flow of water from empty wine bottles (selflessly provided by the staff!).

The experience of today’s students therefore goes far beyond the ‘chalk and talk’ lectures that many of us experienced as the basis of our academic education. Whilst two blackboards have been included in the design of Barton Science Centre’s Physics department (as a nod to our past), the inclusion of a dedicated project lab and ‘always-open’ flexible classrooms, are features more focused on the new style of education current Tonbridgians receive.

So why should we embrace such an extensive Academic Enrichment programme? The cynics might say it is for university applications. Top universities stopped caring about whether an applicant could throw a rugby ball or take a wicket some time ago. It is also now true that they have 6

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

moved beyond just looking at exam results, expecting top grades as the norm. Universities are therefore increasingly looking for something extra, and good academic enrichment certainly offers that differentiation.

A larger motivation, however, is that it helps students to prepare for later life and helps them get a flavour of what they might explore in the future. An ex-student I taught five years ago recently got in touch to say that his decision to join a design consultancy post-graduation, stemmed directly from some of the opportunities he was offered when in the Sixth Form.

Designing and building a Heath Robinson machine from scratch will certainly teach students far more about the importance of ‘modular handover’ in automated systems, than any exam-focused lecture I could give on Kepler’s three laws.

But a fundamental reason for running such an enrichment programme is far less obvious on paper, but self-evident when witnessed first-hand. It’s fun. Very fun. And intellectually challenging. Did you think I was referring to the students?

Sorry, I meant for the staff… We also get

to explore our subject beyond exam specifications, we get to tour amazing facilities, compete alongside our students in online competitions, conduct experiments that we cannot justify in a class-setting, and work in student-staff teams to try to break world-records on the school playing fields. It is a unique role and a reason why we are very privileged; we must surely have one of the best jobs available in today’s job market. Whenever I am entering another set of results into a spreadsheet or marking a Novi’s slightly rushed prep, I know it will not be long before I can set off a liquid nitrogen explosion as a demonstration of pressure variation with temperature. Who would not want that as their day job?

I will leave you with a simple quote that is displayed in the new Physics Department, and which I repeat to my Sixth Form students each year as a reminder of the importance of academic enrichment in today’s Physics education.

“Only attending the lessons is like opening a beer and just looking at it.

Sure, you’ve made a start, but you’re missing the point…” ●

Step inside

THE BARTON SCIENCE CENTRE

APRIL 2019

7

Left: Headmasters Kemp, Everett, Haynes, Hammond and Priory stand behind the Barton Science Centre's commemorative plaque. Centre: View of the Chapel from a Laboratory.

Right: NASA astronauts Dr Michael Foale and Dr Steve Swanson unveil the plaque

T

he Barton Science Centre opened in January, with boys using its state-of-the-art facilities from the start of the Lent Term.

Named after distinguished British organic chemist Sir Derek Barton, a former pupil of the school, and a Nobel Prize winner 50 years ago, the spectacular, three-storey building places science and technology at the very heart of school life.

One of the most ambitious developments to happen at the school since its first science building was constructed in 1887, the Barton Science Centre blends new classrooms, laboratories and latest technology with many of the architectural features from the original Victorian building.

Designed to stimulate interest and curiosity about all the sciences – Physics, Chemistry and Biology – the centre

8

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

includes an interactive periodic table, a TV wall, its own bee hive, a roof garden [as pictured on the magazine's cover page], a greenhouse and a library, to name just a few of its new features.

The school’s Head of Science, Bill Burnett, described the Barton Science Centre as "striking, innovative and simply fun to be a part of.” He added: “It’s a world-class environment for innovative teaching and learning, where we decided that no two rooms would be the same.

“Some classrooms, for instance, have a very flexible layout with chairs and desks, and so the teacher might sometimes be in the centre of the room, to encourage discussions. Other rooms are set up for independent study and experiments. Even the stairs and walls are adorned with scientific symbols and names, and they too are part of the learning experience.”

Designed to foster even greater curiosity about science, and to stimulate cross-curricular activity, the centre will also have a wider public benefit. It will enable the school to enhance its outreach programmes, such as the ‘Science for Schools’ days for local pupils, host public lectures, and become a regional hub for the whole community.

The Science for Schools programme runs on Wednesday afternoons: many primary school children come to the Tonbridge labs, where they grow crystals, carry out mini-experiments, build parachutes, learn about maggots and generally have fun with science.

The school is also running an exciting programme of science activities for boys, showcasing the potential of the new building. In March, Tonbridge became the first school in the UK to host ‘Mission Discovery’, a week-long course in which teams of pupils from local schools design

an experiment to be flown to, and tested on the International Space Station. This ground-breaking event was led by NASA astronauts, Dr Michael Foale and Dr Steve Swanson, alongside experts from King's College London and the International Space School Educational Trust (ISSET).

Dr Foale and Dr Swanson took centre stage during the official opening of the building on Saturday 23 March. The pair, who both served as commanders of the International Space Station, gave a short talk in which they recounted their experiences of going into space, and gave their impressions of the new science facility. “This is a centre which will inspire the next generation ... where students can start to have ideas, interests and dreams,” Dr Swanson said.

Dr Foale added: “You have ignited a fire here in Tonbridge for learning and discovery, and for achieving something special.”

APRIL 2019

9

SIR DEREK BARTON

CARL PANTIN FRS

JOHN GEORGE CHILDREN

Chemist

Zoologist

Scientist

NORMAN HEATLEY OBE

DAVID PYE

WILLIAM RIVERS

Biochemist

Engineer

Psychologist

(MH 1932-35)

(PS 1924-29)

(JH 1913-17)

(FH 1900-05)

(FH 1786-90)

(Day Boy 1877-80)

ERNEST BASIL VERNEY

CHARLES GEOFFREY GARRETT

BILL HAMILTON

Pharmacologist

Physicist

Evolutionary Biologist

SIR10ARTHUR MARSHALL OBE DL O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

BILL BROWN

COLIN PATTERSON

Engineer & Pilot

Scientist

Palaeontologist

(Day Boy 1910-13)

(HS 1918-22)

(JH 1938-43)

(Sc 1934-39)

(SH 1949-54)

(JH 1947-51)

SCIENTISTS REMEMBERED

in the Barton Science Centre

T

he original Tonbridge Science Centre was the first purpose-built school science building in the country. In an era when most schools thought science a suitable subject for those not gifted enough to study classics, Tonbridge was nothing short of revolutionary. The vision shown by the school and the governors paid off and Tonbridge has had a proud tradition of science at the highest level, ever since.

When looking back through our alumni, 1924-1954 would appear to mark a particularly ‘golden age’ for Tonbridge: thirty years in which four very significant scientists were educated here as boys; Norman Heatley OBE (PS 24-29), Sir Derek Barton (MH 32-35), Charles Geoffrey Garrett (JH 38-43) and Bill Hamilton (SH 49-54).

Their stories, covered over the next pages, have been a source of inspiration

for the school in the development of the new Barton Science Centre. They, alongside many other notable scientists, have been remembered in the naming of laboratories and libraries in the new science centre. We hope their memories will inspire further golden ages to come, not just at Tonbridge but in schools across the region.

Norman Heatley OBE (PS 24-29) Commemorated in the naming of the Heatley Library in Chemistry, in recognition of his vital role in the mass production of penicillin.

After Tonbridge, Norman went on to St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences, graduating in 1933. His doctoral research in Cambridge led to a PhD in 1936, and he then moved to the University of Oxford, where he became a fellow of Lincoln College and joined a team working under Howard

Florey that included Ernst Chain.

Alexander Fleming had first discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, but at that time believed it had little application. When Florey and his team recognised the potential of the discovery for combating bacterial infection, they faced the problem of how to manufacture penicillin in sufficient quantities to be of use. Heatley, although the junior member of the team, possessed a natural gift for ingenuity and invention. It was he who suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity, thus purifying the penicillin.

In order to conduct tests on human patients, even more of the drug had to be produced, and again it was Heatley who realised that the most effective vessel for this purpose was something like the porcelain bedpans in use at the Radcliffe Infirmary. These were in ➻

APRIL 2019

11

short supply because of the ongoing Second World War, so Heatley designed a modified version which was manufactured in the Potteries. With the help of these, the Oxford laboratory became the first penicillin factory, and subsequent tests on humans proved the efficacy of the new treatment. Even so, it was very difficult to produce enough for sustained treatment.

At the launch of the Barton Science Centre, Headmaster James Priory said: “I was lucky enough to know Norman when I became a student at Lincoln College Oxford. I was an English student and so, our conversations were rather more literary, I think it’s fair to say. He was a very kind and entirely unassuming man, but also clearly deeply proud of his work and he was delighted to have the opportunity to share it. He invited me back to his house once for tea, to show me the original notebooks he’d used, in which he’d sketched his work with Howard Florey, built on Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, and developing ways in which to purify and mass produce it. There’s no doubt that Norman’s work saved countless lives of servicemen in the latter years of the Second World War and has gone on of course to save many millions of lives since. What I didn’t dare admit to Norman, was that I was actually allergic to penicillin. Despite that, he has been one of my quiet heroes ever since.”

Sir Derek Barton (MH 32-35) Commemorated in the naming of the Barton Science Centre, in recognition of his Nobel Prize for the development of the concept of conformation and its application in Chemistry.

Whilst Norman Heatley was developing ways to mass produce penicillin towards the end of the Second World War, Derek Barton was working in military intelligence. Later, he took a

12

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

sabbatical in Harvard where he wrote a paper on conformational analysis, in which he shed light on the threedimensional geometric structure of complex molecules. It was for this ground-breaking insight that he became a Nobel Laureate in 1969.

Through his work on conformational analysis, Sir Derek Barton, as he later became known, was able to identify the geometry of various organic molecules; most famously, Cyclohexane. To celebrate this achievement, the school commissioned ‘Barton’s Chair’, a large-scale sculpture which now hangs in the central atrium of the new facility.

The sculpture, which is 8 billion times the life size of the Cyclohexane molecule, re-imagines its structure as a network of adult and child figures, evoking imagery of human connection and cooperation, and commemorating the words of eminent OT author, EM Forster; ‘Only Connect.’

Charles Geoffrey Garrett (JH 38-43) Commemorated in the naming of the the Garrett Laboratory in Physics, in recognition of his work as a laser and optical fibre pioneer.

Whilst Geoffrey was a boy in Judde House, Heatley’s work was just come to near-miraculous fruition. After studying Physics at Cambridge, Geoffrey moved to the United States where he joined the faculty at Harvard, later becoming director of AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Geoffrey was a pioneer in optical electronics, and a passionate advocate of optical fibre cables as the way of the future. He extended laser techniques to develop far infrared, and even helped to develop the prototype computer microchip. He was also a polymath; a lover of music, history and languages, which reflects one of the key inspirations behind the design and development of the Barton Science Centre.

NOTICES LOVE Cllr Rory Love has been appointed OBE in the New Year’s Honours List for public and political service.

(MH 73-77)

Bill Hamilton (SH 49-54) Commemorated in the naming of the Hamilton Laboratory in Biology, in recognition of his role as one of the most important evolutionary theorists of the 20th century.

Smythe House boy, Bill Hamilton, is internationally regarded as one of the great ecologists, and evolutionary biologists of his generation. His work is hugely influential in the work of scientists and writers such as Richard Dawkins.

In 1964, Hamilton accepted a teaching position at Imperial College, London, and published The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour, a paper that laid the foundation for population genetics studies of social behaviour. The key concept presented in this work was ‘inclusive fitness,’ a theory that later became known as ‘Hamilton’s Rule’.

Through this, Hamilton proposed that an organism’s genetic success is derived from cooperation and altruistic behaviour, as well as the consequences of social interaction. He demonstrated mathematically that it was possible for altruism to evolve as a trait as long as the benefits of altruistic acts fell on individuals that were genetically related to the donor. In other words, it would be advantageous for an animal to give an alarm call, despite placing itself in danger, to warn a group of relatives, since its relatives also carry copies of its genes. Through his rule, Hamilton predicted the conditions by which one individual would likely behave altruistically toward another.

Over the course of his career, Hamilton addressed other important theoretical problems related to the choice of mate and sexual reproduction. He also pioneered the use of computers in biology and computer simulation as a method of research and proof. ●

Top: The final Barton's Chair sculpture hanging in the atrium of the Barton Science Centre. Below: Sculptor, Briony Marshall creates a first draft of the model in wax, 1/3 of the size of the final sculpture.

CLARK On the 17 December 2018, to Oliver and his wife Amy, a son, Alexander George Clark.

(CH 95-00) GUMMER The engagement is announced between Felix John, younger son of Lord and Lady Deben of Winston, Suffolk and Clementine Mary, elder daughter of Mr Richard Vaughan of Goodrich, Herefordshire and Mrs Susan Vaughan of Glewstone, Herefordshire.

(Sc 92-96) HOOK The engagement is announced between David, younger son of Mr and Mrs Tim Hook of Speldhurst, Kent and Esther, daughter of Mr and Mrs Stephen Franks of Wellington, New Zealand.

(WH 00-05) HOWICK On 19 November 2017, to Oliver and his wife Sarah, a son, Oscar Harry Storm Howick.

(Sc 00-05) HILL The engagement is announced between Edward, son of Mr and Mrs Michael Hill, of Penshurst, Kent, and Lindsay, daughter of Mr and Mrs Paul Sedola, of Vancouver Island, Canada.

(CH 01-06) WATSON On 16 November 2018, to Becca and her husband Dan, a daughter, Scarlett Elizabeth Holly.

(OT Relations Manager) To add a notice online, or in the next edition of OT Magazine, contact us at:

 tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org +44 (0) 1732 304253 APRIL 2019

13

MEET OUR NEW HEADMASTER Last summer, Tim Haynes retired after twelve years of exceptional service to Tonbridge, ushering in a new era for the school: the James Priory era. Having provided a decade of outstanding leadership to The Portsmouth Grammar School, James joined us in September 2018, and is already heading the school with dedication and energy. Read on to find out about our new Headmaster and his vision for the school.

Q: Where were you before coming to Tonbridge?

I had taught at Portsmouth Grammar School which I joined initially as Head of English before becoming Head of Sixth Form. From 2008 I was fortunate enough to become Headmaster and so moved down to Portsmouth with my family, having previously lived in Petersfield within the South Downs. We thoroughly enjoyed moving into Southsea and living by the Solent. Before that, I had started my teaching career at Bradford Grammar School. I still love going back to the Yorkshire Dales and places as evocative as Salts Mill and Haworth.

Q: What were your first impressions of Tonbridge as a school?

I first became aware of Tonbridge through books. As a rookie English teacher, I read Jonathan Smith’s superb book, The Learning Game. I loved the interleaving of poems, especially those

by Edward Thomas, with Jonathan’s insights into the dynamic of human relationships in the classroom.

Knowing he was Head of English here made me curious about Tonbridge. I also love the explorer Tim Severin’s account of his extraordinary recreation of the voyage of St Brendan across the Atlantic in a coracle. Here was someone else whose story intrigued me and who had also come from 14

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Tonbridge. Add to that such great literary names as E M Forster, Vikram Seth and, from the Sciences, the wonderful Professor Norman Heatley whom I met at Oxford and only later learned just how significant his involvement had been in the development of penicillin. I’m a big fan of Keane’s song writing too. I had a picture building in my imagination of a school that had the space and time in which to nurture some really creative minds.

My first actual visit to Tonbridge was much more recent. It is clearly a very beautiful school with some impressive facilities. The chapel - resurrected after that devastating fire - is stunning and probably my favourite space because it is where the whole school comes together. But the strongest impression I gained from those first exploratory visits was of a welcoming, friendly school, a community at ease with itself, but with a seriousness of purpose too.

Q: What has most surprised you about Tonbridge?

If I’m honest, I thought that I would find the transition from a coeducational setting to a single sex environment quite challenging, at least initially. I had not taught in a boys’ school for many years and I assumed that there would be a much harder ➻

I had a picture building in my imagination of a school that had the space and time in which to nurture some really creative minds.

JA N UA RY 2 0 1 9

15

edge here than I was used to. The surprise has been just how friendly, supportive, compassionate even the school is. Sport, for example, plays a large part in the life of Tonbridge but the culture of sport here is one of encouragement and enjoyment. There is great accomplishment, but the emphasis is on everyone being involved, including the staff. I think this culture permeates the school as a whole.

Q: What is your vision for the School?

I have listened to a lot of thoughts and views about Tonbridge since joining, whether from pupils, alumni, current and former staff, governors. It is clear that the school generates strong affection and that the experience of being here plays a significant part in people’s lives.

I am keen for this to continue, of course. I’ve always believed that young people should be happy and that success, however this is defined, will come from this feeling of fulfilment rather than the other way around.

I would like Tonbridge to be a school that is recognised for its excellence in understanding each boy as an individual and in providing the environment and the opportunities for them to develop as fantastically creative, curious, confident young people. I would like us to be known as a school which genuinely develops a lifelong love of learning.

I also feel passionately about the importance of widening access both in terms of expanding our engagement with the wider community and in making it possible for boys from all backgrounds to benefit from a Tonbridge education. From the conversations I have had so far, it’s reassuring to know that I am not alone in thinking about Tonbridge in these ways either now or in the future.

Q: What kind of Tonbridge pupil would you have been?

16

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

I would have been involved in debating and drama. I’m sure I would have been involved in the Chapel Choir too and made occasional appearances on the trombone in Concert Band. I would have been playing rugby and hockey, though I don’t make any great claims for the sporting honours I would have bestowed on the school! I would have loved being involved in conservation as I have a strong interest in natural history and the outdoors.

Without wishing to be too confessional, I would probably have been a source of occasional, mischievous humour, something I thought I would have

grown out of by now…

Q: Tell us about your family.

My wife Helen is also an English teacher. We met at school, so have known each other for most of our lives.

We have three children: Alice, who is studying Philosophy at St Andrews; Emma, who is at Warwick studying Spanish; and Ben, who has joined the Sixth Form at Tonbridge. We arrived at Rivers House with a white rabbit, a three-legged cat and a cockerpoo puppy, so we are quite a menagerie when we are gathered all together! ●

The Lord Lisvane KCB DL

GEORGE BAKER (WH5)

OT Society President, Lord Lisvane (SH 63-68) has had over 40 years of parliamentary experience, including working as Clerk of the House of Commons between 2011-2014. He was made a Life Peer in 2014 and currently sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher. After years of public service, and now free to express his opinions without restrictions, he last year ‘went viral’ for having likened opposition to a second EU referendum to forcing nervous aunties to the cinema to see Reservoir Dogs. In the aftermath of March’s ‘meaningful vote’, Politics student, George Baker (WH5) sat down with Lord Lisvane to discuss the state of British politics and the odd anecdote about his time at Tonbridge School.

Q: What is the future of the House of Lords moving forward in terms of reform?

I am a member of a group called 'A Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber'. Our effort is to identify how the House needs to change in way that does not require legislation because firstly, unless it is a government initiative you’re not going to get time in any legislative programme to do anything about the House of Lords. Secondly, if you introduce a bill, the scope would be wide enough to do lots of unplanned things.

Our efforts then morphed into the Burns Committee (Lord Speaker's Committee) focusing on the size of the chamber. I think people generally agree that the Lords is very effective at what it does in terms of legislative scrutiny but that it is much too big. Every journalist who writes about the Lords has a sort of module on their computers that says, "second largest chamber after the People's Assembly in China". Burns can be summed up in one sentence as "two out, one in". It does require the PM of the day to play ball. Our present PM has been more equivocal on this than she has been in relation to Brexit - saying she would not 'overdo it'. Over the last year, I think we have made a net loss of getting on for fifty. I think at the moment, we are around

790 and the aim is to get down to the size of the House of Commons. To go back to your original question, I don't see the Lords being reformed in the immediate or even the midterm.

Q: Would it be fair to accuse Speaker John Bercow of overreach and of abusing his powers as Speaker of House in recent months?

I think he was absolutely right to rule as he did on a potential 'Meaningful Vote Three'. There is an old rule - and I am sorry he made so much of it being 1604 because there is a sort of assumption that if things are 415 years old that somehow, they must be decrepit. Whereas the point he was making, and should have been made more strongly was that this has been a central part of House of Commons practice for centuries. The media picked up a couple of occasions when it was challenged, but of course what nobody sees apart from the practitioners are the fact that time and again, somebody goes into the table office says: "Can I put this down?", and the answer is: "No, because the House decided that in a debate six weeks ago". So it is a check on wasting the House's time, basically. So I think he was right in not allowing MV3, given there was no real change. I think there was a change from MV1 to MV2 because of the legal analysis which was bolted on. ➻

JA N UA RY 2 0 1 9

17

Q: Would you vote for Theresa May's Brexit Deal?

It is a question of what the alternatives are, because if you had said to me three months ago would you vote for it, I would have said no. This is partly because I think we are all in a handcart to hell at the moment because I am a very strong 'remainer' and I would like to see a second referendum. This is because I think only the deluded would think that the 2016 mandate is still current, because we have had three more years of people who can now vote, and three more years of people falling off the perch at the other end of the scale. John Reid said in a debate in the Lords in responding to the Brexit Minister in the Lords, "If I interpret the Minister's remarks correctly, we shouldn’t have a second referendum because the people have spoken, and it would be very

18

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

divisive". He then said that "those are two very good arguments for never having a general election again", and I completely agree with that. I am amazed by the irony that Theresa May tells us that we can't rerun 2016, but at the same time she tells the Commons, three times now, please will you accept my deal. That seems to me to be wholly illogical.

Q: What are the challenges to people my age agreeing to take on a career in politics and public service?

Before the challenges, I would say there are duties, as I think there are two big problems in society at the moment. One is the challenge of fake news and all its ramifications, when you have got somebody like Trump who thinks in order to make something true, that you simply have to say it. Going back to the Brexit debate, it was simply opposing assertions,

and nobody was brought to book on those, such as the 350 million pounds a week to the NHS which was simply a statement. Grown-up political discourse requires people to take responsibility for what they say, and it requires them to submit themselves to scrutiny and challenge. The ubiquity of 'fake news' now here, across the Atlantic and in other countries, means that we really risk losing grown-up political discourse and I think people at your stage really need to feel that it is a duty; that they have to do something about it.

The other problem that worries me is the leaching of trust out of politics and Parliament. There have been blips such as the expenses scandal, but nevertheless the basic mechanisms of Parliament and its role are unchanged. Brexit has made people mistrust Parliament, very often on

the wrong grounds. There is no doubt that if we don't do something about this mistrust in politics and in Parliament, then we will be a very much poorer society, and a poorer polity in the years ahead.

In answering your question about the challenges of public service, my role as Clerk of the House of Commons was very varied, it required lots of adrenaline.

There is a combination of real intellectual stretching as well as person skills, and it was great fun. It is a feeling that you are close to or indeed part of great events, which is a thrill. I would not have recommended to my daughters that they go into the Civil Service because I think it is so stretched and its morale has been so damaged over the last few years.

Austerity, with successive governments has hollowed out the civil service and has made it much less fit for purpose.

Q: Does it feel liberating being able to express your own opinions in Parliament after years as a public servant?

Well, you have chosen exactly the word that I always use; it is very liberating. I don't overdo it because I am a cross-bencher and the way we work is that you don't talk about something you don't know about, and that is very healthy in a parliamentary environment.

My colleague Lord Hennessy once wisely said, “Bullshit in the Lords at your peril.”

I have been difficult to the government on a few things, but on things that are really about constitutional propriety. For example, too extensive powers being given to ministers in Bills. I'm not going to wade into the big issues about police numbers for example, as we've got four retired commissioners of the Met as cross-benchers who have the appropriate level of expertise to deal with these matters. So I haven't become a sort of polemicist in political terms, but I have got used to, and really rather relish the idea of getting up and saying I don't think the government’s got this right - but within that relatively narrow constitutional framework.

Q: So why did you decide to be a cross-bencher?

After 42 years of being absolutely politically neutral, I couldn't have taken a party whip, not least because I didn't cleave to any of the major parties, as I had got so much into the habit of being

Brexit has made people mistrust Parliament very often on the wrong grounds. neutral. Also, it would have poisoned the wealth of my successor because let’s say I had gone to the Labour benches, people from either side may have said that the Clerks are against us, or for us.

Q: If there was a General Election tomorrow, who do you think would win?

Well firstly, I think it would be a disaster, because it would be a Brexit election and one of the many disasters of Brexit is that the government has been paralysed for a year, possibly two, ever since they realised that they are going to have to cope with Brexit. The rabbit has been in the headlights for two years and so much including crime, education, social care, health, have just been put on the backburner because nobody has had the bandwidth to cope with that. If we were to have a General Election now, I think that would be exactly the same. The choices that really need to be made for

APRIL 2019

19

the country at large wouldn’t be made because they have all been crowded out

by Brexit.

One of the extraordinary things of the past months is that Labour is behind in the polls. When we have a government that is so clearly riven by dissent and when constitutional expectation is turned on its head. The government on the one hand can win a vote of confidence by 19 votes, which the whips would have said in an earlier age is a comfortable majority, and it still loses the major plank of its policy by 230 votes. If Walter Bagehot was around today, he would be completely disbelieving. When that same policy is then rejected by 149 votes, that is in terms of constitutional theory, completely chaotic. So you have a government that has lost command of the House, and collective cabinet responsibility - which I think is even more important - has completely broken up. The book is being rewritten every day and when you have that all happening, the Labour party ought to be 20 points ahead in the polls, but of course they’re riven by dissent too.

The anti-Semitic argument hasn't helped.

This, alongside the lack of leadership are two things that are a chain around the Labour Party. If I were a Labour member of Parliament, I would be very annoyed as it’s an open goal yet the ball has been kicked into the crowd and lost.

Q: With the emergence of the Independent Group as a potential alternative to the two main parties, do you think a new centrist movement is inevitable considering the Lib Dems are still doing poorly in the polls?

I think the Lib Dems are absolutely stuck and there is a problem for them in terms of image. If they were to elect Joe Swinson say, then I think they would get a boost. In terms of the Independent Group, the history of trying to form new parties is not a happy one. You have just got to look back at the SDP as an example. It’s a bit like a rocket, and it goes up with a terrific shower of sparks and then... nothing. I think the emergence of a centrist party is probably only going to come if there is an apocalyptic division of either of the two major parties and if they simply can't carry on under the banner, whichever it is. If the ERG and the Brexiteers go off and form a right-wing

20

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

party, then there will be a lot of people who will move towards the centre and it might possibly coalesce into a new party.

The problem is, we are talking about the political ideas and attractions of a new party. The hard mechanics across the country such as constituency organisations are really important, and if you want to fight an election as a new party, you have to set those things up from scratch. When you look at how much infrastructure there is for the two main parties, trying to replicate that at relatively short notice would be absolutely impossible.

Q: Is Parliament healthy at the moment and are we facing a constitutional crisis?

We are, certainly, facing a constitutional crisis. We were told we were going to take back control. However, I think our PM and Government being told by the EU 27 what they can and can't do is about as far from them taking back control as anybody could imagine. I make a distinction between ‘is politics broken?’ and ‘is Parliament broken?’. Politics I think is in a very bad way for the all reasons we have discussed. I don't think Parliament is broken and the metaphor I use is - if you see a car driven into a ditch, you go and have a look at the driver, you don't immediately decide to change the engine. So it is about how you handle the institutions and what you do with the institutions which is more important.

There may well be things that can be done which would make Parliament more effective, but what needs fixing is politics and the link between what people aspire to, and what they’re prepared to take responsibility for - and that will take a lot of fixing.

Q: What are your memories of Tonbridge and what are the biggest changes since you were here?

I think it’s become a much more socially conscious society and people in a community like Tonbridge have duties of care and toleration towards each other. I think if you'd sat us down fifty years ago and asked the same question, I think we would have said yes, in theory, but not in practice. One of the things I find very impressive and warming about the society that the school now represents is that it understands inter-relationships

and responsibilities much better, and it is a more benign and tolerant society than the one I was educated in. There is also a broader intellectual understanding and aspiration. The fact that you can put very different subjects together at A Level is a good example. For us it was a choice between the arts and sciences. I think the feeling that you really can make choices which are not imposed upon you by academic staff is entirely positive. ●

It's an open goal, yet the ball has been kicked out into the crowd and lost.

100 years of

REMEMBRANCE

Read our feature on the last ten fallen Old Tonbridgians at: tonbridgeconnect.org/news

I

n November, Tonbridge School joined local communities across the globe remembering the First World War generation who served, sacrificed and changed our world.

2018 marked the centenary of the Armistice that brought World War One to an end, and to commemorate this significant year, the school’s Remembrance Service featured a special tribute to the final ten Old Tonbridgians who lost their lives during the Great War. The men were honoured in the form of life-sized silhouettes, installed in the Chapel cloisters as part of Royal British

Legion’s national ‘There But Not There’ campaign. Their stories, which you can read about on our website, are an important reminder of the great sacrifice made by the 716 Old Tonbridgians who gave their life to the cause, over the course of both World Wars.

Attended by boys, parents, staff and friends, the service featured hymns, readings and moving performances by the school choir. There was also a procession of service medals won by two Old Tonbridgians, 2nd Lieut. George E.L. Cressey and 2nd Lieut. Edward J. Norman, both killed in action in the

APRIL 2019

21

Left: Leading Hand, Harry Grant (PS3) stands before 'There But Not There' silhouettes Right: Renault FT Tank on display outside of Chapel

Great War, and a former Headmaster, Lieut. Harold N.P. Sloman.

The service address was given by The Lord Lisvane KCB DL, President of the OT Society and Master of the Skinners’ Company, who told the congregation that his grandfather and father had served in the First and Second World Wars, respectively. “While this year is one of special commemoration, remembrance can’t just be an annual event,” he said. “The legacy of sacrifice is with us every day and should be just as fresh as the day that sacrifice was made.”

He added: “Remembrance should spark in all of us a determination to seek the path of peace, no matter what the provocation.”

A Renault FT First World War tank was also on display on Remembrance Day.

22

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Restored by the Weald Foundation and originally built in 1918, the tank had seen active service in the final months of the conflict and bore a series of machine gun bullet holes in its side.

By the end of the Great War 415 Tonbridgians had died, roughly the size of the school at that time. About half of Tonbridgians killed were 24 years of age or under, and half of them were aged 20 or under. Most of them were junior officers in the Army. The Second World War claimed the lives of 301 Tonbridgians.

To find out more about Tonbridge and the Great War, visit our online archives at: www.tonbridgeschoolheritage.co.uk

Remembrance should spark in all of us a determination to seek the path of peace, no matter what the provocation.

APRIL 2019

23

THEN

NOW 'THE PILLBOX' BY BEV MATTHEWS, ARCHIVIST

Left: Pillbox housing an anti-tank gun Right: Tonbridge School's WW2 Pillbox

D

uring the recent renovation and excavation of the school's historic science centre, a forgotten and well-hidden treasure was unearthed; Tonbridge School's World War Two Pillbox.

During the Second World War, these defences were built across the country to contain an expected German invasion. It was decided that a static system of defensive lines around Britain would help delay the Germans long enough for mobile forces to counter-attack.

Over 50 defensive lines were built in Britain, and Tonbridge was one of Kent’s six category A nodal points or “fortress towns.” These would have been defended by the British Army and the Home Guard to prevent invaders advancing to London.

It is a wonderful coincidence that Old For all enquiries, contact:  beverley.matthews@tonbridge-school.org

24

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Tonbridgian, General William Edmund Ironside (Day Boy 93-96), whose biography we highlight on page 47, was the instigator of the original ‘GHQ Line’ of defences that ran along the Medway river at Tonbridge: it was also known as the ‘Ironside Line’.

We need your help to collect and preserve stories like this, which help us understand and interpret the school's incredible 500-year history for future generations.

There are many ways you can get involved, first and foremost by sharing materials with the school that will help us expand our archive collection.

The school's archive project is still in its infancy as we strive to collect and digitise more material. However, we do hope you enjoy browsing our new online collection.

Browse our online archives at: www.tonbridgeschoolheritage.co.uk

How I survived

SAS: WHO DARES WINS James Gwinnett (WW 97-02) is not your average PR professional. A regular marathon and ultra-marathon competitor, James is no stranger to putting himself through challenges that, for must of us, are barely imaginable. In 2018, he set his sights on a new, extreme test of endurance by signing up to Channel 4’s popular TV competition, SAS: Who Dares Wins.

Held in Chile’s punishing Andes Mountains, recruits face gruelling challenges that mimic the SAS’s ruthless selection process. Designed to test their mental and physical strength, this year trials included facing a 200-foot forward abseil and plunging into sub-zero waterfalls, until they reach the final ‘Sickener’ that determines the show’s overall winner. Read on to find out about James’ experience on the show.

APRIL 2019

25

Q: Why did you sign up to Who Dares Wins, and what was it like being on the show?

I signed because I knew the experience would be the opportunity of a lifetime. I knew it would be the ultimate challenge in pushing me to my physical and mental limits and gaining an understanding of what those limits are.

Then also, because I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment - I wanted to take myself out of my comfort zone, somewhere I'd been happily camped for too long, because of the potential reward factor of having achieved something incredible.

Who Dares Wins was brutal and exhilarating in equal measure. Few will ever come close to experiencing such a punishing and yet thrilling few days, in such a spectacular setting. Being thrust into an environment that involves so much stress for such a prolonged period of time - including some mountainous highs and crushing lows - allows you to realise potential you never knew you had, and push limits further than you thought possible. It was undoubtedly the most exhilarating experience of my life.

Q: You’re an extreme athlete, and so, as someone who’s used to testing

26

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

their limits, did you find if difficult?

Absolutely, though probably not in the way you’d imagine. The gruelling thing about the process is that it’s designed to test you both physically AND mentally.

So, while it was brutally hard in a

huge lesson in adapting to each and every situation.

Q: What was the hardest moment in the series for you?

A task on the penultimate day involved traversing a ladder suspended over a canyon, encouragingly called 'The Devil's Throat'.

With only a rope either side to stabilise us we had to walk over the ladder, ignoring the 100ft drop to the river below, and perform exercises like crouching down half way across. As the heaviest recruit by some 10kg, I felt the bend in the ladder more than others and when the wind picked up, I was swaying all over the place. I got to the other side but lost my footing as I clambered up the rocky bank, and Ant Middleton made me do it again as punishment for losing focus!

Q: How did you cope with the harsh winter weather conditions?

With only a rope either side to stabilise us we had to walk over the ladder, ignoring the 100ft drop to the river below. physical sense, being fit (and stubborn!) allowed me to battle through as one of the leaders of the group. What I found the most difficult was being kept constantly guessing and never being able to properly wind down. We were on edge the whole time, never knowing what was coming next, and it was a

I did as much research as I could – I’m fortunate in that I know a couple of Guinness World Record holders in polar exploration! And while the conditions were hard, they were manageable provided you kept your wits about you and your kit in check - that was part of what the DS (Drill Sergeant) taught us.

It was more the combination of different factors that was designed to wear us down and ultimately get recruits to VW (voluntary withdrawal). The fact that we had to contend with regular intense physical exercise, at altitude and in those harsh conditions, whilst being tested mentally and emotionally, under constant assessment, so you can’t lose focus for one second - that’s going to be hard for anyone.

Q: What were Ant, Foxy, Ollie and Billy like?

The DS were brilliant. Ant, as Chief Instructor, was a little further removed but I have the utmost respect for Foxy, Ollie and Billy. Foxy is a giant of a man both literally and figuratively speaking who has come through some rough times and is humble and wants to help others because of what he has experienced. From Ollie, I got the sense that he would move mountains to come to the aid of anyone who needed help, and Billy was a laugh a minute with some of the things he said but also incredibly patient throughout the process.

Q: This series was quite novel in the sense that female recruits took part for the first time, and it also aired in same the year that the Ministry of Defence opened the SAS selection process up to women. Do you think gender made a difference in the show?

I don’t think it’s possible to generalise that easily, because there’s no sweeping statement that applied to either gender.

It didn't come out as either the men or women being 'better' as shown by there being equal numbers in the final eight.

Every member of the special forces has their own unique set of skills and strengths and the job of someone in the position of the DS is to bring out those strengths, whilst helping recruits learn to deal with any weaknesses. For example, we had both guys and girls afraid of heights, but they overcame these fears through dogged determination. The most pertinent lesson I learned from the experience is that it's not about being the fittest or fastest, it's about being the most resilient and resolute.

Q: What was the best part of the series for you?

The last couple of days and being part of the final eight were incredible. I think by that stage we had earned the respect of the DS and they were willing to give us slightly freer rein, which meant we could really enjoy and appreciate the experience. We also did some fantastic things which will stick long in the

memory - flying up a stunning mountainous valley in a helicopter was a highlight - and being able to laugh and joke around with the DS was great.

I got a sense of having 'made it', knowing that I had got through to the interrogation phase, and while that was probably the most tortuous experience of my life, it gave me an enormous sense of fulfilment.

Q: Now that you’ve been through this experience, would consider joining the Special Forces?

I think I've missed the boat unfortunately because I'm at that stage of my life where I'd like to settle down.

But knowing what I know now, if I were to do it all over, I may well do things very differently.

Q: If you could take part in Who Dares Wins again, would you?

Absolutely. I'd go tomorrow. Today even!

SHARE YOUR STORY Everybody has a story to tell.

To share yours, contact:  tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org

APRIL 2019

27

Tuesday 7 May

Thursday 6 June

A HISTORY OF TONBRIDGE SCHOOL

LIFE AS A WAR ARTIST IN AFGHANISTAN

a talk by David Tennant

28

a talk by Graeme Lothian

Tuesday 11 June

Thursday 20 June

CAN ART CHANGE THE WORLD? ART WITH SOMETHING TO SAY O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

SISTER EDITH APPLETON OBE AND THE BATTLES FACED BY WW1 NURSES

a talk by Valerie Woodgate

a talk by Dick and Lisa Robinson

DISCOVER. LEARN. PARTICIPATE.

THE TENNANT LECTURE SERIES DAVID TENNANT, FOUNDER

C With only a rope either side to stabilise us we had to walk over the ladder, ignoring the 100ft drop to the river below.

entral to what The Tonbridge Society has to offer are the lectures – now called the Tennant Lectures - and they are a key part of our programme, bringing together staff, parents and OTs. Between twelve and fourteen talks are arranged each year, and since the Society was founded over 240 talks have taken place. They cover a huge range of subjects, from Chris Hollins (WH 84-88) on winning Strictly Come Dancing to Professor Chris Rudge on the future of Transplant Surgery: there really is something for everyone.

Some of the most memorable lectures have been given by members of the Common Room. Few will forget Jonathan Smith talking about the art of teaching and quoting from his book, The Learning Game, Dr John Taylor telling us about the classical world, or Sir Anthony Seldon discussing some of our most recent Prime Ministers.

If you would like to give a talk yourself, please let us know. We have had some wonderful lectures from successful and talented OTs, including Ed Smith(WH 90-95), Sir Fredrick Forsyth (PS 52-55), Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (PS 68-73) and your current President, Lord Lisvane (SH 63-68). You will be in distinguished company.

It is amazing who will come to talk at Tonbridge, if you have the gall to ask them! Speakers have included Charles Moore, Boris Johnson, Max Hastings, Kate Adie, Harriet Harman, Sir Dominic Asquith, Nicola Horlick, Sir Douglas Flint, Lord Norwich, Ian Hislop, Colin Cowdrey, Douglas Hurd, Sir Malcolm Rifkin, Peter Snow and John Simpson - to name but a few. We have had many superb talks.

The Society is determined to keep up the wide range and high quality of these lectures. They are completely free, as is the wine and sandwiches which are served before them, and you do not even have to book. The talks are open to all of the Tonbridge community, so please just come and join us. It is a great way of reuniting with friends and we would love to see you.

On the left of this page are the lectures for next term and we look forward to warmly welcoming you to them.

For all enquiries, including how to become a speaker, contact:  tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org To find out more about Tonbridge Society events, visit our website: www.tonbridgeconnect.org/events

APRIL 2019

29

In pursuit of

TONBRIDGE'S SCIENTISTS 2019 has been an extraordinary year for Science at Tonbridge.

To mark the opening of the new Barton Science Centre, we asked Old Tonbridgians with a science background to write to us with their story. In the next pages, we hear from 9 OTs, whose experience demonstrate the wide range of job options available to science graduates, and many of whom have exploited the positive characteristics of their science-trained brains in some unexpected sectors.

30

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

NICHOLAS KITCHIN (MH 81-85) Senior Director, Vaccine Clinical Research, Pfizer

H The public health benefits of vaccination are so profound that once I became involved I didn't really want to do anything else.

aving done science-based A levels, I left Tonbridge in 1985 to study medicine in London. I chose medicine because I enjoyed the underpinning subject matter, not because I had medicine 'in the family' (as many do) or because I felt a 'calling'. In retrospect, that directed many of the choices I took subsequently. I studied for an extra year to obtain an intercalated BSc in Biochemistry, so completed my medical degree in 1991.

After the obligatory jobs in general surgery, general medicine and A&E I decided to specialise in anaesthetics. Whilst I found this fascinating to learn, after a couple of years I realised it was not something that I wanted to do forever. By chance I spotted an advertisement for a junior role at a company performing first-in-human clinical trials, which I got. Despite the role being one that required a medical qualification, I recall many of my colleagues thinking that I was somehow opting out or jumping ship.

Within a few months I realised that my tentative steps to a career in the pharmaceutical industry were the right ones. That job gave me an entry to subsequent more senior roles within international research-based pharmaceutical companies. The breadth of potential jobs in the sector is huge for scientists and medics alike – ranging from bench research, discovering new drugs through to those supporting companies’ commercial activities. Although I have always worked in the UK, there are also plenty of opportunities to work abroad.

Initially more by accident than design, I have been specialising in the field of vaccines for the past 20 years – in different roles at different companies, both on the commercial and the research side. The public health benefits of vaccination are so profound that once I became involved I didn’t really want to do anything else. It is often quoted that only the availability of clean water has made a greater contribution to global health than vaccination. Yet, ever since the days of Jenner and smallpox vaccination in the late 18th century, there has been a vociferous minority of people who distrust vaccination.

These negative opinions range from outright hostility towards vaccination, which is relatively uncommon, through to hesitancy, which is much more prevalent particularly amongst the better educated. The underlying reasons are varied, ranging from the fact that

APRIL 2019

31

many diseases we routinely vaccinate against are no longer seen (and so their seriousness becomes underestimated), through concern about vaccine safety (fuelled by things like the MMR vaccine 'scare') to distrust of institutions that recommend vaccination (which are often linked to governments).

In our connected, social media-influenced world messages can be shared widely, rapidly and sometimes for malicious purpose. This is exemplified by recent news that American researchers have found that social media bots and Russian trolls have been spreading disinformation about vaccines on Twitter to create social discord and distribute malware. Interestingly, the study found that they often posted both pro and

32

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

anti-vaccination messages to create so-called false equivalency, which could lead people to believe there is a more evenly balanced debate about the pros and cons and vaccination than there actually is. 1 As responsible citizens, it is beholden on us to make rational health-related decisions for ourselves and our families based on the best evidence available. In the 21st century more than ever, weighing up the provenance of that evidence is critical.

1. (Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate.

Broniatowski DA et al. Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print August 23, 2018: e1-e7)

Above: James Gillray's 1802 caricature of Jenner vaccinating patients who feared it would make them sprout cowlike appendages

Six months working in Nairobi opened my eyes to the value of research.

A

ALEX AARVOLD (JH 91-96) Consultant Paediatric Orthopaedic Surgeon & Honorary Associate Professor, University of Southampton

career in research has come to me partly by accident, but to be in a role that furthers medical science is incredibly rewarding. At Tonbridge I chose all the sciences for A-level, and regretted it on day one of L6th when I saw my timetable – double chemistry or physics EVERY day. However those years were fabulous and I had great teaching from the likes of Messrs Saunders, Todd, Prosser, Briggs, Belbin, Bull, King, Marsden.

I studied medicine at Edinburgh, though my studies played second fiddle to sports. I captained various teams at school, uni and club level and learnt more about teamwork than medicine. The focus of my early doctor years, in Scotland and Australia, could certainly have been more wisely spent.

Six months working in Nairobi opened my eyes to the value of research. I worked in HIV clinics in the slums, for the charity Nyumbani, taking HIV tests from over 3000 children. The tests revealed a severity of AIDS that, in 2004, was as severe as anything known about.

With no access to HIV medicines then, every week we saw more of these children were dying. My statistical and writing skills at the time were basic, so the work was never published. However, the data we collected was used to help the charity secure international funds for anti-retroviral medication. The death rate plummeted.

I returned to the UK to start surgical training in 2005, which has taken me to Oxford, London, Wessex and Canada. One of the oddities of medicine is that research is heavily valued to secure promotions, despite not necessarily being relevant to how good a doctor one is. So I wrote a few papers with the single incentive of helping my surgical career. However, 2007 brought a political shake up of medical training (‘Modernising Medical Careers’), fondly known in the profession as ‘Murdering Medical Careers’. I was one of many aspiring surgical trainees cast into the wilderness, so I found a job in a lab looking down a microscope at stem cells.

The team I joined at Southampton University is fantastic. Those few years have resulted in me publishing a dozen research papers, presenting our work around the world, winning The Scientist Award 2011 for our development of a stem cell concentrator,

pictured below, for tissue engineering (beating, amongst others, the designers of Amy Williams’ Olympic Gold skeleton sled and a military automatic landing device for helicopters) and was awarded The Syme Medal by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for my thesis on tissue engineering.

On returning to surgical training, I could use my new found research skills to help others develop their projects for those sought after publications required for promotion. My CV accidently became as research orientated as it was surgical. With such rewards from research I have strived to continue this alongside clinical work. The focus of my research is now on clinical trials and studies on hip dysplasia, Perthes disease, cerebral palsy and osteonecrosis, which perfectly matches my clinical practice. The two complement each other nicely, though there are competing demands on time.

I have worked with far more intelligent and far better researchers than me through school, Uni and work.

However, as in so many walks of life, working together in teams and working hard is as important as any skill set. Now I am supervising research projects with medical students, trainee doctors and international collaborators, those characteristics I developed on the sports fields appear not so wasted after all.

APRIL 2019

33

Top right: contamination site, Kuwait. Bottom right: Stonehenge, UK

PETER SKINNER (FH 77-82) Chief Executive, Environment & Ground Engineering, EMIA, AECOM

I

f you could, you did a Science degree and if you couldn’t you did an Engineering one. That was the conventional wisdom for those doing Mathematics and Sciences in the early eighties. So I was pointed towards engineering! I finished my O Levels thinking I wanted to do Electrical Engineering as that was the, then, exciting area. As I studied my A Levels, that changed to Mechanical Engineering. In the end I kept my options open and studied Engineering Science at Exeter University. There, I became captivated by Geotechnical Engineering, or Soil Mechanics, as it is also called, as it was an engineering subject that was more of an art than the other subjects I was studying.

You take some sparse information, such as a few boreholes, and come up with a safe, economical design for the whole site. I found I liked the uncertainty of not knowing and enjoyed the collaboration, discussion and argument of interpretation and refining a design.

I joined a consultancy and for seven years designed large dams across the world, including a year in to do a Master’s Degree at Imperial College. Dams fell out of fashion and so I moved into Environmental Engineering. It is still about controlling water, except now, instead of holding it back in a reservoir, it is about safely moving and treating its contamination. Those aspects of uncertainty I had learnt as a geotechnical engineer now allowed me to progress my career into management. Making predictions and backing my judgement then allowed me to progress to becoming Chief Executive of the largest environmental consultancy team in the UK&I, Continental Europe and Africa; a professional team of over 1,600 consultants. A wit once remarked my team has 'more degrees than a thermometer.'

The capability of my team continues to astound me; archaeologists working on Stonehenge; acousticians predicting the noise from HS2; creating ‘hotels’ for translocated water voles; solutions to clean up the contamination over an area the size of Greater London from when Saddam Hussain deliberately polluted Kuwait; to making decisions based on five capitals (financial, manufactured, social, human and natural).

But I worry that although as a society we can do great things, we don’t. The inability of our society to make long term decisions is concerning. It is not that we don’t know; we do. As Jean-Claude Juncker said: “We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we've done it”.

34

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

To me, there are two areas where we need to make dramatic changes. Firstly and specifically, we need to tackle climate change. It will make a significant change to the way we live if we don’t. There will be more extreme storms, more flooding, less food production. It will change our society for the worse and we do only have a decade left to do it, or it really will be too late.

People will look at us as we look at the late Romans; “why did they let it happen, surely they knew?”

Secondly and generically, we need to fight future battles instead of replaying the historical ones. For example should we be building new roads and car parks? Autonomous vehicles will change how we move and we won’t be requiring four lane motorways or numerous parking spaces. Cars will not be left unutilised for two weeks as we go on holiday. The income, or more accurately the reduction in costs, will allow for more cocktails on the beach, which will be further inland than it is now!

Our Engineers and Scientists know what to do; we as a society must look to the long term and allow them to use their talents, for good - not just now, not for the next decade, but for the centuries to come.

People will look at us as we look at the late Romans; "why did they let it happen, surely they knew?"

APRIL 2019

35

FRED ISAAC (OH 05-10) Product Manager, Cubic Motion

A

fter 5 great years at Tonbridge playing sport, video games and working to get the best grades I possibly could, I left the South East to study Chemistry at the University of York. I chose York and chemistry because I was good at the subject, had a curiosity to solve problems and knew I could pursue the sport of my choosing whilst doing so.

The specific choice of chemistry was secondary to the fact I felt that a solid grounding in science would allow me to pursue a technology-focused career post university.

In my final year at university I was sure that chemistry was something I no longer wished to pursue. I felt the process was too long winded for me to see results, and I wanted to enact change and create things as soon as possible. This led me to look towards a career in technology. I realised, while having a deabte with my family about automation, that I had a passion for how computers and robots interpret the world. I pursued this passion and established myself with a job at the largest computer vision distributor in Europe as a sales engineer. Working at a large organisation in a dual role of sales and engineering allowed me to see the breadth of applications computer vision could be used in, from making cars, to goal line technology in football, and even idenitfying the most efficient method for butchering pigs. I got to play a part in specifying and building all of these systems; something which took a large measure of careful maths and a fundamental understanding of science.

The broad nature of my early work experiences really allowed me to identify the challenges I wanted to work on. This is something I think I would still be unaware of had my role been focused in one market area rather than across a technology. I found most interest in 36

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

areas where traditional techniques were failing; specifically agriculture and media content creation.

I felt a special affinity towards agriculture as this was an area where chemistry could be deemed to be lacking. The fact that herbicide resistance is growing among weeds, and current methods of trying to control this is costing over $20 billion dollars a year says that using chemistry to kill these plants is no longer the right solution. We are also starting to see significant literature come out about how we are dramatically altering our eco systems with these techniques, the most prominent recent issue being the damage we have been causing to bees.

I wanted to do something about these problems; ones I knew existed from my background in chemistry, but ones I didn’t believe were being solved fast enough by the science that had created the problem. I therefore joined an Agritech start-up that was applying computer vision to the harvesting of crops by building a robot that could roam the farm and identify and pick tomatoes as soon as they became ripe.

One of the key benefits of reducing human contact with the crops whilst they grow is that you dramatically decrease the chance of infection with disease, and therefore reduce the amount you need to spray the crops.

Working on this project really allowed me to feel like I was meeting this challenge head on.

I have since moved on from that exciting endeavour to work for a company called Cubic Motion, who provide facial animation and animation

technology to leading video games, tv shows and films. We build products that allow us to film actors and translate the performance straight to animated characters, making their expressions appear incredibly lifelike. Though this would seem like an extreme departure from Agritech and computer vision, we are all about accurately translating an actor's performance into the digital realm, just like I was previously translating the ripeness of a tomato.

Both deal with how computers understand the world. This application

I found most interest in areas where traditional techniques were failing; specifically agriculture and media content creation.

Above: Cubic Motion's facial animation technology in action

of the fundamental knowledge I have around computer vision would have been impossible without my scientific background. Studying science and chemistry at school and university taught me that you must still apply understood fundamentals to unseen and unknown challenges, even in cuttingedge industries like Agritech and video games development.

APRIL 2019

37

DR PAUL NAILOR (WH 74-78) Independent Consultant, and Partner, Baird Partners

S

cience and the scientific method have been part of my life since my earliest childhood.

However, I also have a facility in languages and this resulted in my entering Tonbridge School on a Knightley scholarship. Whilst my love of languages, art and music have endured, when it was time to pick a subject to study at Oxford there was only one option: Physics.

Physics is the ideal subject area for those who do not blindly accept established wisdom. In some circles it is called Natural Philosophy and I think that encapsulates for me the allure of the subject: you learn how to question. That is the skill is what has provided me with such an exciting and broad career and, ultimately, the ability to network at the highest levels both at home here in Malta and internationally.

The first stage of my career after studies was as a research engineer and later consultant at PA Consulting in Cambridge.

This was the idea of my PhD supervisor at Imperial College, the late Prof.

Walter Welford. Having studied laser physics and theoretical particle physics at Oxford followed by an MA in Advanced Mathematics at Cambridge I was ideally positioned to go for an opportunity at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, where a student was needed with knowledge of laser and optical systems and of high energy particle physics. During my time at Fermi Lab I had both lab disasters and successes. Before returning to my business career I want to recount a couple of these as they are important in what followed.

In Fermi Lab experiment E632 we were tasked with using the then most powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron, to probe the predictions of various theoretical models of the structure of matter. We used the high energy proton beam to force proton-proton collisions in a large sphere of liquid hydrogen. The results of these collisions manifested themselves as trails of bubbles in the liquid. Whilst conventional cameras had been used historically to photograph these trails from a variety of angles, the unique aspect of E632 was to use a high power pulsed ruby laser and a

holographic camera to take holograms of the entire volume, which would be reconstructed in a facility in the UK and examined by a robot camera exploring the recreated space. My jobs were to work on the design of the laser, the holographic camera and its optical system and on the reconstruction machine and its optical systems.

One particular situation comes to mind from this. In order to fire the multistage laser we needed to switch a bank of very large capacitors very quickly. The only device able to do this at that time (1985) was a Krytron switch. This is the same switch used in the detonation of a nuclear bomb. I was using these up fast during the development of the laser, so I ordered 20 from the supplier. The next day I got a call and then a visit from officials at the US Dept of Defence who wanted to know why I needed so many nuclear bomb triggers… There were also many highlights as what we were doing had never been done before, and I was allowed a lot of freedom and allocated a sizeable budget and the opportunity to present the work at international collaboration meetings and conferences. All of this built up my confidence and presentation ability as well as achieving many scientific firsts and being comfortable at international senior levels.

Whilst at PA Technology and latterly at Scientific Generics, a spin out from PA Tech of which I was a founder member, I used the skills and knowledge developed during my academic career to the full. I won and executed development projects for international clients based on my own ideas and was recognised as an expert witness in certain fields. I developed a love of the chemical manufacturing industry and took ownership of this sector for the consultancies and latterly at the five investment banks where I worked.

Bringing the mindset of the physicist to business and industry problems led me to develop new ways of analysing corporate strategy and a string of landmark merger and acquisition transactions across the world. I would present my ideas at Board level across the world and won clients due to the innovative nature of those

Physics is the ideal subject area for those who do not blindly accept established wisdom.

38

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Left: Photos included in Dr Nailor's PhD thesis, showing a very high energy proton-proton collision in a hydrogen bubble chamber, taken as a hologram and photographed from the reconstructed real image in the lab. The resolution is about 25 microns, far finer than any ordinary bubble chamber photo.

ideas. Highlights would include: advising the Italian government and the state company ENI on restructuring its chemical industry business, and then executing the restructuring; performing the first ever UK stock market takeover deal for Salomon Brothers; winning a multibillion pound project to advise a Swiss chemical company in a contested hostile takeover of a UK speciality chemical manufacturer when at Credit Swiss First Boston – a first for the firm, won by my knowledge of the target company; and many more of which I have a shelf full of commemorative acrylic blocks and other mementoes.

The same mindset took me to join the management

team at Elementis where I helped design and execute a 3-year turnaround which was a great success – and very remunerative… Now I have left the day to day business field, I still think up projects and plans in a variety of market spaces based here in Malta.

All of this stemmed from my love of questioning established wisdom and practices born of being a physicist, through and through. There are too many scientists that have inspired me along the way but I would pick out one. Richard Feynman was for me the ultimate physicist. His life and writings would inspire anyone. I hope I have been doing justice in my life to what I learned from his.

APRIL 2019

39

DERYCK CHAN (JH 07-09) PHD Student, Geotechnical Engineering, University of Cambridge

I

grew up in a housing estate in Hong Kong which sits directly on top of a railway station box and in close proximity to a former landfill, which has been rehabilitated into a park. From a young age, I have been fascinated by how things work, especially the road and railway infrastructure that took me to school and back every day. As I grew up, I learnt that engineering is the university subject where science is applied quantitatively to understand how things work and to make things work. When I joined Tonbridge for sixth form, the joys and frustrations of British railway travel confirmed my desire to study engineering so I could contribute to the infrastructure industry. I applied to study engineering and was fortunate enough to be offered a place at Cambridge.

My time as an undergraduate engineer in Cambridge were the most enjoyable years of my life to date. I liked the broad-based first and second year engineering course, which taught me just enough maths and science to understand how everything works in daily life, be it computers, concrete bridges, or culverts.

Cambridge does not offer an engineering specialism on transportation, so I chose civil engineering in my third and fourth year, which was the most relevant to infrastructure design. When I completed my MA in Engineering, I decided to take a post-university gap year out of 'mainstream' engineering practice and worked cross-culturally as a civil engineer and language teacher for two Christian missionary organisations. My projects took me to Uganda and Manchuria, where I understood the full force of civil engineering. The provision of infrastructure can connect people and build communities, but they are also inherently political as the repurposing of land will also uproot and divide other communities. I realised that moral values and scientific integrity are the most important virtues in all good engineering, and in that order. So when I came to the end of my gap year, I decided to return to the UK for a research position, so I could hone my technical skills and contribute in a greater capacity in the future.

I am currently working towards a doctorate in civil engineering and my current research project looks at what people might call a 'first-world problem.' When a new basement structure, such as a railway station box, is built in London Clay, the construction process is typically complete within two years, but the contact forces between the structure and the soil keeps changing slowly for over a decade afterwards,

40

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Left: Deryck's experimental device to simulate basement construction Right: Jeffrey standing in front of a neutron Target Station 2 at ISIS Neutron Source

sometimes displacing a centimeter a year for several years. Engineers must use past data to predict these delayed movements before building the structure, but the dearth of data – because buildings are typically left alone once they’re finished rather than monitored continuously for decades – led to much conservatism in the industry. My work involves using a 10-metrediameter centrifuge to replicate this phenomenon in the laboratory, so we can make predictions using a 1-in-100 scale model and simulate a decade’s worth of movement in a day.

My work only provides incremental technical improvements to the wider issue of infrastructure provision. Ultimately, one needs to have clear moral values if one’s scientific contribution has political consequences. To this end, I look no further than to the Holy Bible for inspiration. Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Infrastructure ought to build people’s lives and empower disadvantaged communities by connecting them to economic and social wealth. And it is with these values in mind that I strive to contribute to society as a Christian and a civil engineer, because “unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”

JEFFREY POON (FH 06-11) PHD Student, Chemistry, University of Cambridge

E

ver since my GCSE studies, I've known that I had an aptitude for science and applied mathematics. That, coupled with a desperate desire to get out of studying subjects that required me to write essays, led me to pursue physical science-based A level subjects, and to studying chemistry at Oxford. I always enjoyed chemistry lessons, in no small part thanks to the brilliant teaching of Dr Denis Cruse at Tonbridge, and its relevance to virtually all applied science. At first, I envisaged myself ending up in the fields of either pharmaceutical or synthetic chemistry. How wrong I was!

Whilst at Oxford, I found myself increasingly drawn to the studies of physical chemistry. This branch of chemistry applies experimental techniques and theories of physics into chemically-relevant systems. I was in awe of the power of experiments in rationalising behaviour, from the most mundane (why do water droplets form on glass?), to the very complex (what happens on the electrode surface inside a battery?).

This led me to be interested in pursuing a career in research.

In summer 2013, I was awarded a RISE Scholarship funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The research placement was in Mainz, Germany for two months, to investigate synthesis of polycarbonates using gaseous carbon dioxide. The experience taught me two important life lessons.

Firstly, no worthwhile results come without putting a significant amount of thought into controlling the possible variables. Good results take time.

Secondly, perhaps more importantly, is the need to take initiative. For the first two weeks (a quarter of my stay there), my experiments consistently yielded no results, despite repeated checking and careful preparation. It was then that I decided to compose a

short memorandum, using what synthetic chemistry I already knew, explaining why I did not think the experiment would work on the reagents used. After much discussion, my supervisor was convinced, and we changed our approach. Subsequent experiments yielded excellent results and led to the publication of my first academic paper.

Later, I began working in the field of electrochemistry at Oxford. Using those important lessons I learned in Germany, I was relatively successful and published more papers by my graduation in 2015, including my first paper with me as the lead author. I couldn't escape essay writing after all! This success spurred me to continue further studies and led to my current post as a final year doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, studying industrially-relevant surface chemistry.

In my short academic career, it's struck me that my original perceptions of research were quite different from reality. This was particularly true during my doctoral studies, which taught me the importance of collaboration. The days of science being the purview of a few lone geniuses, if ever true, are long gone. The need for cooperative research is best demonstrated by publicly-funded facilities such as CERN, or the lesser-known Diamond Light Source and ISIS Neutron Source, which I'm lucky to have experienced first hand, while working there.

My plan now is to become an early career researcher.

However, early career researchers in physical sciences now face a challenging career landscape, where the historically-enjoyed job security from permanent tenure is lost through new contract-based systems while compensation remains meagre for the high-level skills and long hours required from workers. As a result, many graduates are understandably being attracted to careers in the financial or commercial sectors, which pay far more, and often with limits on working hours.

Science now faces a serious risk of ‘brain drain’. Most would sensibly ask why people would choose to continue pursuing an academic career. For me, there is nothing quite like the thrill of discovering something new for myself, with the aid of others, and meeting like-minded people combining their expertise to achieve greater insights into the mechanism of our world. I hope that, despite the difficulties highlighted, more Tonbridgians may be interested in choosing a research career and I certainly look forward to working with a few in the future.

APRIL 2019

41

RONALD CREASY (PH 52-57) Mining Engineer

T

he choice of a career in the mining industry is not something one meets too often in OTs and my gravitation in this direction came from a family history of colonial stock, mainly from China, India and Ceylon, and their assumption that Britain after the war was not the place to be.

My science orientation led to a number of enquiries into the various engineering options with perhaps the lure of a very generous metalliferous mining scholarship following an entrance exhibition to Imperial College tipping the decision. I duly entered the Royal School of Mines in October 1957. I graduated in 1960, and started work on the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia. In those days, mining in Southern Africa was controlled by the large mining houses. The life of mining graduates in Africa followed a fairly arduous route where one worked at every job in the mine from shovelling, timbering, drilling, blasting and hauling the ore to the shaft, as well as the treatment of the ore in the surface plant - a programme which took two years to complete. It did give one a very good insight into the workings of a large mine where the number of employees could total some 10,000 or more.

It was a system which worked from the Cape of Good Hope up to the Copperbelt bordering on the Belgian Congo.

Harold Macmillan in his famous 'Winds of Change' speech in the late 1950s was spot on. What he did not foresee was the corruption which would creep into the mining industry and effectively destroy it.

Independence came to Northern Rhodesia in 1964 with the creation of Zambia. The problem came with the impatience of the politicians with the rate of progress of Africanisation. Fast-tracked mining graduates failed to master the complex requirements of a large mining operation. The profitability of the Copperbelt mines took a severe hit in the years that followed and what had been a massive industry went into decline. Today it is being re-financed by China, a very different type of colonialism. The demise of the mining industry in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe following the end of UDI in 1980 is well documented and followed a far worse course, i.e. blatant interference by politicians.

In South Africa, prior to the 1994 universal franchise vote and for a number of years thereafter, starting up a mine was a well documented process provided one

42

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Above: Harold Macmillan delivers his famed 'Winds of Change' speech Right: Superphenix Reactor in Creys-Malville, France

could secure the funding. The landmark decision by the Government to transfer the mineral rights without compensation from the landowners and hold them by the State together with the excessive requirement for free equity distribution has virtually put a stop to all new mining activity in the country. One Chief Executive has publicly stated that he has no longer any interest in starting new mines in South Africa.

Despite this, there is in South Africa a huge pool of highly qualified geologists and engineers with hard-earned mining skills. It is perhaps lucky that Cecil John Rhodes stopped at the Belgium Congo border because now there is still half a continent of only partly explored land rich in minerals. It is in these areas that South African mining personnel of all disciplines are working under expatriate conditions. The results of their work has brought relative wealth to these countries and much needed infrastructural development into the areas in which these mines have been started. Unfortunately the politicians are already looking at possible ways of milking these operations.

Many mining companies have halted development plans and/or pulled out of certain countries because of corruption and what amounts to subtle bribery demands.

Big mining is highly capital intensive and through mining the only practical way a country can fast track infrastructural development. As I celebrate my 80th birthday I still enjoy a part time participation in developing a mining operation, but not in Africa. It is sad to see a once mighty industry in Southern Africa sink into a quagmire of greed and corruption.

JEREMY TULLETT (SH 72-76) Skills & Competency Manager, Alstom Transport UK

I

was, I thought, born to be a chemist. I had a chemistry set at home. I loved the subject at Tonbridge and gained a place at Oxford to read Natural Sciences (chemistry).

Then I got a job during the nine months before going up to university which involved using a computer. Computers back then were room-sized beasts which were accessed from clunky terminals or even teletypes, but I was set to doing scientific programming, and was bitten by the problem-solving bug inherent in modelling a physical system with a computer programme.

Having arrived on my course, much as I still enjoyed studying chemistry (apart from organic chemistry, which I completely failed to grasp), I went out of my way to head for the physical chemistry options (which involved the use of computers), before doing my Part II in the Department of Theoretical Chemistry. No test tubes there!

This slightly quaint start landed me my first job as a scientific programmer on the UKAEA’s Fast Reactor project, in Dorset. They were specifically looking for scientists who could programme. Then, as now, pure programmers with no real-world knowledge tended to be geeky types who could rework your operating system for you, but do nothing useful.

This included a year on detached duty at CEA-CEN Cadarache in Provence supporting the Superphenix startup project. Tough tour of duty that, with all the sunshine, scenery, wine...

As UKAEA moved through privatisation, morphing into AEA Technology, my experience led me to: programming offshore safety software, safety consultancy, R&D programme management, and then managing the Y2k project for AEA Technology Rail in Derby, which had recently been bought, when it was still called British Rail Research.

I moved to Derby, and became interested in general management, specifically skills and competency management. After a short-enforced career break, I joined what is (for now) Alstom Transport UK, where I am the Skills and Competency Manager for the Signalling, Systems and Infrastructure division.

Anyone with a scientific leaning loves to learn, and I have to some extent driven my career by obtaining a number of vocational qualifications to accompany my MA (Oxon). The Oxford badge probably helped in my twenties, but you need proof of competence in any field of endeavour. My hatful of NVQs demonstrate both that, and a continuing interest in selfdevelopment, helps to impress employers who may otherwise regard the middle-aged applicant as someone slowing down for retirement. The achievement of which I am proudest, in this respect, is to have obtained the heady status of Chartered Manager.

The scientists (and mathematicians) whom I most admire are some of the popularisers of science and mathematics, particularly Jim al Khalili, who can make really hard topics accessible to the interested layman. In my own small way, as a STEM ambassador, I suppose that I try to emulate that.

My message? No one should get hung up on science if a scientific career doesn’t follow your first interest. We can’t all be world-leading researchers, and R&D jobs are hard to find both in academia, and outside of it. Follow your nose, get trained and educated in other things.

You never know where you might end up.

APRIL 2019

43

let's

GET SOCIAL Professional networking on Tonbridge Connect tonbridgeconnect.org/clubs

A

s part of our aim to provide you with ways to collaborate, network and support each other, we recently launched Tonbridge Connect, a private online platform for the Tonbridge community.

This year, exciting developments have been taking place on the site, offering you even more ways to connect and interact with the 1,000+ members already signed up. With the launch of Tonbridge Connect’s new and improved Club pages, connecting with OTs in your region or industry has never been easier.

Whether you’re about to relocate, or are already living abroad, our 5 regional clubs, currently made up of Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, USA and Canada are a useful support network. They offer a place to share advice, network, or organise a get-together with fellow OTs currently living in these regions.

Similarly, no matter what stage you are at in your career, our 15 industry clubs allow you to benefit from the expertise of our global community of OT professionals, from graduate to senior leadership level. If you would like to take careers support a step further, why not also sign up to our mentoring scheme, and help make a positive impact on another OT’s career? You can choose what level of support you would like to provide, from general careers support, interview preparation, CV advice, to

44

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

holding a talk for current pupils at Tonbridge School. Once you’ve signed up, OTs can send you a mentoring request, which you can review and either choose to accept or decline.

You can also limit the number of mentees you are able to support at any given time, to a level that suits you.

You can also use Tonbridge Connect’s clubs page to keep up to speed with OT Sports clubs, and other interest-based clubs like the OT Lodge group.

If you’re interested in starting a club that doesn’t already exist, please get in touch with a member of our team, who can support you in building this community.

To get started, sign up through your profile page on Tonbridge Connect.

For all careers and mentoring enquiries contact:  tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org To find out more, visit: tonbridgeconnect.org/clubs tonbridgeconnect.org/careers

COULD YOU BE A CAREER KICKSTARTER? Sign up to our mentoring scheme at: tonbridgeconnect.org/careers

APRIL 2019

45

THE OT READING LIST D

iscover the latest releases from the world of OT literature. In recent months, we’ve been treated to Sir Tim Waterstone’s (JH 52-57) new memoir, The Face Pressed Against a Window, in which Britain’s most successful bookseller explains what let him to open Waterstones and how he built it up into the business empire it is today.

Explore a sport obsessed dystopian world in Michael Aylwin's (PH 85-90) kickstarter-funded novel, set in the year 2144, and follow Philip Pendered

46

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

(CR 67-95) as he travels, footloose and free, in Spain under Franco and 1960's France.

Revel in the marvellous eccentricity of some of the Church of England’s most curious vicars in Fergus Butler-Gallie's (PS 05-10) first book, and enjoy Christopher Reid’s (PH 62-67) exquisitely compiled canine-orientated response to T.S. Eliot’s best-selling collection of practical cat poems.

Include your book in the next edition:  tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org

THE READING LIST

Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs Christopher Reid (PH 62-67)

Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero Charles Sprawson (PH 55-59)

Judge not, lest ye be judged. This timeless wisdom has guided the Anglican Church for hundreds of years, fostering a certain tolerance of eccentricity among its members. ButlerGallie’s first book is a compendium of several centuries worth of gloriously mad, ecclesiastical nuttiness.

Featuring the likes of the ‘Mermaid of Morwenstow’, who excommunicated a cat for mousing on a Sunday, and ‘Mad Jack’, who swapped his surplice for a leopard skin and insisted on being carried around in a coffin.

Christopher Reid offers a canine rejoinder to T. S. Eliot’s best-selling Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; one of the most successful poetry collections in the world. Reid wrote the collection in response to an invitation from the Estate of T. S. Eliot, and features illustrations by Elliot Elam. His witty and varied poems introduce characters such as Dobson the Dog Detective, Flo the Philosophical Foxhound, and Frazzlesprat, a dog who would really rather be a cat.

Haunts of the Black Masseur is a dazzling introduction to the great swimming heroes, from Byron leaping into the surf at Shelley's funeral to Hart Crane diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico. Bursting with anecdote, Charles Sprawson leads us into a watery world populated by lithe demi-gods – a world that has obsessed humans from the ancient Greeks and Romans, to Yeats, Woolf, Fitzgerald and Hockney.

Ivon Michael Aylwin (PH 85-90)

The World of Tides William Thomson (PS 01-06)

Made for Love: A Hippie’s Memoir Philip Pendered (CR 67-95)

Ivon is a fast-moving sporting dystopia by one of the Guardian's leading sportswriters. The book is set in the year 2144, and the world is powered by sport - politically and practically.

Each community owes its prosperity or otherwise to the success of its teams and athletes. A person's class is determined by their aptitude for sport. Once their useful life as an athlete has expired, they are placed in stasis at an age predetermined by that class.

In The Book of Tides, William Thomson took the reader on a mesmerising journey round the coast of Britain. Now, he sets out with his surfboard and tidal compass to encounter the waters of the world, charting his most extraordinary sights and experiences. These include the whirlpools of the Arctic circle, the world's biggest ever surfed wave off Portugal, the strongest whirlpool in Norway and, in Australia, the most dangerous rapids known to us.

Follow Philip Pendered as he travels, footloose and free, in Spain under Franco and 1960s France. Honest and entertaining, and as you would expect from a hippie’s memoir, full of sex, drugs and other surprises. It offers many different moods, some humorous, some, describing the power of music, wonderfully profound. Readers are treated to all kinds of intriguing thoughts about what it means to be young, alive and free.

A Field Guide to the English Clergy The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie (PS 05-10)

APRIL 2019

47

Uncharted Bill Bruford (FH 62-67)

The Fox Frederick Forsyth (PS 52-55)

The Multiverse Andrew Wynne Owen (SH 07-11)

What do expert drummers do? Why do they do it? Is there anything creative about it? If so, how might that creativity inform their practice and that of others in related artistic spheres? Applying ideas from cultural psychology to findings from research into the creative behaviours of a specific subset of popular music instrumentalists, Bill Bruford demonstrates the ways in which expert drummers experience creativity in music performance and offers fresh insights into in-the-moment interactional processes in music.

Most weapons do what you tell them.

Most weapons you can control. But what if the most dangerous weapon in the world isn’t a smart missile or a stealth submarine or even an AI computer programme? What if it’s a 17-year-old boy with a blisteringly brilliant mind, who can run rings around the most sophisticated security services across the globe, who can manipulate that weaponry and turn it against the superpowers themselves?

Wynne Own received Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize in 2014 and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2015. His first book of poems celebrates human curiosity and is written in a variety of strictly observed metres and with rhyme. The Multiverse sings of science, philosophy, and religion, testing the emotional valences of each. The poet is an enthusiast - for the visible world, for scientific and philosophical excursions.

The Fourth Education Revolution Sir Anthony Seldon (CR 89-93)

The Face Pressed Against a Window: A Memoir Sir Tim Waterstone (JH 52-57)

A Short History of the Angmering Park Shoot Nigel Clutton (HS 48-51)

In this charming and evocative memoir, Sir Tim Waterstone recalls his formative years in a small town in rural England at the end of the Second World War. He explores the troubled relationship he had with his father, before moving on to the epiphany he had while studying at Cambridge, which set him on the road to Waterstone's and gave birth to the creative strategy that made him a high street name.

Game shooting may not be to everyone’s taste; but has become a driving force behind the creation and restoration of so much of the landscape in the South Downs. This book tells of Angmering Park’s transformation from a little-used peripheral beat, and former Second World War tank training range, into one of the country’s leading driven game shoots.

Will artificial intelligence liberate or infantilise humanity? Vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, and former Head of Politics and History for Tonbridge School, Sir Anthony Seldon explores the impact AI will have on the education sector in his latest book, The Fourth Education Revolution.

48

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

THE READING LIST

SAVE THE DATE Ironside: The Authorised Biography of Field Marshal Lord Ironside Edmund Ironside

This first full authorised biography of 1st Baron Ironside is the definitive account of the incredibly varied and long career of one of the most prolific military leaders of the twentieth century. From commanding allied forces in WW1, to Chief of Imperial General Staff and later, Commander-in-Chief Home Forces in WW2, this was a man born to serve.

Witten by his son, Edmund Ironside, the biography is based upon the field marshal’s meticulously kept diaries covering more than fifty years.

Wednesday 1 May

CITY DRINKS Skinners' Hall

Thursday 16 May

PAST PRESIDENTS' LUNCH Tonbridge School Thursday 6 June

SUMMER LUNCH Skinners' Hall Thursday 6 June

OTS AGM

Skinners' Hall Date TBC

OT CRICKET REUNION Tonbridge School

Saturday 16 November

OT REUNION Tonbridge School

The Test Nathan Leamon (CR 95-12) Fast-paced, humorous and candid, The Test follows the battles on and off the field as stand-in England captain, James McCall, tries to get his exhausted team across the finish line. Along the way, his story becomes one of fatherhood, friendship and trusting yourself when no one else will. Nathan Leamon's love letter to Test cricket captures the feel and flavour of professional sport from the inside - the good, the bad and the simply surreal.

Date TBC

OT RUGBY REUNION Tonbridge School

Tuesday 24 September

144

TH

ANNUAL OT DINNER Skinners' Hall

Please visit our website to stay up to date with the latest Tonbridge Society events: tonbridgeconnect.org/events

APRIL 2019

49

The ART OF BEER Jonathan Downing (FH 76-80)

B

eer is my life. The summer of 1976 saw the end of my first year as a Day Boy at Tonbridge and my first foray into home brewing with my dad, a PhD in micro biology and chemistry. Needless to say, a great teacher.

At the age of sixteen, my first job was as a cellarman and back stairs runner at the George and Dragon in Speldhurst. This was followed soon after by a move to Moscow and becoming a boarder for my last two years of school where, unfortunately brewing was frowned upon.

The city and University of Birmingham allowed me to renew my brewing endeavours, working in pubs and at proper breweries packaging during peak season. For

50

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

the Live Aid festivities our house had 8 brews on the go, to keep us going all through the night.

After graduating and applying for jobs at various UK breweries, leaning towards the sales and marketing side to make use of my B.Comm, I had the chance to visit my sister in Canada for a couple of weeks. While in Toronto I heard of a brewing conference and thought it may be interesting to see what was happening in the Canadian industry.

'Sitting alone in a Pub' is a great way to start any story, let alone a career, but the first evening of the conference I was doing just that when some French Canadians who owned the Atlas Hotel, a bar and hotel complex in Welland asked if they could join me. They were also attending the conference and had purchased

some equipment that day with the goal to be the first brewpub to open in the province of Ontario.

They were keen to learn about English beers and brewing and as luck would have it, they also needed a brewer to help them get started. An invitation to visit their property led to an employment offer to help them start the brewery.

Approximately six months later, after applying to move to Canada and attending the United States Brewing Academy in Chicago for further education (and to see if they did anything radically different in North America), I moved to Ontario to design, build and open the Atlas Hotel Brew Pub, license number BPL 001 - one of the first ten brewpubs in North America since prohibition.

One brewery opening led to another. In a nascent industry you are in high demand if you have the skills and are prepared to work anywhere, such that within my first five years in Canada I had helped open or worked for about twenty brewery startups across Canada and the USA. I set up my own consulting Company in 1994 with the career goal of opening one hundred breweries, a goal reached by 2006 in a rapidly growing, worldwide industry. Along the way I was lucky to get a contract with the US military to build fourteen breweries on bases in the US, Japan and Korea culminating in a brewery at Pearl Harbor for the Pacific Fleet. 'Work' also took me to Cyprus, the Caribbean, and made me the first North American allowed into the city of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro, Ukraine ) after the Soviet era.

I got married in the summer of 2006, had hit my business goal of one hundred breweries, trained about four hundred brewery staff, designed well over three thousand beers, won a long list of awards and still loved my job. But not the travelling so much.

An endeavour for the next phase of my life was to have people come to me, and aided by my accountant who knew the right people, to approach Niagara College to facilitate this. The idea was to start a course or class there teaching people about craft beer and brewing. The college already had a successful culinary program and had started a Teaching Winery to support the local industry in the Niagara region.

At the time, there were about fifty breweries in Ontario but the industry was showing signs of another growth period, therefore already in desperate need of trained, educated brewing staff. After consulting with the Ontario Craft Brewers Association and other beer industry experts they agreed with me and the new adventure began.

Creating a college course that had never existed in the world was educational, challenging, and a lot of fun, especially when working with the dedicated professionals at Niagara College. Having the opportunity to design and build the world’s first teaching brewery, which as a learning enterprise is also a commercial craft brewery, is the most rewarding thing I have done thus far.

In 2010, we welcomed our first intake of students and have grown as rapidly as the craft brewing industry has in the years since. We earned the commendation as the best college programme in Canada along with numerous other awards. Currently, we have seventy eight students on campus, from the starting point of twenty four in 2010. I am told we still have maintained a 100% graduate placement in jobs, unique among all programmes in Canada.

We just graduated our 250th student, and are now a year-round programme with a semester added in the summer, due to the demand for our graduates who come from across the world to attend. The industry in Ontario has grown to nearly three hundred breweries, but our graduates go far and wide; working in, managing and roughly 10% owning their own companies, to date.

There are over three hundred applicants for each of the three class intakes annually, with eighteen to twenty students in each class, it seems that I will happily be here for a while.

If you happen to be in Ontario, and in particular the Toronto area, I invite you to come and visit the Glendale Campus of Niagara College where a Teaching Distillery was just added. Within minutes of us are over one hundred breweries, wineries, distilleries, and of course the magnificent Niagara Falls. ➻

APRIL 2019

51

Jonathan's

'GO TO' BREWS

M

y usual 'go to' is whatever my students are brewing for class projects. They are always creative, innovative and above all well made. There are some classic examples of beers I always look forward to and are my ‘go to’ when I can get them; Wadworth’s '6X' is the finest example of an English real ale when served from the cask and even in cans and bottles is not bad. Other beers in this category would be Sierra Nevada Pale ale, Guinness and Weihenstephan's 'Hefe Weissbier'.

Local beers are really the best though; fresh, unique, often brewed using local ingredients and seasonally available. Oast Brewers 'Pitchfork Porter' is a standard but their use of local apricots, chestnuts, strawberries

52

and other produce from Niagara make their portfolio of brews really stand out. Brimstone and Bench breweries also have excellent local themed brews. A little further away in Gravenhurst Ontario and enjoying a newer style of beer, I enjoy drinking ‘Juicin’, a hoppy, hazy seasonal IPA from Sawdust City.

But generally, my order will be whatever I find on a particular day with friends at any brewery or brewpub; it could be a Pilsner from Steam Whistle when I'm in downtown Toronto, a sour from Mikkeller in Baghaven, a '10W30' from Neustadt in Ontario, or a 'Snake Head' from Mundo Maya in Playa del Carmen. The style or brand is usually not important, the company I am with and the taste and quality of the beer make that one my current favourite. ●

Juicin' Sawdust City 6.0% vol

Pilsner Steam Whistle 5.0% vol

Hefe Weissbier Weihenstephaner 5.4% vol

Sour Varieties Mikkeller

Snake Head Mundo Maya 5.1% vol

Draught Guinness 4.1% vol

Pitchfork Porter Oast House Brewers 5.3% vol

10W30 Neustadt 5.5% vol

Pale Ale Sierra Nevada 5.6 % vol

6X Wadworth 4.1 % vol

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

A life of

EXPLORATION

Anthony Osmond-Evans (Sc 56-61) Above: Portrait of Anthony Osmond-Evans, by Peter Draper Jnr.

A

t school I was a keen sportsman, and this continued with Real Tennis, which I later learnt at Petworth. I was most fortunate to have a brilliant partner, John Ward, and we won the 1976 Manchester Invitation World Doubles.

In the 1980s, I had travelled round China, a country with which I had fallen in love whilst working for Johnnie Walker Whisky in Hong Kong in the 60s, when Sir David Trench (SH 29-33) was Governor. I greatly admired the artistic skills of the Chinese artisans in fine porcelain and woodcraft - steeped in Confucian culture.

Behind every successful person there is always that element of luck. In the summer of 1983, I rose early and looked out of my bedroom window in Guilin, Southern China. Soldiers were arriving at a stadium in a small football ground behind the hotel. A sombre tone and martial music prevailed. I knew something serious was happening.

Villagers were herded in, clearly traumatised. Twelve prisoners - placards hanging from their necks, were paraded in front of soldiers and officials. Later, I discovered the prisoners had been accused of serious crimes - from GBH to murder.

Justice was dealt with summarily and swiftly. Heads bowed, the guilty were marched away and shot. The cost of the bullet - $1 - was then charged to each family.

Macabre!

By good fortune and well-hidden, I took some great

photographs with a telephoto lens.

You create your own luck. Gary Player famously said: “It’s funny, the more I practise the luckier I become.”

Ten thousand people were similarly executed in 1983 throughout China (0.1% of the nation). Clearly, the Politburo brooked no opposition and the peasants were kept in line.

(China had annexed Tibet, with its gentle Buddhist Religion. In the Northwest region, 1 million of the Uighurs (Muslim) are today in camps for 'correctional training'. In 2032, Hong Kong - with its British law and financial centre - will be fully integrated into China).

When I returned to London - desperately guarding my precious films through customs - I prayed the X-ray machines had not damaged them. I rang my good friend Brian Nicholson, managing director of the Observer to tell him I had photographs of these executions.

He said: “F***ing Osmond-Evans. Trust you to capture these, when we are desperate for photos for a feature (Sir) Donald Trelford is running in next month's supplement! Will you accept £5,000 for the world rights?” My photo did come out all over the world Mort du Matin in Paris Match for instance.

With all that money, I went straight off to buy the latest Nikon equipment. My life as a photographer had really started in earnest.

During the 80s, I successfully founded Good Connections, which introduced Heads of Industry to ➻

APRIL 2019

53

major Service Companies.

In 1989, one major client was Sir John Baker, the head of National Power. Over cricket at Lords or during the dinner interval at Glyndebourne, I showed him the best photographs from my world travels. This led to my photographic book, National Lights, to showcase his new public company.

Lit up buildings are the best visible manifestation of electricity, but I nearly got arrested one night when a police car drew up on the A6 as I was photographing RAF Fylingdales (the then giant listening-in domes). I said I was quite legitimately outside the security perimeter, but It didn’t help when I also mentioned that I had had a private dinner with the Foreign Secretary the previous night! The sergeant grabbed his walkie-talkie and told his superior “Chief, we've a right one ‘ere - says he had dinner with the foreign thingy last night.” After much bureaucratic unravelling, I was allowed to continue.

From then on, my publishing career never looked back. In 1995 I published China The Beautiful, with a Foreword by Sir Edward Heath - much respected by the Chinese government.

The book was the result of a 6-year adventure in China, starting from Harbin in the North with its ice sculptures (minus 40 in Winter). My camera battery died after each shot and I had to warm it up in my ‘crown jewels”. I then travelled the Silk Route to Samarkand, to the sub tropics in Southern China and to Lhasa at 12,000 ft in Tibet.

Former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd told me: “The awe-inspiring photograph of the Potala Palace set against the backdrop of the mighty Himalayas makes me realise how insignificant our own lives are”.* Through Douglas, I arranged for Sir Edward Heath to

present my book to the Government Heads at an Emperors Banquet, which I hosted in Beijing.

Next, I published India The Beautiful in 1997 to celebrate 50 years of Independence from the British Raj. In order to obtain Sponsors for all my books - mainly from industrial giants - I needed to meet heads of industry. In Bombay (nowadays called Mumbai) I stayed at the best hotel, The Taj Mahal. I had deliberately booked on the fourth floor of the old colonial wing, as did those leaders I had in mind. I took the lift to breakfast at 7 o’clock. Leaders are frequently early risers.

In those days, suits and Old Boy ties (often easily recognisable) were de rigeur: OT, Old Etonian, The Guards, MCC, Hawks Club. These ties gave me my opening gambit “I see you are an Old...”

For an hour I never left the lift. My ploy had worked.

Thirty 'Breakfasteers’ invited me to London. Ten were to become Sponsors of my new book.

Whilst in Calcutta (now Kolkata), I visited Mother Teresa by appointment, but she politely said she didn’t want a photograph that day. I said that was ok, and we sat on her veranda whilst for an hour she held my hands between her own tiny gnarled hands. Probably the most peaceful hour of my life in a turbulent world.

On leaving, I presented her with a £1,000 cheque. She said: "Now, about that photograph, Dear!” Alas, the sun had dropped leaving her in shadow. If I went down to my driver for the flash, I would lose the moment. So I just raised my camera, held on grimly and prayed. I got the picture.

I then published, at the Millennium, a book on Britain with an elegant foreword by Douglas Hurd. Prince Charles wrote to me to say how much he had admired my book about the country he loved.

54

* The former home of the 14th Dalai Lama. One of my prized possessions is the padlock to his Master Bedroom.

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

Left: Wellington Arch, taken whilst whizzing around in a taxi, by Anthony Osmond-Evans Middle: The Potala Palace, Lhasa, by Anthony Osmond-Evans Right: Portrait of Mother Teresa, by Anthony Osmond-Evans

In 2012, I was commissioned by Boris Johnson to publish a coffee-table book, The Spirit of London, in honour of the London Olympics and to celebrate The Diamond Jubilee of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Boris wrote the foreword and presented it to every Olympian. The book shows an OT dinner at Skinners Hall and includes Gibbo. Forty-thousand books were sold.

Previously this millennium, I had published three books, The Magic of Monaco, which was commissioned by HSH Prince Albert; The World’s Finest Spas, commissioned by Rolex; and 50 Remarkable Years, with a foreword by Chris Patten and an article by Frederick Forsyth (PS 52-55), which celebrated HM The Queen’s Golden Anniversary.

I have just completed the photography for the 8th book, The Rider’s Balance, by my lovely partner, Lady Sylvia Loch. Sylvia is, arguably, the world's leading authority on Classical Dressage and has that special gift of brilliantly conveying her teachings through her books and demonstrations.

This year, 2019, is the 50th anniversary of the landing on the moon. My club, the Explorers Club in New York, is celebrating this amazing achievement at our annual dinner next week. Buzz Aldrin, who was the second man on the moon, is one of our most honoured members - as is Elon Musk, whose company, SpaceX, has just docked crew Dragon with the International Space Station. Sir Edmund Hillary has been our late President.

Our annual dinner starts with a buffet of barbecued crocodile, green Iguana, goat eyeballs, tarantula and cockroaches! Whatever, lots of protein!!

One has to be invited to become a member and my invitation was for exploratory work on the Tibetan plateau. By way of reciprocity, one has the use of the

famous Bucks club in London.

By way of an amusing aside, I was having dinner some years ago with the King in Bhutan and he was complaining about the fact that he was currently married to 4 sisters, who gang up on him. I volunteered: “Sir, there is one bit of good news.” He enquired: “What on earth can that possibly be?" I responded: "You only have one mother-in-law!”

Envisaged for the future are books for HH The Aga Khan on his wonderful gardens around the world; Westminster; and The Old Rectories of England.

I am extremely fortunate to have two successful daughters, both of whom enjoy challenging PR careers.

Nicola is currently with Tusk Elephant Charity and Saskia was formerly with M&S. Saskia has also given me a delightful granddaughter, Florence, aged 4.

Today, we all live in a highly complex world with major religious differences, not to mention power hungry despots and political leaders. I learn that Iran with its Nukes is hellbent on annihilating Jerusalem and Israel, thus giving it direct access to the Mediterranean.

After an extraordinary life, I am in my last chapter hopefully a long one - but I do fear for the future, especially for my children and grandchild.

However, Tonbridge will still be here, and I am much reassured by the words from the great school song: "This is the school, my school: I am a word in her story…

Though I die and mine own forget me, my name is here - and I live For teacher and taught touch hands and part, but the School, the School remaineth Greeting Tonbridge, Tonbridge!

Farewell, Mother of sons!" ●

APRIL 2019

55

SHUTTER SPEED Neil Bruce (PH 56-60)

I

was at - ‘attended’ maybe not an accurate word - Tonbridge School from Autumn 1956 to Summer 1960, and was in Park House. I was not an academic by any interpretation, and it took 2 years of detention to get seven O Levels. Having a bike for the shooting club, I spent most summer Saturday afternoons cycling round local antique shops, instead of watching boring cricket matches, which was compulsory. Thus there was no way I was going to Uni, and I had to decide how to earn a living. I spent from 1960 to 1970 mostly in TV advertising, starting as an Ad agency messenger and ending as a sales Executive at Woman’s Own Magazine, when I was made redundant

by Channel TV! When ‘asked to leave’ Woman’s Own - I hated it - I took up photography, inspired by my dear friend Lewis Morley (who took the iconic shot of Christine Keeler naked on the chair), and found my way into photographing cars, which were my love. Early on I took snaps for the Esher News road tests, meeting racing drivers Tony Brooks and Roy Salvadori, who ran local garages. When we decided to road test a Ferrari Dino, we went to Maranello Concessionaires (MC) in Egham, and I was taken for a ride by racing driver Michael Salmon, photographing the speedo reading 108 mph along the 50 mph bypass!

As I left MC I was asked by their MD Shaun Bealey for some prints, which I 56

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

duly sent. I received a reply saying that I was the first photographer to actually keep their word, and send prints, and would I take some pictures for them. This first commission was to shoot a Daytona Spider for the 1971 Motor Show stand.

There was just one black example in the UK, and I had to shoot it on the very wet October Saturday before the Press day the following Tuesday, and get a 4ft square print on the stand in time. We moved the car into the showroom…

The next job was in January 1972 when I photographed the whole Ferrari range at nearby Wentworth golf course.

I continued to shoot all new models and other subjects for MC until press material came from the factory in 1983.

In April 1973 they took me to the Factory on a dealer visit, where I managed to get lots of great material, including Enzo and his PA Dr Franco Gotzi at the Fiorano circuit, but I was shooting film with a 5 x 4 inch plate camera, and a 6x6 cm Rollie, not digital, so of course one had no idea whether one had good shots until one developed the film at home! ‘Chimping’ meant nothing in those days…

I even had a hair-raising ride round the track in the prototype 365 Boxer Berlinetta.

Working freelance I spent many happy hours with my MC driver pal Alan Mapp, including a day spent in the Black Mountains with the new 1984 Mondial Cabriolet, and was allowed to drive ➻

APRIL 2019

57

58

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

that back home in Burghclere, North Hants.

By then, I was also becoming the main supplier of car photos to UK and overseas calendar companies, as well as having hundreds of pictures used in motoring books.

I was trusted enough to be lent Ferraris, so I borrowed several around that time. When the new F40 arrived in 1988, I was allowed a whole fine October morning with the pre-production prototype, with Alan Mapp driving and positioning it for me, and I was allowed a drive. It was a monster. It was so important to get a car precisely positioned that I much preferred to have a driver, and I must be the only snapper to have turned down the offer of a Testarossa for the day, as Alan wasn’t available!

Of course I was doing other car photography at the same time, and was the UK snapper for the luxury American motoring magazine, Automobile Quarterly, between 1974 and 1985.

Sadly AQ didn’t survive for long after it was later sold by its owner, Scott Bailey.

I met classic car dealer Nigel Dawes in about 1975 when doing an AQ shoot on Lagondas, and became a regular visitor to his lovely Malverns home Birtsmorton Court. Nigel would ring me and tell me he had just bought some exotic classic and I would drive the 1 1/4 hours planning exactly where I would position the car, as I soon knew the site so well.

In about 1978 I had met car collector

‘Bob’ Roberts, who was later to start the Midland Motor Museum at Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and I became the museum photographer, until it was sold and then closed.

In around 1980, while working for AQ magazine I realised that there could be a market for the posters that they were producing, so imported some to test.

They were so well received I started a secondary business which I named ‘Classic Car Goodies’, selling the posters to all the UK motor museums, including Beaulieu where I was soon supplying some 60% of their stock. I was also selling the Ferrari, Aston Martin and Jaguar factory posters, and soon had a thriving business, with the Beaulieu Autojumble the high spot of the year. I then obtained licenses to print car badge stickers, but it soon got too much, and I found myself telling people I was a ‘packing clerk’, shipping some 10,000 posters worldwide a year, and so, sold the business to get back to photography.

One of the finest cars I shot was the concept Jaguar XJ220 which was a true 48 valve mid V12 engined car, unlike the horrid V6 production result. I have a framed print of this photo signed by its stylist Keith Helfet.

I’m now retired from photography, but still work freelance for MC as I have reprinted all out of print Ferrari handbooks, parts books etc. since 1980, so I have been associated with them for 47 unbroken years All good fun. ●

APRIL 2019

59

60

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

MARIE WALLACE, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

MAKE AN EVENT out of any occasion

Once again thanks to you and all your team at Tonbridge School for helping us with the Festival. We were really impressed by the commitment, professionalism and attention to detail.

For all enquiries, contact:  events@tonbridge-school.org

To find out more, visit: www.tonbridge-events.co.uk

W

ith superb facilities, beautiful reception rooms and great accessibility, Tonbridge School is an excellent choice for any event. As Business Development Manager, Marie has been making the most of these outstanding facilities since taking over the department in 2012, with all profits re-invested back into the school.

More than 250 private events are held at the school every year, ranging from one-off private functions and corporate events, to full-board residential courses that run for a number of weeks on an annual basis. Clients range from local companies to national and international schools and organisations including Australia Athletics, GB hockey and National Youth Associations.

Combining historic charm with modern amenities, the school offers a number of unique venues against a backdrop that guests remember and event organisers want to use again and again.

The events department are delighted to offer OTs the opportunity to hold business or private functions at the school. The dedicated team of events co-ordinators will provide a bespoke service, working closely with you from initial inquiry to managing the event on the day, providing a personal touch at all times. Whether you are planning a conference, training day, product launch, client networking event or even a wedding or memorial service, Tonbridge School has the answer.

The school is keen to invite OTs back for a site tour to see the fantastic developments that the school has undergone in recent years. The latest developments include the brand-new Barton Science centre, opened by NASA astronauts Dr Michael Foale CBE and Dr Steve Swanson in March 2019, the award winning Chadwick Building (new divinity building), named after the distinguished OT Reverend Professor Owen Chadwick (Sc 29-35) in 2014, and the transformation of the Smythe Library, opened by HRH Princess Alexandra in 2016.

If you are considering holding your event at Tonbridge School, or are interested in a school tour, please contact the events department via telephone on 01732 304268 or via email at events@tonbridge-school.org We will be delighted to hear from you.

APRIL 2019

61

CLUBS & SOCIETIES OT Golf Club JOHN ALLBROOK (WW 75-80)

2018 was another full year. As well as entering the Halford Hewitt, Grafton Morrish and Bernard Darwin trophies, we played ten friendly matches and competed in four golf days, including a golf day specifically for our younger members (U35s), and ran four meetings in the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

The calendar from March to November is very busy and provides something for all our members no matter their ability and appetite to play golf. In all, more than 115 members participated, which means that Tonbridge continues to have one of the strongest active public school old boy golfing societies.

We did not have our best year in the premier competitions. In the Halford Hewitt we exited following a narrow defeat to Eton (3-2) in the second round and in the Grafton Morrish, we failed to make it through regional qualifying for the first time in a while.

However, we won the Bernard Darwin Trophy (for over 55s) at Woking for the

62

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

first time in 5 years. Richard Partridge (MH 70-75) ably led our team of Geoff Clay (HS 51-56), Jonathan Hubbard (PS 60-65), John Spurling (JH 71-76), Colin Jones (FH 74-79) and Julian Spurling (JH 71-76). Over four ties in very hot, dry conditions the OTs prevailed, beating Uppingham in the final. Sadly, we were unable to defend the Senior Darwin Trophy (for over 65s) but finished runners-up to Repton in a very closely contested final. It was a terrific effort over 2 days again in energy sapping heat.

During the summer it was also great to see two of our best match golfers doing so well in Senior Amateur events; Colin Jones won the Welsh Seniors Championship with rounds of 70/71/73 for a +1 total over three rounds. This was good enough to secure victory by the narrow margin of 1 stroke; Richard Partridge was tied at the top of the leader board at the end of the Scottish Senior Open Championship with rounds of 75/71/75. After the play-off he ended

up as runner-up. However, he made up for this narrow miss later in the summer with a fine win in the Kent Seniors Championship following two rounds of 69 for a 5-stroke win.

Additionally, both Richard and Colin qualified for the English and Welsh teams respectively in the Senior Amateur Home Internationals. A fine achievement and great reward for their consistency throughout the summer.

In 2018 we enjoyed successful meetings played on some wonderful courses. The Spring Meeting was held at Aldeburgh GC and Thorpeness GC in Suffolk. The Summer, Autumn and Winter meetings were held at New Zealand GC, Woking GC and Seaford GC respectively. Some very competitive and enjoyable golf was played by all who attended. For the 2019 Spring Meeting we return to Royal St George’s GC and Royal Cinque Ports GC, as we do every third year.

During the year we enjoyed our usual full quota of fixtures with other Clubs and Societies and were fortunate to play on some of the best courses around (e.g.

The Berkshire, West Sussex, Royal Ashdown, Tandridge, the RAC) always at very reasonable rates.

We also entered teams in several other golf events during 2019; Three Schools Challenge, Four Schools Challenge, Hector Padgham Trophy and The Cricketer Cup Trophy. Sadly, we failed to win any. However, these are first and foremost fun golf days and those who played thoroughly enjoyed their golf.

The annual match against the School took place at Wildernesse GC in April. It was a particularly tight affair this time round with the match being halved.

However, the School retained the Chris Emms trophy by virtue of their victory the previous year.

Every year we hold a match play knockout, which all members may enter.

The semi-finals and final are always

OT Football Club GORDON RIECK (OH 06-08)

played on the same day at a leading golf club. The 2018 Finals Day was played at Hankley Common GC, a course that is currently listed in the UK’s top 30. This year our four finalists were Matt Shales (HS 99-04), Wiiliam Marle (SCH 71-76), Oliver Knight (CH 97-02) and Alex Blain (PH 04-09). For the record Matt Shales won an exciting final over Oliver Knight and in so doing put a new name on the trophy.

Although we have a strong core of Senior members in the OTGS it is encouraging to see a growing group of younger golfers coming along to play.

Our younger members do benefit from lower subscriptions and subsidised green fees at all our events and matches.

Additionally, we do hold a golf day every year specifically for our U35 members.

For the last two years we have hosted this event at the Wildernesse GC and in 2019 we shall be returning there again.

2018 was a watershed year for the OTGS. After 18 years as our Hon Secretary, Tony Monteuuis (HS 60-65) decided to stand down. The health, vibrancy and success of our Society is in so many ways a tribute to Monty’s energy and passion for it. At the Spring Meeting we celebrated Monty’s massive contribution to the Society and I’m sure I speak for everyone in thanking him once again here.

I would also like to thank Stephen Stowell (HS 59-64) for his contribution during his two-year stint as Captain and David Golding-Wood (PS 69-74), who is already proving an able and excellent successor.

The 2018/19 season has been one of flux and evolution for the Old Tonbridgians Football Club 1stXI. The season has seen the squad undergo a gentle transformation with a number of players that experienced unprecedented success in the league and cup gradually making way for a new cohort of fresh faced graduates and gap year boys eager to leave their mark.

This evolution has inevitably been accompanied by some inconsistent performances on the pitch, which have been compounded by a number of lengthy injuries, most notably to the likes of Charlie Adam and Mike Holden.

The upshot of this misfortune is that the team has been forced to pull together and younger players have stepped up and contributed. This was most evident

when a squad of eleven players beat Eton away with three different outfield players (a special mention to Max Glennon, Tom Spurling and Jamie Lavers) taking a turn in goal and Jamie saving a penalty.

Despite the challenges that have been faced, at the time of writing, the team has a chance to finish in the top half of the league and has a semi-final of the Arthur Dunn Cup, away at Eton, to look forward to. If you are interested in playing or being involved in any way please do not hesitate to get in touch.

For all enquiries contact the Club Captain, Sam Colley at:  scolley33@hotmail.com

For all enquiries, including how to join the club, contact:  john.allbrook@btinternet.com To find out more about OT Golf visit our website: www.otgs.org.uk APRIL 2019

63

OT Cricket Club JOHN GIBBS (FH 56-61)

Our cricket season began, as always, with our first round Cricketer Cup match, and the draw this year resulted in our playing our first match against the Repton Pilgrims on The Head. Winning the toss, the OTs put the Pilgrims in to bat, and they scored 223 off their fifty overs, with Brodrick (76) and Poynton (47) providing a solid basis for the Pilgrims’ innings. However, O’Riordan picked up three wickets, Pettman bowled a very useful spell and two run outs produced pressure which limited the Pilgrims to 223 runs. We knew we could reach this target and so it proved.

Tom Elliott played a key role with his unbeaten 79, and he was supported by Smallwood, who scored 31 runs early in our innings, while Tom Coldman also scored some valuable runs towards the end, and we won with four overs to spare The next round was away at Eton, where we played on Upper Club. We had raised as good a side as we could, but we were unable to field our strongest team due to other commitments. Batting first, we struggled to post a sufficiently competitive total. Wickets fell early in our innings, and again it was Tom Elliott, who had returned especially early from a brief holiday, and who steered our innings and batted brilliantly again However, we had not managed to reach a total which we were able to defend. A couple of dropped catches early on meant that Eton got off to a better start than they should have done, and in games like this we needed to take such chances. Fabian Cowdrey was our standout spinner and overall the spin attack was outstanding. Another twentyfive minutes batting would have meant that Eton might well have failed to reach the target. Alas, they crawled over the

64

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

line for the loss of six wickets. It was a disappointing day for the young OT side in which the oldest member was the twenty-eight-year-old captain, Oliver Durell.

The Cricketer Cup squad was: Fabian Cowdrey, Jasper Smallwood, Zak Crawley Olly Durell (Captain) Tom Elliott, Marcus O’Riordan, Ossie King, Julius Cowdrey, Toby Pettman, Henry Cope, Hugo Snape, James Monkhouse, Ed Hyde, Tom Coldman, Rupert Harbig.

However, arrangements for our regular fixture of two days of cricket with the Charterhouse Friars went ahead in the normal way in mid - July. Once again, we were playing on the Head, while the 1st XI square at Charterhouse was being relaid. On the first day we played a declaration match. The Friars won the toss, elected to bat and scored 244 – 8 off forty-six overs. Their innings was based on de Soya’s century, with the Friars’ wickets being mainly shared between MacGregor and Prideaux. The OTs then faced the challenge, which even with Adam Sixsmith totalling 120 in a fine innings, proved insufficient to steer the OTs to victory, and the result was a draw. We had only faced twenty seven overs, but scored 227, finishing 18 runs short.

However, for the second match it was agreed to play a forty-five over match.

The OTs won the toss and decided to bat.

This produced plenty of attacking cricket with Marcus O’Riordan making a century before he retired injured. Olly Carr-Hill scored a useful 67 runs and Jono Arscott a supportive 38. The Friars, faced with the prospect of chasing almost 300 runs, after their testing spell in the field, were unable to cope with the required run rate to compete with the OTs innings, while the young OT attack of Prideaux,

Mathieu and Wooldridge shared most of the wickets between them. We won the match convincingly and two days cricket had been enjoyed by all of those playing.

The OTs look forward to visiting Charterhouse in July.

Cricketer Cup 2019 Our first Cricketer Cup match in 2019 will be played against the Haileybury Hermits on the Head on Sunday 16th June, starting at 11.30 am. All support will be welcome. Since the OTs were the first team drawn when the draw was made, any match we play will be on the Head.

OT Rugby Club GEORGE MOSS (JH 04-09)

For all OT Cricket enquiries contact:  bighyde@hotmail.co.uk For all OT Rugby enquiries contact:  george.moss@live.com

The OTs (aka The Sticky Bandits) began their third season in London South West 2 with a renewed enthusiasm after a good end to the previous season. The league is continually competitive, with old boys sides from King’s Wimbledon, Emmanuel, Dulwich, Reigate and Cranleigh making up the bulk of the opposition alongside established clubs such as Eastleigh, Farnham and Twickenham.

After a slow start of three losses and a draw (the OTs don’t have a pre-season

per se) the OTs did find some form, winning away at Cranleigh 63-0 to announce themselves to the league with aplomb. A mix of OTs, university associates and a smattering of London-based antipodeans make up the squad, which boasts members from all 4 home nations and all 3 of the old ‘Tri-Nations’. We’ve even got an Argie on the books.

A good run started at Cranleigh and was followed by a standout win away at Dulwich (22-32) as well as victories at Effingham, Eastleigh and London Exiles to leave the OTs well placed at the half way stage of the season.

Since then, they have been almost perfect in 2019, losing only to league Champions, King’s Wimbledon. On 16th February they played their first competitive fixture on the 50, beating London Exiles 33-12 in front of a hearty crowd. The club plans to repeat the fixture annually.

At the time of writing, the club have two matches remaining (at home to Eastleigh and away at Farnham) and victories in both would see them finish second and enter a playoff for promotion to London 1 South, potentially locking horns with clubs such as Sevenoaks and Westcombe Park in 19/20.

It is an open club, and we encourage all school and University leavers to get in touch should you and your friends (whether they're an OT or not) wish to keep playing competitive but enjoyable rugby in London. There is touch on Clapham Common during the week through the summer months with league fixtures running from September to April. Please contact George Moss (JH 04-09) on Tonbridge Connect to get involved or for more information.

APRIL 2019

65

OT Real Tennis Club GEORGE NODDER (PH 03-08)

At the time of writing the 2018/2019 season is drawing to a close, it has been a fine season marked by the club entering the prestigious Henry Leaf doubles tournament for the first time in many years. Although silverware evaded the club (again), it was particularly pleasing to see new faces turning out for the OTs and club players doing well playing under different colours. In the recent Spring Weekend at the Queen’s Club the A singles final featured 2 OTs, with the club also represented in the B string singles and the doubles – see the photo for the OT winner and finalists Richard Dalzell, Tommy Shields and George Nodder. Below is a brief summary of the fixtures played.

Henry Leaf Alumni Level Doubles The season got off to a more serious start than usual with Ed Hyde and George Nodder competing in the Henry Leaf. Ed and George lost an exciting match to Warwick in the quarter final, having come back from a set down, the pair were disappointed not to make the most of the momentum they had going into the deciding set. With exciting players like the Shields clan improving rapidly, this hopefully season marks the start of a serious assault on the cup.

Brigands Doubles George Nodder and Michael O’Dwyer played in the Brigands handicap doubles tournament at Hardwick amongst peripatetic clubs at the end of September. We qualified from the group thanks to a net game difference of a single game, sadly that was where our luck ran out and we were well beaten on handicap by a strong Hurlingham pair who were the eventual winners.

Kent Schools v Queen’s Our annual match with Queen’s was this season billed as Kent Schools to

66

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

hopefully accommodate players from other schools in Kent, particularly King’s Canterbury who had won the Schools’ Alumni Handicap Doubles tournament (Cattermull Cup) in the previous season; in the event we had one non-OT participant (Simon Mansfield from Sevenoaks). We won the evening’s contest of handicap doubles by three rubbers to one, with Michael O’Dwyer, Chris Gook and Richard Dalzell participating and Jack & Tommy Shields making their impressive debuts.

OTs v Petworth We experienced a most enjoyable day at the newly refurbished Petworth House Tennis Club, on an eight-playersa-side basis, with everyone playing once before and once after lunch with a different partner. At the half way point the match was nicely poised at two rubbers each but we fell away afterwards to finally lose by 5 rubbers to 3 which many OTs blamed on enjoying too much of Jan Fuente’s excellent lunch! The OTs were represented with a wide range of ages: Richard Stocks, Richard Dalzell, David Mills, Charles Fuente, Michael O’Dwyer and Jack Shields with Ivo Shields making his debut. It was also good to see Tom Shields in attendance to watch the action, particularly his talented sons.

Cattermull Cup Alumni Handicap Doubles Towards the end of January, George Nodder and Michael O’Dwyer played the handicap tournament for alumni at Middlesex. The OT pair cruised through their group, playing some disciplined tennis in the face of some steep handicaps. Unfortunately the following day they couldn’t quite replicate their form and lost a tight game to the eventual runners up.

We are always keen to welcome new players. If you are interested, please get in touch.

For all enquiries contact:  george.nodder@gmail.com

OT Squash Club DAVID NIX (FH 82-87)

2018/19 has been a ‘transition season’ for OT Squash. Generally, when used to describe a sports team’s performance, ‘transition’ is a euphemism for a year of abject results, of disorder in the ranks and a general lack of forward movement.

For OT Squash this would be an unfair description. Compared to last season there has been a similar number of fixtures against similar opponents, similar results and barring a couple of retirements, similar faces turning out to play.

The transition for us has manifested itself in two related events. Firstly, we have gone digital. We now use Pitchero to manage fixtures and selections.

Anyone interested in playing squash or just keeping up with results and matches can visit our website. It has been a bit of a learning curve for us all and it is not yet a perfect system but we have made a solid start and the more people who use the site, the more useful it will become.

The more significant event and the one that prompted this digital transformation was the retirement of Gordon Aylward as Chairman, CEO, Captain and all-round beating heart of OT Squash. Gordon started the club in 2006 and for 12 seasons took on the thankless task of organising matches and cajoling people into playing, retaining a sense of humour at each diary malfunction that resulted in an incomplete team. He must have attended the best part of 200 fixtures and watched 1,000 individual matches, the majority of which will have included a large dose of mediocre squash interspersed with the odd flash of brilliance. He has managed to smile each time a killer drop shot hits the tin and always has a positive word to say at the end of even the most terrible

performance. It was fitting that he should come to watch OTs vs the School, in particular to see OT Alex Melkonian fight back from 2-0 down to run out of steam and lose in the 5th against the very promising Dom Long. I am sure he would have taken great pleasure in seeing the school produce an excellent young player (ideally one he could earmark for future Londonderry Cups) and this would have tempered his disappointment in watching an OT lose.

So, the nuts and bolts for the season.

The Londonderry Cup side (ie the good players ably marshalled by Will Montgomery and Charles Fuente) are still involved in the new round robin format with the Finals night to be held at the RAC on 29th March.

For the rest of us, 18 friendly matches planned in total, 4 in Kent the remainder in London. To date we have won 6, lost 5 and tied 2. 24 players have represented the club.

As ever, to complete our transition we need more players. A large number of the current regulars have been representing the club with occasional distinction for some time, and some younger blood would be welcome.

Anyone keen to revitalise their squash career and get involved, please get in touch.

For all enquiries contact the Club Captain, Sam Colley at:  mark.aylward@tysers.com  cchammond@outlook.com Find out more at: www.pitchero.com/clubs/otsquash

APRIL 2019

67

OT Rackets Club ED HYDE (FH 11-16)

The Rackets season is still ongoing, and so far, has been marked by two tournaments. Firstly, the Noel Bruce (Old Boy Doubles) took place at Queen's in September. Tonbridge entered a record number of pairs for an individual school into the draw - even with a few missing.

Three pairs progressed from the groups to the main draw. Tommy Shields and Nick Hutton unfortunately came up against first seeds (Cheltenham) - always a tough one! Ed Hyde and Jack Shields met fellow OT pair, Rupert OwenBrowne and Adrian Spurling, with the former winning 3-1 - a great match with

a bumper OT crowd. Hyde and Shields went on to face Wellington in the quarter finals. The match was assumed to be a full gone conclusion with OTs up against two top-10 ranked players.

However, Hyde and Shields took a 2-0 lead. Unfortunately, Wellington found their stride, winning 3-2 - an upset had been on the cards. A great tournament for Tonbridge - a record turn-out and three pairs into the main draw. More of the same next year...

Secondly, the OT Rackets Weekend took place at the start of December. The OTs were able to give some of the boys

some decent practice before Queen's as well as playing some decent Rackets themselves - in particular Ollie Howick, who played imperiously before meeting Tommy Shields in the final. Tommy was on great form and deservedly won his second OT title. Great to see so many OTs back on court and thanks to Dave and Ben for organising and running on the day.

the new sports centre, which might have meant considerably fewer courts. The condition of the courts is very good, and with three Winchester and five Rugby, almost unique amongst five playing locations.

We had fixtures this winter against the Jesters, a narrow loss, and the RFA, again a loss, but hope to have a victory against the boys this year at the end of March.

Last year they had a narrow victory against us.

Several OTs took part in National Competitions, and there are more to come shortly with the Veterans and the Masters, for which some of us qualify.

We are a merry band of between 6-10

on a regular basis, with some enjoying occasional “bat fives” - if in doubt come and give it a try. We meet every Tuesday evening at 20.00 more or less throughout the year, and it is rare to be unable to play due to adverse court conditions. We’re always happy for new members, of which there have been 2 of late, to boost the slightly older players like myself. If you’re interested in joining us, just come along on a Tuesday, or get in touch.

For all enquiries contact:  bighyde@hotmail.co.uk

OT Fives Club DR NEIL ARNOTT (MH 63-68)

I am most pleased to be able to report that that the OT Fives is alive and well, and we continue to get enjoyment and comradeship from our regular Tuesday evening outings at the school. It also helps keep us fit!

Several years ago, the Fives courts were made a site of special interest and almost unique in the country, being a line of courts with a shooting range in one building. We are most fortunate as this has meant a very high-quality repair of the roof, with Welsh slate as per the original, and new lighting of the latest variety. For this reason, we have been immune from some of the changes within the school, and resisted a move to

68

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

For all enquiries contact:  neil.d.arnott@gmail.com

OT Rifle Club WILL KEMP (WW 85-90)

The heavy snow falling over Kent in early March 2018 forced us to postpone our AGM and small bore match at the last minute. Thankfully the school was very accommodating, and we rescheduled for an altogether more salubrious April day. The good weather did not help the OTs' aim however, and we were beaten by the school, but only by a slim margin of 3 points! There were thirteen OTs present, the top scoring eight totalled 735 with a very handy contribution of 97 by Mark Taylor. The School’s winning score was, as those mathematicians among you will have already calculated, 738. The School should note that this year we shall be making sure we bring the ‘Big Guns’.

In May some of us gathered at Bisley for a practice shoot to blow away the cobwebs before the match against Kent County and the School the following month. We used the new Electronic Targets now established on the right hand targets on Century Range, and spent a happy afternoon at 600yds. The best of it was that it was free, as the targets were still in testing mode. The following month we had a smaller than usual team for the full bore match, small but evidently perfectly formed as we were victorious against the School. Mark Taylor, Sean Williams, Ian Mitchell and team captain Henry Dodds represented the OTs with aplomb. Unlike the previous year, however, we were beaten by Kent.

In July the Veterans' Match during Ashburton Week was once again a highly competitive affair. Despite the inclusion of Theo Dodds in the team, who contributed a spectacular ‘possible’ (that’s 50 out of 50 for you non target rifle shooting types) as a team we were placed 34th out of 49. The gold and silver winning teams (of five) both shot 250 - our score was 234 with 26 V bulls so not too shabby. Indeed it was the highest total managed since 2009.

The highlight of the year was the dinner night in October, which is usually followed by a long range shoot at Bisley on the Stickledown Range at either 900yds or 1000yds, depending on how daring we feel. This year however, the rain was falling very hard, indeed, and we weren’t feeling very daring. At this point Victor Dauppe suggested we hire the Melville Range instead, as he had a couple of gallery rifles in his vehicle, and we could spend a dry morning (the Melville is a covered range) trying something different. It was an inspired idea, and consequently we had a very enjoyable (and comfortable) time shooting at advancing and time limited targets. Our thanks go to Victor for his generosity. There is now a distinct desire among many members for the club to buy a gallery rifle of its own and make it a regular event. A discussion to be had at this year’s AGM I think.

In December we met at the School for our annual fun shoot, organised kindly by the School we had lunch in the Lowry Room and then fired a five bull target followed by a wild boar snap shoot which was marked as a group. Not easy with iron sights. Annoyingly, the School beat us; again by the narrowest of margins. Oh well, there’s always next year!

For all enquiries contact:  will@willkemp.com APRIL 2019

69

OT Lodge EDWARD HICKMOTT (WH 51-55)

It’s been another enjoyable year for the Lodge. Edward Hickmott (WH 1951-55), one of our most distinguished members, was installed by another, Drummond Abrams (SH 1947-50) and took the Chair in September. Our youngest member (TS 2005-10) was initiated, alongside two members receiving 50- and 60-year long service certificates, whilst our retiring Tyler, Peter Comben (ex-staff) and Visiting Officer, Simon Dodd, were awarded honorary membership.

The Lodge brings together like-minded Old Tonbridgians, staff and OT fathers within and outside of Lodge meetings - socializing and carrying out charitable works, whilst also enacting a beautiful ritual which is allegorical and

70

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

helps us improve on a moral level. We meet and dine four times a year at the Civil Service Club in London, and also have social functions, e.g. annual wine tasting, City drinks and a Henley Regatta trip.

We’re part of a wider network of Public School Lodges (the PSLC), with reciprocal invitations to each other’s meetings. We will be hosting the annual PSLC festival whilst celebrating our Centenary at the School on Saturday, 11 July 2020 - open to all OTs, their families and friends tickets on sale from June 2019.

Unlike other School affiliated societies however, our Lodge brings members together for life. Those who join generally get actively involved and have a fun time progressing through its ranks.

For more information about our Lodge, or our Festival, contact the Secretary, Michael Khajeh-Noori at:  otl4145secretary@gmail.com

OBITUARIES

REVELEY, Paul Vernon Died in hospital of pneumonia on 12 March 2017, aged 105. The following obituary was published by the Royal Television Society: The last surviving direct link with the pioneering work of John Logie Baird died on 12 March. Up until his death in his 106th year, Paul Vernon Reveley possessed an exceptional ability to recall his direct contribution to historic television events throughout the 1930s with an accuracy that exceeded anything in print.

In conversation, Paul could transport you to that pioneering television era, providing first-hand accounts of his work as the engineer who had spent the longest time working directly for Baird. His near-perfect recall meant that discussion with him was an uncanny experience.

Paul had been not only the oldest, but the longest-standing member of the RTS, with his Fellow status approved in December 1937. He started work for Baird in February 1932 in his 21st year, after graduating in “light-current electrical engineering”.

His first role was in supporting Baird’s second major live TV outside broadcast. This, the 1932 Derby, was both a vision/sound simulcast using BBC transmitters, as well as being linked by cable to a paying audience in the Metropole Cinema, where Paul had built, installed and operated the special video projection system.

When the Baird Company was acquired by GaumontBritish, Baird employed Paul and a few other Baird Company engineers to support him in developing new television systems. As the senior engineer, Paul was central to the design and demonstration of Baird’s projection systems, culminating in the demonstration of live, closed-circuit colour television in 1938 at London’s Dominion Theatre. This was hailed at the time as the peak of excellence in TV. The central components of that system now reside in the Science Museum. Paul held five patents in television systems. In late 1938, Paul left the Baird Company to become assistant wireless engineer to the postmaster general of Hong Kong within the Colonial Service, eventually being incarcerated as a civilian prisoner of war by the Japanese.

After the war, Paul spent the rest of his long career managing and delivering electrical services for remote communities in the Far East, mostly in British North Borneo. He returned to the UK in the 1990s, retiring at 80.

He recently featured on the BBC Four documentary Television’s Opening Night: How the Box was Born, which was broadcast in November 2016, and was subsequently interviewed on Newsnight.

Paul was born on 21 July 1911 in north London, the only son of Vernon James Reveley. He died on 12 March 2017 in King’s Lynn and is survived by one daughter.

(FH 25-28)

YATES, William Nixon (Bill) Died at Wadhurst Manor Care Home on 29 May 2018, aged 100. Loving husband of the late Joan Mary and much-loved father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

(SH 32-37) HUBBLE, Humphrey Ronald Offord Died in 2018, aged 96.

(WH 35-40) RAWCLIFFE, Peter Geoffrey Died on 18 December 2018, aged 94. Husband of Susan, father of Jeremy and James and stepfather to Victoria.

(HS 37-43)

HARE, Niel Lewis Died on 28 December 2017, aged 92. The following obituary was published by the Southborough Valley Association: It is with great regret that we record the death of Mr Niel Hare, of “Galen”, Pennington Road, on 28 December 2017, aged 92. Niel and his first wife, Cecilia, joined the Southborough Valley Association in February 1969 when it was formed to fight a development scheme at Barnett’s Wood,

APRIL 2019

71

Southborough. After a successful campaign, they both joined the Southborough Society when it formed in September 1969, thus being Founder members.

Niel’s father was a doctor in practice at “Galen”, where Niel spent his formative years. The house was sold after his father’s death, and Niel was very proud that he was eventually able to buy it back again.

Shortly before “D” Day, 6 June 1944, Niel was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in ‘B’ Squadron, 141st Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps (The Buffs), which had been converted from infantry by November 1941 and was later equipped with Churchill tanks armed with powerful flame throwers (Crocodiles). ‘B’ Squadron landed in Normandy soon after “D” Day and fought in support of British, Canadian and American troops. Its finest hours were in support of American forces in the capture of the heavily fortified port of Brest on 14-16 September. It suffered heavy casualties, one of whom was Niel. When his tank hit an unexploded shell, it was blown to bits and Niel was blown to safety, but broke both ankles on landing. He was among a dozen men of ‘B’ Squadron to be awarded later by the Americans a Bronze Star for gallantry.

Niel served on the Committee of the Southborough Society, though the dates are not known. He was a charming, described at his funeral as a “perfect gentleman”, who will be much missed.

(SH 38-42)

APLIN, Ian Edgar Died in early 2018, aged 92. Ian was born at Mill Farm in Mark Cross, Sussex on 27th September 1925. He was from to a long line of farming families, with a branch of his family later becoming famous for its “St. Ivel” brand.

Ian was first educated at Yardley Court Preparatory School, where he still holds the Long Jump Record made as long ago as 1939! Later he went to Tonbridge School in Kent, where he was a not only a School Praeposter and the Head of Welldon House, but also the senior member of the Officers Training Corps with the rank of Warrant Officer II. He also won the Victor Ludorum, Athletics Points Cup. Thanks to his years at Tonbridge and their splendid Science Laboratories and Observatory he developed a lifelong passion for evolutionary science.

Ian briefly served as a young Sergeant in the Local Home Guard at Tonbridge. He later just missed out on being commissioned into The Royal Horse Guards, having failed his Wireless Examination, largely due to being too involved in college rugby and athletics. As Vice-Captain of the 1st XV he played several times for the Royal Military College and was also Captain of the Athletics Team.

After a brief period of infantry training Ian was commissioned into The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, where the Reserve Battalion was stationed at Elgin in Morayshire. After a few months he volunteered to join their 7th Battalion that had become the 5th (Scottish) Parachute Battalion.

Ian served with the 5th (Scottish) Parachute Battalion in the Palestine Campaign from 1945-7. In Palestine he

72

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

lost 58 of his fellow officers and men murdered by the Zionist terrorist organizations The Stern Gang and Irgun Zwei Leumi. In addition, 236 were wounded, many seriously by roadside bombs and in ambushes.

During those years he found time to represent Middle East Land Forces in a triangular Athletic Meeting with Greece and Turkey at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon where he won the High Jump. As Vice-Captain of 5th (Scottish) Parachute Battalion’s Athletic Team they later won the Army Team Athletics Championship at The White City in London.

Captain Ian Aplin was later promoted to Adjutant to the famous Lt. Col. J. M. T. F. Churchill, DSO and Bar, who in his career was the only officer ever to command both an Army Commando and a Parachute Battalion. For many years Ian was a member of The Army and Navy Club, known as “The Rag” in St. James’s Square, London.

After the War, he joined his father’s successful business enterprises. After his father retired, he started his own business the Bishopsdown Property Company.

He later lived in the United States for nearly twelve years, during which time he briefly opened an English Period Furniture Gallery in Oakland, California, and later worked as a yacht salesman. He had learnt his skills years ago from an old Cornish fisherman called Tom Ferris whilst sailing his father’s boat “Banshee II” from St. Mawes in Cornwall. In California Ian got to know the American market through working with Sailboats Inc. The thrill of sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge was a lasting memory.

Throughout his life, he continued his interest in a variety of sports, including athletics as a member of the London Athletic Club. Not only had Ian played rugby for two seasons in the Tonbridge School 1st XV, but also for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and the Wasps in London. Ian also enjoyed squash, rackets, fives and tennis, and even dabbled in real tennis at Queen’s Club, London. He played golf on many courses in England and Ireland, including the famous Royal St. George’s and Princes in Kent. At one time he had a ‘six handicap’! For many years Ian enjoyed fly fishing and riding in the Irish Republic, especially with his two children Neil and Christina at Ballyduff on the Blackwater River, and later on the River Shannon at Ardnacrushan, near Limerick. Ian was also a member of the prestigious St. Stephen’s Green Club in Dublin. He was a member of the Scottish Ski Club and remembers trudging for miles from Glenmore Lodge, near Aviemore after the war to reach the snow line. He also enjoyed climbing in the Scottish mountains, and particularly remembers reaching the top of Tom A’Choinich in Glen Affric when it was blowing a blizzard. Ian even ventured on one occasion to join the ring-netting fleet out of Portpatrick on the Rhinn of Galloway to the Isle of Man. Fishing in the tumultuous Irish Sea without any safety equipment in those days was not something to be repeated!

Ian returned to England towards the end of 1990. The continued support by the United States of the illegal occupation of Palestine by European Zionists had devastating consequences for the region as a whole. In 1990 Kuwait was encouraged by Washington to reduce

its oil prices so threatening Iraq, who were vehemently opposed to Israel. Following Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in August the Americans amassed a vast force in Saudi Arabia in order to attack Iraq. Ian in his lectures in California had frequently castigated America’s propaganda emanating from its “Voice of America” radio station in Cyprus aimed at those countries opposed to Israel. In October 1990 Ian presented a long letter in person addressed to His Excellency Dr. Azmi Shafik Al-Salihi, the Iraqi Ambassador in London. In it he suggested that Baghdad create an Arab Broadcasting Station to counter Washington’s meddling in Middle East affairs in support of Israel. Almost immediately the Iraqi Ambassador was recalled to Baghdad and his place was taken by Zuhair Ibrahim his Charge D’Affaires and Minister Plenipotentiary. Ian and Zuhair became good friends and regularly dined together at Al Basha restaurant in Kensington. He was impressed with Ian’s recommendations and sent a copy of his letter to Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister in Baghdad. Tariq Aziz requested that Ian be granted a visa and meet him in Baghdad. Meanwhile Ian had become friends with Sir John Moberly, the former Ambassador to Iraq, who also objected strongly to the United States and the United Kingdom’s foreign policy in respect of the Middle East.

Unfortunately, the die had been cast and there followed the most horrendous attack on Iraq on 15th January 1991. Sir John and Ian were amongst the last to leave the Embassy before it was closed. During these months Ian’s son Neil acted as courier delivering his letters by hand to avoid interception by MI5. So began a tragic series of events that have still to be resolved, including the equally disastrous second Gulf War. He is survived by his wife, Rosina, and three children, Neil, Christina and Julia.

(WH 39-43)

BROOKS, Peter John Died on 2 July 2018, aged 93.

(Sc 40-43) GRAHAM, Michael Onslow Died on 16 March 2018, aged 91.

(Sc 40-44) JOINER, Charles Louis, Dr MB FRCP Dr Charles Louis died peacefully on 20 July 2018, aged 95. An exceptional doctor, devoted father and loyal friend who touched so many lives. Father of Sally and David, grandfather of James Thomas and Kayleigh, and great grandfather of Raphael, he leaves behind a family blessed to have had him in their lives.

(WH 40-41)

EPHRAUMS, Roderick Jarvis (Roger), Major General Royal Marines, CB, OBE, CStJ, DL Died on 6 January 2019, aged 91. The following obituary was published in the Telegraph: Major-General Roger Ephraums, who has died aged 91, participated in a wide range of operations during his 33 years’ service in the Royal Marines, while his elite Corps met the challenges of Britain’s worldwide interests and reinforced Nato solidarity during the 1970s.

In 1973, when Ephraums took command of 3 Commando Brigade, he had been associated with Arctic warfare from the earliest days of the Corps’ involvement. His challenge now was a number of large-scale exercises involving the newly formed UK/ Netherlands Amphibious Force and Greek, Turkish, Italian and US marines to demonstrate the advantages of amphibious flexibility on Nato’s Southern Flank.

These were accomplished largely due to Ephraums’s charm, courteousness, droll sense of humour and very methodical approach. After these palpable successes, it was entirely appropriate that he should attend the Nato Defence College in Rome in 1976.

He was promoted in March 1976, his final appointment being as Major General Commando Forces when he oversaw large-scale winter deployments on the Northern Flank of Nato. Again, Ephraums displayed the meticulous staff work which was the hallmark of his career, ensuring that the Corps was re-roled and that the right people were in place to exert appropriate influence.

His efforts proved crucial to operational effectiveness and demonstrated the Royal Marines’ versatility.

Throughout his career Ephraums also demonstrated his own soundness in strategy, politics and operations.

Christened Roderick Jarvis, Ephraums was born in Torquay on May 12th 1927, the son of a mining engineer, and was educated at Tonbridge School. His elder brother, Captain Mike Ephraums MC Royal Marines, was killed in action at Termoli, Italy, in 1943 while serving with 40 Commando. Roger joined the Corps in January 1945, passing out top of his entry and being awarded the sword of honour.

His first appointment was to the cruiser Mauritius in the Mediterranean Fleet.

After instructing at the Infantry Training Centre RM at Lympstone and qualifying as a heavy weapons specialist in 1951, he was appointed to 42 Commando on anti-terrorist operations in the jungles of Malaya.

The commando deployed to Malta in 1952, and then to the Suez Canal Zone where, during breaks from the

APRIL 2019

73

primitive living conditions in a tented camp, he visited Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem.

Ephraums was adjutant of 42 Commando at Bickleigh, Devon, when on a July night in 1958, during a crisis in Lebanon, he received a midnight call to bring the commando to instant readiness, gather reinforcements and embark in the aircraft carrier Albion at Portsmouth. So overloaded that there was concern for her seaworthiness, Albion sailed for the Mediterranean. When the crisis settled, Ephraums’s administrative skills were again tested as the commando disembarked in Malta and then redeployed for training at Tarhuna, a British training ground in the Libyan Desert.

After the Army Staff College in 1960 and promotion to major, Ephraums became the first Corps Secretary, a new appointment intended to bring coherence and order to the Royal Marines’ regimental affairs. He returned to the Far East in 1962-64 as Brigade Major at headquarters 3 Commando Brigade in Sarawak, just as the confrontation between Indonesia and Malaya was developing.

In 1969 Ephraums took command of 45 Commando a month before the presentation of new colours by the Queen: at rehearsals Molly, his wife, stood in for the monarch. A few weeks later Ephraums led a covert deployment to Bermuda to guard against trouble during an international Black Power conference there; 45 Commando also conducted two tours of duty in Northern Ireland in the summers of 1970 and 1971.

Besides these operational tours, Ephraums’s task was to develop the techniques of winter warfare and to move the commando from Plymouth to a new home at Arbroath, Angus. It was a relief to become a student at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1972.

Ephraums was appointed CB in 1977 and retired from the Corps a year later.

He initially settled near Arbroath and joined an outdoor clothing company based in nearby Friockheim, but left when in 1985 he was asked to become Representative Colonel Commandant, Royal Marines, attending official and ceremonial functions on behalf of the Duke of Edinburgh and the Corps and acting as the link between retired and serving members of the Corps.

Ephraums and his wife were an ever-approachable, hospitable and widely admired couple who led active lives. He was an enthusiastic sailor and served for 10 years as the chairman of the RNLI at Arbroath. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Angus in 1985, and made a Commander of the Order of St John in 1994.

In 1989 he bought an apartment in Lagos where he wintered, and eight years later left Scotland and bought a retirement home in Winterbourne Earls, Wiltshire. There, he served as a steward in Salisbury Cathedral.

Ephraums married Adela Mary “Molly” Forster in 1955. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter.

(Sc 41-44)

74

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

FORD, David Robert Died in September 2017, aged 90.

(SH 41-45) WHEELER, Michael Lloyd Died on 21 May 2018, aged 90.

(HS 41-45)

CAVALIERO, Roderick Died on 27 August 2018, aged 90. The following obituary was published in the Telegraph: Roderick Cavaliero, who has died aged 90, was, variously, a teacher, public administrator, historian, and champion of British Romanticism.

A genial and energetic cheroot-puffing scholar and an officer for many years of the British Council, Cavaliero served in India and Brazil and, in the 1970s, as director of the British Council in Rome, finally retiring as Deputy Director General of the entire organisation. He wrote books on the Knights of Malta and the Ottoman Turks, but it was for his interest in and love for the Romantic poets that he became best known in later life.

In 1990, following his retirement from the council, he joined the British School at Rome at a time when its tax status and budget were under threat from British government cuts. Instead, the outgoing treasurer’s austerity proposals were cut, and within weeks Cavaliero became chairman.

He spent the next four years radically overhauling the school, negotiating a new charitable charter whereby the Queen would eventually become its patron, extending its financial base and introducing the alien idea of fundraising.

By tradition the chairman of the school was also chairman of its smaller independent cousin, the Keats-Shelley House, the museum of the British Romantics at the foot of the Spanish Steps where John Keats died in 1821.

To promote the British poets and the spirit of Romanticism became one of Cavaliero’s last missions.

He embraced with enthusiasm the duties of celebrating the bicentenaries of Keats and Shelley at festivals in Recanati and Lerici, holding forth in fluent if fractured Italian with the formidable Contessa Leopardi at the joint Leopardi-Keats party, and giving an impromptu speech on the drowning of Shelley at the helm of a heavily packed boat cruising around the Gulf of Lerici.

His love of the Romantics (although sometimes in emotional moods he would disown them in favour of

Browning) spawned two books. Italia Romantica (2005), subtitled English Romantics and Italian Freedom, was a vivid history of pre-unification Italy as seen through the eyes of Romantic travellers and poets, notably Keats, Byron and Shelley. Ottomania: The Romantics and the Myth of the Islamic Orient (2010) focused on another Romantic obsession, and in addition to the English Romantics Cavaliero explored the fascination with the mysterious Near East of Continental Romantics including Pierre Loti, Rossini and Delacroix.

The younger of two sons, Roderick Cavaliero was born on March 21st 1928 at Wrotham in Kent, to Eric and Valerie Cavaliero. His father, a stockbroker, and his four uncles had all fought in and survived the First World War. Their mother died on Armistice Day, it was said, from relief.

The Cavalieros are thought to be a Sephardic family which had come to England in the 1880s from Algeria, possibly of Crusader stock. Family history, and a post-university stint of six years teaching history in Malta, would imbue Roderick Cavaliero with a lifelong passion for the Crusaders, inspiring his first book, The Last of the Crusaders (1960), about the decline and fall of the Knights of Malta.

Roderick was sent away to boarding school at the age of six when the family moved to Sussex after the death of his older brother. A studious small boy, he was a passionate butterfly collector, and discovered a new species, the Long Tailed Blue, which was published in a letter in The Times.

From Tonbridge School he won a History scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, where he converted to Catholicism and met his wife, Mary McDonnell, herself a strong Catholic from a large Lancashire family.

They married in 1957 and the following year he was recruited by the British Council and sent first to India and then Brazil. His writing career had to take second place but in due course it yielded two major histories and a stirring military biography, published after his retirement.

Strangers in the Land: The Rise and Decline of the British Indian Empire (2002) traced the history of the British involvement in the Subcontinent, first as adventurers and traders, and eventually as rulers. His Admiral Satan: the Life and Campaigns of Suffren (1994), told the story of the French naval hero Admiral Pierre André de Suffren, admired but feared as a demon by his sailors, who began in the service of the Knights of Malta and rose through the ranks to command the fleet which took on the British in the Indian Ocean, in alliance with Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore.

Cavaliero’s years in Brazil would inspire another account of empire: The Independence of Brazil (1993), in which he traced the country’s development from the establishment of the Portuguese Kingdom during the Napoleonic Wars to the declaration of independence.

His last foreign posting as Director of the British Council in Rome in the 1970s was, perhaps the most enjoyable. On his way to work he would explore a different church each day and he introduced his children to the world of opera and art.

An ebullient personality, sometimes regarded as a maverick, Cavaliero dominated committees, sliced through bureaucracy and fought successful battles for local funding with Whitehall. During his later career in London as Deputy Director General of the British Council he eschewed the role of poacher-turnedgamekeeper, and toured the world fact-finding and encouraging local initiative.

The ebullient side of his character came to the fore after his retirement when, as chairman of the British School at Rome, he swapped his formal dark suits for colourful Hawaiian shirts (referred to as “Roddy’s Tropicana”) and engaged enthusiastically with the school’s broad spectrum of humanities, which included the work of young conceptual artists.

During his second retirement back in England, he continued to support the Keats-Shelley House as a trustee and treasurer of their British charity, the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. He also took on the job of administering the Charles Wallace India Trust, built on the legacy of a rich industrialist, that enabled many hundreds of young Indians to come to Britain to study and train in the arts and humanities.

Cavaliero’s wife Mary died in 2007. He is survived by their four daughters and a son.

(Sc 42-46)

MILLS, John Lawrence Died on 30 July 2018, aged 89.

(HS 42-47) PRITCHETT, Henry Desmond Eric (Desmond) Died on 24 June 2018, aged 89. Desmond was a very gifted man; a man of quick intelligence, witty, charming and considerate; the most congenial companion you could wish for.

He was also a successful businessman, a great lover of music, a widely read man, a connoisseur of fine wines and, perhaps first and foremost, a paterfamilias loved not only by his own children and grandchildren but by all the rest of us who looked up to him.

He shone even as a schoolboy, winning a scholarship from Tonbridge School to Oxford where he read Modern Languages and also crowned his schoolboy interest in rowing by becoming Captain of Boats at Brasenose College.

After graduating, he worked for a while in the City, but his earlier National Service in the New Territories of Hong Kong had left him with an abiding love for the Far East; so it was no surprise when he accepted the offer of a job in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and settled happily in Colombo.

There, he was responsible for shipping cargoes of tea, coconuts, copra and rubber – all the commodities of Empire – while continuing to pursue his love of rowing as the Captain of Colombo Rowing Club.

In 1960, what must have been an idyllic life was interrupted by the arrival of a young woman who had come to work in the UK High Commission.

On landing in Colombo, Carol (for it was she) was

APRIL 2019

75

greeted by the ship’s Agent who at some point asked where here home was. “Bournemouth” she said, only to be told by the Agent that he shared a house with a couple of chaps, one of whom – Desmond – was also from there. “I haven’t travelled all this distance across the world to meet someone from Bournemouth”, said Carol.

I guess we all get it wrong sometimes…

They were married a year later and continued to live in Colombo until they returned to England and set up home and business in Blackheath.

Blackheath Travel was started in 1964 and they eventually settled in a large handsome house on the edge of the heath after the family had expanded to include not just Amanda, who had been born in Sri Lanka, but also Katie and Alison.

Dear Alison, whose tragic death last year cast such a long shadow over the whole family.

But back in those years, the travel business thrived and became something of a landmark in the village, as well as receiving national recognition for its Wine Trails, until it was sold in the 1980s – at which point Desmond, with Carol, revived a long-lost local magazine, The Guide.

Here, he proved to be an accomplished editor and journalist but, more than that, he showed just how well he could write. It’s rare to come across someone outside the realm of professional authors who have, as he did, an individual prose style that was immediately recognisable, immensely readable.

I have two memories that sum up Desmond for me.

One is about his father, a doctor in Tunbridge Wells, who in the days before the National Health Service could hardly bring himself to charge his patients for their treatment.

But there needed to be bread on the table and one day, at the urging of Desmond’s mother, he went out to collect at least some of what he was owed. He came back without any money but a single payment in kind from a patient who had given him a stuffed owl in a glass display dome.

Although, as we have seen, Desmond proved to be a more effective businessman than his father, that same kindness, that humanity, was in his genes; and he had it in abundance.

The other memory is of a day trip to Wimereux that he organised for many of us local parents and our children.

The sun was scarcely up as our coach left Blackheath and Desmond was walking up and down the aisle dispensing large Bloody Marys from a plastic can that must have held at least a gallon of the mix.

So we crossed the Channel to France in high spirits – 80 degree proof spirits, you might say – to find perfect weather for playing rounders on the beach, paddling in the shallows and building sand castles.

Then off to a restaurant for lunch where the children marvelled at their fathers’ skill at throwing bread rolls at each other.

For a whole long summer’s day, I think we were all children together, with Desmond somehow having recreated for us the timelessness, innocence and

76

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

playfulness of the nursery floor.

All of us here, I know, are left with an inexpressible sense of loss; but we have also had the great good fortune to have known this most loveable of men, a man of great accomplishments who simply didn’t know how to make an enemy, and who cheered and enriched the lives of all who knew him.

In the words of W B Yeats, he was “not one, but all mankind’s epitome.”

(FH 42-47)

MAYMAN, Ian, Major D.L. CStJ Died on 12 December 2017, aged 90. His family write: Mayman and Alexander opened the batting for Tonbridge in the annual Clifton v Tonbridge match at Lords in 1945. After a maiden first over, Mayman faced his first ball from Pudsey the Clifton bowler, a very fast away swinger: he let it go past. The second ball he attempted a cut through cover but only managed to snick it through the slips. Four very chancey runs for Tonbridge. "Play carefully, take no chances, you are both meant to stay there, not to thrash the bowling” had said John Knott, the cricket master, as they went out to bat. Pudsey bowled again, he let it go past to the keeper and the next one as well. Then came a ball, designed to be cut. He made his stroke, a snick and the ball was in the keeper’s hands! He began the long walk back to the pavilion. In those days you left the crease without waiting for the umpire's raised finger.

Approaching the pavilion, he became aware of a commotion both in the stands and behind on the field: "Come back, come back, you're not out" they shouted.

Mayman once again covered the long walk back, took up his guard, Pudsey bowled, snick, ball in wicket keeper's hands, umpire raises finger. He makes the long walk again. The London newspapers that evening reported the incident under headlines, "The boy who walked" and "Schoolboy Opener Ignores Lords Umpires". Short articles grossly sensationalising the incident, and which were largely inaccurate in Mayman's opinion but germinating the cynicism with which he read press reports thereafter.

Surely a Max Beerbohm scenario?

Conscription followed. WW2 was in its fourth year.

After Maidstone Barracks, by troopship to India and officer training at Bangalore. Initially commissioned into 9th Gurkhas where Ian witnessed the horrors of India’s Partition in 1947, transferring to 6th Gurkhas at the start of the Malay Emergency in 1948, and finally joining 10th Gurkhas in Malaya in 1952.

His experiences of jungle warfare continued with few respites until the end of the Malaysian Confrontation with Indonesia in 1968. Notable during the latter period when commanding his company, a particularly bitter encounter with Indonesian regulars occurred on the mountainous border between Sarawak and Indonesian Borneo. Ian displayed outstanding personal courage and leadership - particularly when, under enemy fire, he carried a wounded and dying Gurkha down to a less exposed position behind some rocks. In this encounter five of the enemy were killed and eight wounded. His

company lost three killed and two wounded.

Interspersed through these more than twenty years’ service in the Far East were happier occasions: ADC to General Perowne a Chindit veteran, GOC 17 Gurkha Division and Major General Brigade of Gurkhas who on his retirement appointed Ian an officer of the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem, and then The Queen's Coronation Contingent 1953, an overland journey by car with two friends from Kathmandu to England, Marriage to Polly Fairtlough in 1960, Staff College and Staff appointment in BAOR and a mention in despatches for operations in Borneo.

With substantial reductions in the armed services pending and the amalgamation of the two battalions of 10th Gurkhas, Ian, then Chief Instructor at Mons Officer Cadet School Aldershot, decided on early retirement in 1969. With Polly and their three children, Venetia, Harry and Tom, they settled in Haslemere. After his three informative years with Shulton GB Ltd, based in London, they decided to own and run an hotel. This was The Talland Bay Hotel in Cornwall which over the years they transformed into a first-class country house hotel. Ian was, over a period of 25 years, involved with St John in Cornwall first as secretary to the council in Cornwall then President for South East Cornwall followed by Deputy President for the county and ultimately promotion to the level of Commander of the Order. For his services to the county of Cornwall Ian was appointed Deputy Lieutenant in 1988.

Two things that quickly struck anyone who met Ian was his sense of humour and his composure. He had an extraordinary ability to make light of any situation, no matter how serious, yet to do so in a way that was respectful to its seriousness. Never wallowing in the hardships, but also not disregarding them as of no consequence.

(JH 43-45)

TAPSELL, Sir Peter Hannay Bailey Died on 18 August 2018, aged 88. The following obituary was published in the Telegraph: Sir Peter Tapsell, who has died aged 88, was one of the last and possibly the wealthiest of the Tory grandees in the Commons, where he served with one short interruption for 54 years, eventually as Father of the House.

Never a minister, though briefly an Opposition spokesman, Tapsell – a generally liberal Tory – owed his lack of advancement to his independence of mind and success in the City. For more than 30 years he was a

partner in the stockbrokers James Capel, eventually taken over by HSBC. His assiduous networking in the world of finance ensured that his views commanded global respect, if not always that of the House.

The immaculately tailored Tapsell reckoned his opposition to the Maastricht treaty the high point of his Westminster career. He took pride also in having been the first Tory MP in half a century to vote against a Tory budget when he opposed Sir Geoffrey Howe’s deflationary package of 1981.

But his most effective action was to second his Oxford friend Michael Heseltine’s leadership challenge, which ousted Margaret Thatcher – with whom he profoundly disagreed – in 1990. Had Heseltine won, Tapsell was down for a senior job, but he got nothing from the winner, John Major.

He could be deadly in debate. When David Owen as Foreign Secretary declared that “history will judge” the wisdom of one of his policies, Tapsell crushingly asked: “Has the Right Honourable Gentleman not considered that history may have something better to do?”

In 1993 the Spectator named him Backbencher of the Year, stating: “He is exactly the sort of backbencher the whips cannot tolerate. He is a completely independent man and demonstrates this by frequently asking the questions the prime minister least wants to hear.”

Eleven years later, he was named Parliamentarian of the Year.

He seldom refrained from giving advice. He encouraged the Chancellor Anthony Barber to float the pound weeks before he did so. He urged Edward Heath not to call the disastrous February 1974 election. He warned Gordon Brown not to sell off the Bank of England’s gold at what turned out to be the bottom of the market.

He claimed to have been the first MP to suggest Saddam Hussein might not have weapons of mass destruction. And he told friends that if ministers had followed his advice on the poll tax, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, Maastricht and the Gulf War, New Labour would never have come to power.

As investment adviser to central banks, finance houses and trading companies around the world, Tapsell developed an awesome network of clients; his guests atop Toronto’s CN Tower in 1982 included three serving prime ministers and several central bank governors. He cultivated leaders from the president of Nauru to the emirs of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

His trenchant opposition to racism made friends of many rulers in post-independence Africa and the Caribbean. He demanded the release from jail of Dr Hastings Banda in his maiden speech, greeted Kenneth Kaunda at the prison gate and was close to Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Unita guerrillas in Angola. When Nelson Mandela visited London after his release from prison, it was Tapsell he sat next to.

Crucially, in 1960, Tapsell got to know the Sultan of Brunei. He became an honorary member of the Brunei Government Investment Board – overseeing $14 billion in reserves – and married his second wife in one of the Sultan’s palaces. He was also for almost two decades a member of the highly influential Trilateral Commission.

APRIL 2019

77

A clue to the finances at Tapsell’s beck and call was given by the donations he could summon up: £1 million for the Oxford Union from the Mitsubishi Trust and Banking Corporation and £1.5 million to Merton College, where he was an honorary Fellow, from a Japanese golf course developer.

His other contribution to Oxford was as an honorary postmaster (scholar) of Merton, with Duncan Sandys, Minister of Housing, to stop a bypass being driven through Merton Meadows.

Tapsell, in the words of the Sunday Telegraph’s Patrick Hutber, combined “a suave manner and awkward integrity”. He insisted when seeking a council grant to convert stables at his country house into a cottage for his parents that “talk of my being rich is absolute nonsense”. All of this was a world away from his boyhood ambition to become world heavyweight boxing champion.

He opposed the outlawing of foxhunting and smoking in public, and resisted liberalisation of the law on homosexuality. But nowhere was he more resolutely old-school than in his dealings with constituents.

Campaigners to save Skegness hospital petitioned the Queen to remove his knighthood because of his alleged rudeness. And when it was suggested that he install a webcam in his office, Tapsell declared: “I have a surgery once a fortnight and have done for 47 years.

People want to meet face to face, not over the web.”

Peter Hannay Bailey Tapsell was born at Hove on February 1 1930, the son of Eustace Tapsell, late of the 39th Central India Horse, a rubber planter in Malaya who went on to farm sisal in Kenya; his mother, the former Jessie Hannay, told him he was conceived in the Raffles Hotel, Singapore.

But his father was unemployed in the 1930s and, interviewed by Peter Oborne in the Telegraph in 2014, Tapsell recalled his mother “crying in the kitchen” because the family did not have money for rent.

Brought up by his grandfather, Peter was sent to Tonbridge School. After National Service in the Middle East as a subaltern with the Royal Sussex Regiment and working on the groundnuts scheme in Tanganyika, he took a First in Modern History at Merton.

Rejected by the Foreign Office, he joined the Conservative Research Department, and in the 1955 election was personal assistant to the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden.

In 1957 he fought a by-election at Wednesbury occasioned by the resignation of the pro-Suez Labour MP Stanley Evans. John Stonehouse easily took the seat, Tapsell polling a frustrating 9,999; in the mid-1970s, after Stonehouse’s faked death and reappearance, Tapsell would defend his right to speak in the Commons.

He started work that year as a stockbroker, and in three years was a partner in James Capel. When David Rockefeller, president of Chase Manhattan, came to London, Tapsell chaired the dinner in his honour.

Tapsell was 29 when he defeated Labour’s Sir Tom O’Brien by 164 votes in 1959 to become MP for Nottingham West. He was among 15 Tories to support Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s plea to be heard at the bar

78

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

of the House, having been excluded because he had succeeded to his father’s peerage, and criticised Harold Macmillan’s sacking of Selwyn Lloyd as Chancellor.

In 1964 he lost his seat to Labour by 2,292 votes. He was beaten to South Worcestershire by Sir Gerald Nabarro, but was then selected for Horncastle, the Lincolnshire constituency he would represent in varying forms for nearly five decades, holding it in 1966 by 5,735 votes. That December he voted with Labour for sanctions against Rhodesia, saying the terms offered to Ian Smith by Harold Wilson went as far as any British government could honourably go.

When the Conservatives returned to power under Heath, Tapsell advocated a prices and incomes freeze, and Heath eventually imposed one. Following Heath’s defeat in February 1974, Tapsell called for a coalition government; Heath followed suit.

When Jeffrey Archer gave up his seat at Louth, Tapsell urged that Enoch Powell – with whom he disagreed on almost everything – should take over. And in 1975 he voted to reintroduce the Prices and Incomes Board, saying: “The Right will have to stop regarding state intervention, state finance and state shareholdings as an automatic sin against the Holy Ghost.” He was also one of the first Tories to advocate a referendum on devolution. Yet in 1976 Mrs Thatcher made him junior foreign affairs spokesman.

Tapsell’s connections and expertise proved valuable when the next year he switched to Sir Geoffrey’s economic team. He landed some telling blows as Denis Healey tried to recover from the IMF crisis, but quit at the end of 1978, telling colleagues that the monetarist policies being followed would put three million people out of work.

Reckoning Tapsell an unreconstructed Keynesian, Mrs Thatcher did not offer him a job in government. He warned – to Labour cheers – that a “purely monetarist approach” could be ruinous for the economy, and claimed the day before the 1981 Budget that Sir Geoffrey had lost the confidence of the City.

He would later blame Mrs Thatcher’s approach for destroying British industry: “The whole of the West Midlands was wiped out and has never recovered.”

His regular rebellions angered Downing Street, and his attacks on Sir Geoffrey led one Thatcherite client to threaten to withdraw his business from James Capel.

But his real influence was behind closed doors, over lunch with tycoons, bankers – and the odd Cabinet minister.

Tapsell also nursed his constituency. When boundary changes prior to the 1983 election merged most of it with part of the Louth division as East Lindsey, he had no difficulty securing the nomination over Michael Brotherton, the member for Louth. (In 1997 his constituency was again redrawn as Louth and Horncastle.)

He seemed to have put himself beyond the pale when in 1984 he told Mrs Thatcher that “wet” economic policies in the United States had worked better than hers, yet the next year he was knighted. Returning from a constituency function he found his 18-year-old only son, James, dead in his car; an inquest concluded that

he had killed himself over a failed romance and the pressure of exams.

With Nigel Lawson at the Treasury, Tapsell’s critique mellowed. Yet he supported Heseltine’s challenge to Mrs Thatcher with alacrity, appearing 35 times on television as campaign spokesman. Thatcherites in his constituency reacted by making their one serious effort to get rid of him.

Tapsell took an increasingly Eurosceptic line because of his concerns about the impact of monetary union; in July 1993 he helped bring about the defeat over Maastricht that forced Major to seek a vote of confidence.

He also warned that British military involvement in Bosnia could become another Vietnam, and accused John Redwood, whose leadership challenge Major defeated, of “going after foreign gods” in borrowing ideas from America’s neo-conservatives.

As the longest-serving Conservative MP after Heath’s retirement, Tapsell was heard with respect even by those who disagreed with him. He became increasingly concerned over the consequences of British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, describing it as “madness”.

As Father of the House after the 2010 election, Tapsell chaired the session that re-elected John Bercow as Speaker, disgruntled Tories not forcing their objections to a vote. Under the Coalition, he was one of 91 Tories who rebelled in 2012 to kill Nick Clegg’s plans for Lords reform.

He was in favour of leaving the EU, saying in 2014: “If we had a referendum and the country votes to stay in then we’re finished as a country because we will just be gobbled up into the German empire.” He retired from the House in 2015.

Tapsell, one of whose several homes was in Barbados, had been chairman of the British-Caribbean Association, and a Vice-President of the Tennyson Society. He was an honorary life member of 6 Squadron RAF, and served on the United Nations Business Council and the council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 2011.

Peter Tapsell married first, in 1963 (dissolved 1971), Cecilia Hawke, daughter of the 9th Lord Hawke. He married again, in 1974, Gabrielle Mahieu.

(MH 43-47)

BURDER, John Robert (Robert) Died on 7 May 2018, aged 88. He joined Tonbridge school after his return to Canada and Ashbury College where he and his brother, David, had been evacuated to with the rest of his prep school during the Second World War. After National Service he went on to be a solicitor in The Outer Temple with the long-established firm of Batchelors, where he was Senior Partner.

(PH 44-47)

FISHER, Michael Howe Died on 21 March 2019 after a long illness, aged 87.

(MH 44-48) RICHARDS, David Charles Died in 2017 aged 88.

(MH 44-48) ARTHURE, Thomas Richard Died on 2 February 2018, aged 86. Much loved elder brother of John Arthure (Sc 48-53), Thomas leaves behind three children, David, Jane and Richard, six grandchildren.

After leaving Tonbridge and doing National Service in the RAF, Thomas joined HR Owen where he sold cars.

He made a record when a famous manufacturer of biscuits came in to buy a Rolls-Royce, and Thomas sold him one thousand Austin A30s for his sales staff. After 2 years he joined the Steel works in Wales, where he worked until his retirement.

He married Jennifer Morton, and they lived in the house in Reynoldstone, Gower where she had been born, until his death.

He leaves three children, David, Jane and Richard, and six grandchildren and his younger brother and Old Tonbridgian, John Arthure.

(Sc 45-49) HONNOR, Roy William Died peacefully on 5 May 2018, at Coxhill Manor Nursing home, Surrey. Previously of Wateringbury near Maidstone. Devoted husband of Ann, for whom he cared following a serious illness. He leaves two sons, Simon (JH 83-88) and Andrew (Old Cranleighan).

Grandchildren Alexander, Zachary and Annabelle.

At School he showed promise in mathematics. This served him well when he was required to take the position of Finance Director of the Maidstone family business in agriculture and horticulture at the age of only 25. He was quick to recognise the potential for computers in business, writing his own programs. After 50 years as a director he retired from Honnors Ltd at the age of 75. His Christian values had endeared him to his staff.

(JH 45-49) MADWAR, Allan Died 5 August 2015, aged 83.

(JH 45-49) POINTON, Kenneth Richard, (Ken) MA(Cantab), FCMA, FCCA, FCMC, CEng, MICE Died peacefully at his home in Ightham, Kent on 29 January 2019, aged 85.

Ken was born in Bombay, India (now Mumbai) on 7 May 1933 – his father being the General Manager India of the Swedish industrial company, ASEA (now part of

APRIL 2019

79

ABB) – but returned to England aged 3, to live with his grandparents, while his parents remained in India. He attended Rushmoor Preparatory School, where he was head of school. It was while there that Ken’s only sibling, Eric (MH 1942-44), who was on a cycling holiday with his friends, was tragically killed in an accident.

Ken went to Tonbridge in 1946 and excelled academically and at sport. He was in the Cricket 1st XI for 3 years and in the annual Tonbridge vs. Clifton match became the youngest person to hit a six over the pavilion at Lords aged 16. He was also in the Rugby 1st XV and in his final year captained both the Cricket and the Rugby 1st teams, as well as being Head Boy. Ken served in the Royal Engineers during his National Service, learning to parachute and becoming a Parachute Engineer. After reading Engineering at Clare College, Cambridge, where he narrowly missed earning blues in Rugby and Cricket owing to injury, he became a civil engineer for Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners and designed parts of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Aswan Dam, amongst other projects. He subsequently retrained as a management consultant and an accountant, before working as Director for a wide variety of companies including Griffis Metals, recovering precious metals from scrap computers, and IMEG, who laid massive oil pipelines across Europe.

Married to Marj in 1957, his career brought him to Tonbridge again and they bought a house in Ightham in 1963, where they brought up their family. Ken loved the garden (looking at it rather than tending to it!), watching any sport (he was lifelong member of the MCC), and discussing world affairs with friends over a bottle of wine. They entertained frequently and Ken was always ready with an anecdote, a big smile and of course his distinctive laugh.

He is survived by his wife, Marjorie, children, Rick (MH 1975-79), Clare and Nick (WH 1984-89) and his grandchildren, Alice, Naomi, Hal (WH 2015-), Trinity, Freddie and Raphy.

(MH 46-51)

BAX, John Napier Amory Died at his home in Tring on 19 March 2018, aged 83 years. Beloved husband of Janet, dear father of Robert and Heidi and proud Grandpa of Megan, Lewis, Phoebe and Lilia.

(Sc 48-52) FLORENCE, Neil Petrie Died in Germany on 21 January 2019, aged 85. Major (Retd) Neil Petrie, late The South (Prince of Wale's Volunteers) and Queen's Lancashire Regiments, OT, MIPR '65. Dearly loved husband of Marion and brother of Clotilde Maple and the late Alan Florence.

(PS 48-51)

80

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

LONDON, John Frederick Passed away peacefully on 30 October 2018, aged 83, at Pembury Hospital. Loved beyond words by his wife, Merrill, children, grandchildren and great grandchild.

John Frederick London was born in Tonbridge Nursing Home (now part of the School site) on the 17th November 1934 to Doris and Eric London MBE. Returning to Sevenoaks after the war he attended Sevenoaks Preparatory School and entered Manor House in the Michaelmas Term 1948. John much enjoyed his time at Tonbridge playing rugby for the Colts and 3rds and as well as tennis and being a keen sprinter in athletics.

Leaving in 1952 to do his National Service in the Royal Artillery he became seriously ill a few days before being commissioned and spent the next year in and out of military hospitals. Joining the Bank of England, he worked in a variety of roles before moving to the First Bank of Boston and then the discount house Quinn Cope Ltd, working as a bill-broker, and eventually becoming a joint managing director. In semiretirement, he renewed his links with the Royal Artillery by becoming the Finance Director of the Museum Trust before finally retiring.

Outside work, John enjoyed a happy family life having married in 1962 Merrill (nee Prior), who he met through the Young Conservatives. A son, James (MH 78-83) and two daughters followed. His other great interest throughout his life was local politics. He became a local Councillor in 1959 and served variously as an Urban District, Town, and County Councillor for the next 50 years, serving as the Sevenoaks Urban District Chairman, the Town Mayor three times, and Chairman of Kent County Council. On retirement he was appointed an Honorary Alderman and the first Freeman of Sevenoaks Town.

(MH 48-52) McFARLANE, Malcom George Died 1 May 2017, aged 82.

(Sc 48-53) STABLES, David Henry Died in August 2018, aged 85.

(FH 48-52) STOKER, John Mayfield Died in April 2018, aged 83.

(Sc 48-53) BARKER, John Alnwick Died on 22 February 2019, aged 83 (FH 49-53)

CANN, Christopher Richard Died on 9 February 2018, aged 82. His friend, Julian M. Gander (FH 48-51) writes: We met 70 years ago in the ‘facts’ class of Slimy Somerville at Tonbridge School. Chris was in Judde House with superior catering, and I was in Ferox Hall.

Our lives were separate but for Slimy’s class. Just a word of explanation – ‘facts’ involved desperately searching daily papers for items (usually 3). In my case, those papers lurked at the end of a dingy passage at Ferox: so armed with ‘info’ such as ‘the communists have just crossed the Yalu river’, we assembled and swapped notes under the baleful eye of Slimy.

The next time we met was on Sports Day when I rashly entered for the 440 yards. Chris thundered past me going great guns – running was his thing; of course.

We met in the holidays; I lived at 11 Beverley Close Barnes, he at 38 Hertford Avenue, East Sheen. Chris was much brainier than I was, and when I left Tonbridge to learn my uncle’s business, he stayed on and eventually left to be articled to his father’s chartered accountancy business.

Our paths crossed again when he eventually did his national service and was assigned to a post in St Mary Cray near where we lived in Chislehurst. We golfed together and I recall that Chris was ten times better at in than I was, but he was tolerant of my incompetence.

He also played at Richmond Park where once we gave up our game to search for golf balls and found 7! We subsequently abandoned golf altogether when we both joined Roehampton Club and played tennis and squash, eventually becoming honorary members after 50 years.

Chris loved his garden and was a life long RHS member. Now and again we visited the wetlands in Barnes and I was his guest. I persuaded him on our last visit to watch the Asian otters being fed!

He was a lifelong friend and also godfather to my son, Simon. I will miss him greatly.

I would like to say this prayer for Christopher; the traditional version of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever.

Amen.

(JH 49-54)

NOBBS, John Winchester (Chester) Died on 18 April 2018 at the age of 82. He leaves his wife, Linda, his son Patrick, and three daughters, Kate, Juliet and Sally, and nine much loved grandchildren.

After 2 years National Service, Chester felt unable to face further years at university, and instead, emigrated to Vancouver, BC, where he met his wife. However, he returned to Surrey to bring up his family, and following a period working in financial services in the City, set up a small sports equipment company, which he later moved to Dorset which he had fallen in love with as a boy attending summer camps near Blandford. Singing, especially Mozart, together with lawn and real tennis and cricket, remained abiding passions from his time at school.

(MH 49-54) TRAVIS, Gilbert Wilson Died in 2018, aged 82.

(HS 49-53) WINNIFRITH, Charles Boniface CB Died peacefully at home on 7 June 2018, aged 82.

(SH 49-54) HARVERSON, Michael Died in March 2018, aged 79.

(WH 50-55) HOWDEN, Timothy Simon (Tim) Died peacefully at home on Tuesday 19 February 2019 aged 81. He was a much-loved husband to Lois and step parent to Renee and Ryan and Max and Joe. With first wife Penny, and to the end, Tim was a wonderful father to Charles (Sc 72-75), Jo and Nic and grandfather to Tom, Alfie, Stanley, Milo and Milly.

(Sc 50-55) SPANKIE, Hugh Oliver (Oliver) Died on 1 April 2012, aged 75.

(SH 50-55) ADAMS, Gordon Lawrence Died on 4 February 2018, peacefully, surrounded by his family in a Nursing Home, aged 79. Much loved husband of Roberta, whom he married in 1967.

Gordon and Roberta had two children; Christopher and Abby. Christopher followed his father’s footsteps and attended Tonbridge (FH 83-88). Gordon was a loving husband and father and an adored grandad to Megan, Paul and William. He is greatly missed.

(FH 51-56)

APRIL 2019

81

COLLINS, John Phillip Major Died in September 2018, aged 81.

(Sc 51-55)

HÉROYS, Nicholas Died peacefully on 28 January 2019. Adored husband of Sue, loving father of Michael (MH 79-84) and Alexander (SH 83-84). Brother of Claude (SH 51-56), Peter (PS 53-58) and Alexander (Sc 54-55). The following obituary was published on www.kentcricket.co.uk: Nicholas Héroys, who died on 26th January, aged 81 years old, was a Past President of Kent Cricket in 1995-96 and a member of the General Committee for over 30 years from 1970.

Educated at Tonbridge School, Nicholas was commissioned in The Royal Leicestershire Regiment. He was a very good amateur cricketer. After his National Service, he studied at Cambridge, during which time he played two matches for the University (one, in 1960, a First Class match against Hampshire at Fenners.)

In 1972, he captained the MCC vs. Cambridge University and also captained the Old Tonbridgians CC to five finals of The Cricketer Cup (three wins) and was President of the Club.

Nicholas, a trained chartered accountant, had a very successful business career, finishing his working life as Finance Director of Slaughter and May, regarded as one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. He and his devoted wife, Susan, had been married for 53 years and had two sons.

Kent Cricket Chairman, Simon Philip, said: “Nicholas Héroys was a much respected and distinguished servant of the club, as reflected in his appointment as an Honorary Life Member (now Vice President), the highest honour the club can bestow. He will be missed by all at the club who were lucky enough to know him.

The thoughts of everyone at Kent Cricket are with Nicholas’ family and friends at this sad time.”

(MH 51-55) OXLEY, David Gill Died on 27 February 2012.

(Sc 51-54)

82

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

TOWNEND, James Barrie Stanley, QC Died on 17 December 2018, aged 80. The following obituary was published in the Telegraph: James Townend, who has died aged 80, was a fearless advocate gifted with a brilliant turn of phrase and considerable courtroom presence.

As a QC at the Family Bar he played a prominent part in the Cleveland child abuse inquiry in 1987, representing senior social workers and conducting what the Telegraph considered the fiercest cross-examination of the lengthy proceedings when he accused a police surgeon of hypocrisy over her criticism of paediatricians. He also served as chairman of the Family Law Bar Association between 1986 and 1988.

But he was also in demand in other legal areas.

In crime, he was involved in many murder and other serious cases and in 2002 represented the Royal Butler, Harold Brown, who had been charged with stealing from Princess Diana. The charge was dropped following the Queen’s intervention in the trial of the other Royal Butler, Paul Burrell.

Townend made an astonishing disclosure in court in response to a prosecution statement playing down the extent and value of royal gifts to servants. Had the case against Brown gone ahead, Townend said he would have produced evidence that the Prince of Wales had offered a gold wedding ring as a gift to someone on his staff.

The Prince, Townend added, had scribbled a note on the back of an envelope saying: “There is a very good gold wedding ring here which someone in the office might find useful”. It was not clear whose ring it was, but St James’s Palace insisted it was not the Prince’s own, which he continued to wear under his signet ring.

After his client walked free from the Old Bailey, Townend might have permitted himself a smile of satisfaction at one newspaper report headed “Another Butler Who Didn’t Do It”. He appeared in many cases exciting press coverage over the years, and had an eye for an attractive angle. In 1986, when he prosecuted a man at Lewes Crown Court accused of stabbing a pregnant 17-year-old girl to death while stoned on strong lager and LSD, he said the accused man was obsessed with black magic and wanted to witness a human sacrifice.

Defending a wealthy farmer accused of cutting down protected trees on his land in 1984, Townend lost the case but won a eight-week reprieve for his client by persuading the judge to postpone the two-month jail sentence he had imposed until the farmer had finished gathering in the harvest.

Under the headline “Wife in bikini took lessons on guitar”, the Telegraph reported in 1978 how Townend, sitting as a judge at the High Court, granted a woman a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s unreasonable behaviour even though she had made numerous “conquests” of local men, including a window cleaner from whom she had received music tuition clad in her swimsuit. The husband had branded her “the village whore”.

James Barrie Stanley Townend was born at Deal, Kent, on February 21 1938. From Tonbridge School he went to Lincoln College, Oxford, and after National Service was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1962.

He soon built up a successful practice at the Family Bar, being much in demand by the London “Magic Circle” divorce firms, acting in the late 1960s for Earl Spencer (then Viscount Althorp) in his successful custody claim in respect of the young Diana.

Townend took Silk in 1978 and became a Recorder of the Crown Court the following year: impressive achievements. For many years he also sat as a deputy High Court Judge of the Family Division and became a Bencher of his Inn. In the 1990s he had an extensive practice in professional negligence cases involving potentially negligent surveyors, solicitors and accountants. It was especially in this last area where he belied his frequent assertions that he knew no law. So much in demand was he that once, when he had to be in Canterbury Crown Court on a criminal case in the morning, his client in a family case due on in London that afternoon hired a helicopter to fly him from a field just outside Canterbury to make sure he was back in London in time.

In 1982 he became Head of his Chambers at 1 King’s Bench Walk, a position he held for 17 years, and where he led with firmness and benevolence. Townend was one of life’s great raconteurs, blessed with abundant charm and wit. When the wife of a senior member of his Chambers was made a dame, at the celebratory party he closed his congratulatory speech by saying: “All that’s now left is for her husband to make a lady of her.”

He was as comfortable in his three-piece suits, with watch chain across his front, as in his favourite pair of lime-green slacks covered with colourful pictures of parrots. He was a bon vivant, and alcohol always flowed freely at his home in Kingston, where in the conservatory a large chemist’s dispenser held neat gin from which visitors were encouraged to help themselves. When he was Head of Chambers, the AGMs were held beside his swimming pool, with business usually dispatched within an hour so as not to delay the more serious concerns of the day.

Following his retirement he returned to Deal to enjoy wine, conversation and good company as well as fishing and sailing, while maintaining his “open door” policy for visitors.

James Townend’s first marriage, to Airelle Claire (née Nies), was dissolved in 2005. Three years later he married Marleen Marie Lucie (née Deknudt), who survives him with a stepdaughter from his first marriage.

(Sc 51-55)

WRIGLEY, Simon Mark Curtis Died on 9 January at home, aged 80. Loving husband to Fiona, brother to Christabel and stepfather to Zara and Antonia.

(MH 51-54) BRODRICK, Timothy William (Tim) Died in December 2017, aged 78.

(PS 52-56)

HOWLETT, John Reginald Died on 3 March 2019, aged 78. The following obituary was written by his Brother, Peter (SH 56-62) and published in the Guardian: My brother, John Howlett, who has died aged 78, had a varied career as a novelist, scriptwriter and biographer.

His admiration of the rebel and actor James Dean and his research for the 1975 TV documentary James Dean: The First American Teenager led him to write a biography of the actor the same year and subsequently a West End musical, Dean, which had notable success in Japan – though less so in London.

Screenplays followed for his own Murder of a Moderate Man (1985), then a serial adaptation of Len Deighton’s Game, Set and Match (1988) for Granada TV, as well as several original radio plays for the BBC. He also co-wrote an outline story for a film, Crusaders, which became the basis of Lindsay Anderson’s award-winning 1968 hit, If… From the mid-1970s John published a series of novels – mainly thrillers focusing on contemporary issues such as nuclear power, air safety, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the origins of the Aids crisis. His left-wing sympathies and distrust of the establishment characterised these novels as well as much of his other work in the 80s and 90s.

John’s interest in the first world war, sparked by his teenage conversations with veterans of that conflict, allied to the meticulous research that characterised all of his work, provided the basis for Love of an Unknown Soldier (2010), which became the first of a six-volume saga set against the background of the political turmoil of the first half of the 20th century, covering the rise of fascism, the Spanish civil war and the second world war.

John was born in Leeds to Rex Howlett, a senior civil servant, and his wife, Leila (nee Cagna), who was born and raised in Milan. His early writing work was rooted in his experience as a rebellious student at Tonbridge

APRIL 2019

83

school in Kent and then Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied history. It was with fellow Tonbridgian David Sherwin-White (Sc 55-58) that he wrote Crusaders, which satirised public school life.

Later in his career, never having been comfortable with the commercial world of publishing, John found new creative stimulus and freedom through self-publishing and re-issuing his work online.

Living in Stone-in-Oxney, Kent, and then in Rye, East Sussex, with his Italian wife, Ada (nee Finocchiaro), whom he married in 1967, he was an active member of his local communities, renowned for his warm hospitality and strong opinions.

He is survived by Ada, their two daughters, Isabel and Suzanne, five grandchildren, and me.

(SH 53-58)

RENSHAW-FOX, Roger Died on 10 December 2018, aged 79.

(FH 53-57) FERRIER, Hugh William Alexander Died peacefully at home on 3 May 2018 surrounded by his family, aged 77. ‘We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails’.

(JH 54-59) BURKLE, David James Died on 24 July 2018, aged 76 (PS 55-60) DAVIS, James Irwin Died on 25 September 2018, aged 76 (PH 55-59) LEA, Michael Richard (Richard) Died in Canada on 11 May 2018, aged 76.

(SH 55-60) MALTBY, Alan Vivian Died on 19 January 2019, aged 76, following a long battle with cancer. Father of Max (MH 05-10) and brother of Timothy (PS 61-66) (PS 56-60) CARSON, Michael Kingsford, Colonel Died on 5 May 2018, aged 75. Deeply loved husband of Janice, father of Helen and James (MH 84-89), Grandpa of Thomas, Freddie and Beatrice and brother of Hugh (MH 60-64) and Robin.

(MH 57-59)

84

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

BARR, William Bruce Ainsworth (Bill) Died in Australia, after a period of illness, on 19 May 2018, aged 73. His brother Charles (PH 53-58) writes: William, known to many as Bill, died at his home in Renmark, South Australia, after a period of illness. He had emigrated in the 1970s, after graduating from Trinity College, Dublin. A large gathering of family and friends came together to mourn him and to celebrate his life, including his partner Pamela and their son Daniel; me, from England; and our brother Peter (FH 56-60) from Scotland. William had put down strong roots locally, notably as a sportsman, and later a coach, and a broadcaster on sporting topics; a bench was later dedicated in his memory outside the regional radio station in Renmark, overlooking the River Murray on which for many years he had maintained a boat. At the funeral, I was asked to speak on his sporting career, while others covered other aspects of his richly varied life, and this is adapted from that address: William was named after our father, Bruce Ainsworth Barr (PS 20-25), who was born and raised in Ireland; Bruce’s working life was spent in England, where his three sons were all born, but he frequently went back, and took us with him, and he and our Scottish mother Jean went to live in County Down in retirement. In his day, he was a seriously good all-round sportsman, notably in rugby and athletics; having captained the Tonbridge XV for two years, he went on to play for Cambridge University and for London Irish, though he never quite, as his own father (also a Tonbridgian) had done, made the full Irish team.

As a schoolmaster, our father coached sport at a high level, and when he had sons, he must have had high hopes for them. He encouraged us to play sport, and we were sent to schools where sport was taken seriously. Both Peter and I were keen, and reasonably good, but he must have been disappointed to realise early on that neither of us was ever going to be in the same league as he was. But it was third time lucky.

William was absolutely in the same league.

At the age of nine he was playing successfully in the first cricket eleven at Orwell Park prep school, with and against boys of 12 and 13, and captaining the under-11 soccer team. And he didn’t look back, as the school’s magazine testifies. In hockey, “Barr is the most skilful forward we have ever had at the school.” The team he dominated won 6 matches out of 6. The soccer team was equally triumphant, and “Barr’s heading was the best we have ever seen at the school.” He was captain of cricket aged 12 and again the next year at 13, and the magazine gave him this farewell: As a batsman he is already capable of every shot.

He has confidence and the attacking spirit and is not afraid to use his feet to slow bowlers, and if he has the opportunity to play later on and continues in this vein, he must reach the summit of a cricketer’s ambitions. He should at least aim at nothing less.

That was written by a teacher, Brian Belle, who knew what he was talking about – he had played at first-class level for Oxford and Essex and did not give praise easily.

At Tonbridge William did pretty well, playing fly-half in the Rugby XV, and as a batsman in the XI for two years

– and winner of the cup for Best Fielder – but he did not go on to reach the summit of a cricketer’s ambitions. He was already making squash his main priority (at the expense of spring-term hockey), and surely here he could well have reached the very top, if it hadn’t been for injury: he was captain of squash at Tonbridge, and later at Trinity Dublin, and became Irish squash champion before emigrating. It’s hard not to feel a double regret: first that he hadn’t pursued more single-mindedly at least one of the team games at which he excelled and, second, that his career as a squash player was cut short.

But it would be wrong to make it a story of disappointment. William was very competitive, but he also took pleasure, and gave pleasure, in the sheer skills and beauties of sport, first as a player and later as a follower, and as a coach, pleasures that go beyond who wins and loses. Here are two more quotes from his schooldays. First, as a soccer player aged 12. He wasn’t simply the best header of a ball that the school had ever had: “Barr had the brilliance and perfection of the concert pianist; everything was always under perfect control.” And another image comes from his appearance for Tonbridge against Clifton at Lord’s, aged 17. I talked recently to Mike Bushby, who had come to Tonbridge after captaining Cambridge against Colin Cowdrey’s Oxford, and who retains warm memories of William as a key member of one of the school’s best-ever teams. He particularly remembered what the umpires said to him when they came off at the end of an innings in which William and the team were fielding. These were two hard-bitten old professionals who had played and then umpired for decades, but they were glowing with enthusiasm, saying to Mike that “It was like a circus out there.” Meaning not that they were a lot of clowns, but that they were like acrobats, doing spectacular things with great timing and great teamwork, backing each other up as acrobats have to.

And Mike was insistent: “William was the inspiration. He set the tone.”

So I end with those two images, which so beautifully evoke the skills, and the joy, of William as a youthful sportsman: the concert pianist, and the circus acrobat.

They capture the kind of relish for, and understanding of, sport at its best that he carried through his life and communicated to others. Owing much to his Irish forebears, both physically, in the genes, and in spirit. In line with what he always wanted, his ashes will be taken back in July 2019 to Ireland, to Newcastle, County Down, where he loved to play golf, and where he will join our parents in the family grave at the foot of the Mourne mountains.

(FH 58-62)

STRANGE, Nicholas Peter John Died peacefully at his home in Germany on 2 August 2018, aged 71. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer. His stepson Grigory Parkin writes: Nick Strange was an over-achiever all his life. He sat his A-levels at the age of 16. Then he was one of ten students to be awarded the prestigious Trevelyan Scholarship, before going on to read Psychology and Philosophy at Worcester College, Oxford University. In

his case, the award was for retracing - on foot - the 300 mile march in 1704 by the Duke of Marlborough’s army to the Battle of Blenheim, walking from Cologne to the Danube at Donauwoert, dressed in the full period uniform of a British grenadier.

Later, he was awarded his MBA from INSEAD, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an honorary doctorate in economics by the Plekhanov University of Economics in Moscow.

Nick spent most of his career in management consulting, initially with McKinsey, then with Ingersoll Engineers and finally from 1990 as an independent freelance consultant. It was also in the early 90s that he started to teach management accounting. He noticed that even his best accounting students struggled to communicate their results, so he started to teach the art of management communication. This became his full-time activity and based near Cologne in Germany, he taught at more than 30 universities and business schools in the EU, Asia and Eastern Europe.

In 2007 he published Smoke and Mirrors: an Encyclopaedia of Graphic Deceit, which was also published in Poland (2008) and Japan (2009). His book Keine Angst vor Methusalem (2006) analysed the effects of ageing populations in industrialised economies. It was typical of both the international nature of his teaching and his continuing interest in more general economic questions.

Nick’s personal interests were as diverse as his academic preoccupations. He was well-versed in the use of explosives, which made him the terror of the local garden moles. He was a more than competent carpenter. He liked shooting with antique rifles and learnt to fly small engine airplanes in Africa. Nick’s students, friends and family were constantly amazed by remarkable capacity to learn new subjects and new skills - and then teach them.

He leaves behind his wife Anna and two sons, as well as his dog Jhuk and his Mongolian racehorse.

Sir Christopher Bellamy QC (Sc 59-64) writes: Nick and I were close friends when we together in School House, Tonbridge, nearly 60 years ago. We read history, and in 1964 your father and I walked together across Europe following Marlborough’s march to the battle of Blenheim in 1704. This exploit based on the diary of Sergeant Milner who was in the British Army at the time. Nick was dressed in Milner’s faithfully reproduced uniform and I was the faithful packhorse.

A surprising amount of what Milner described was still in existence 260 years later - but probably not the gentleman we found one day dead drunk in our tent at Heidelberg, who was only with difficulty evicted into the pouring rain and eventually staggered away in the general direction of the Rhine.

This was an early example of Nick’s imaginativeness, sense of adventure, attention to detail and love of foreign parts which with many other qualities made him such an outstanding individual and friend.

(Sc 60-64)

APRIL 2019

85

FISHER, Peter Anthony Goodwin Died on 15 August 2018 in a tragic road traffic accident, aged 68. The following obituary was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ): Peter Fisher was probably the nearest anyone will ever get to being homeopathic royalty: homeopathic physician to the Queen, president of the Faculty of Homeopathy, and chair of the World Health Organization’s working group on homeopathy. But what made him remarkable was his single-minded determination to promote homeopathy despite the unrelenting flood of criticism and scientific evidence against it. His career was a masterclass for politicians on how to stay on message. Vowing that he would “debate anyone, anytime,” he was an accomplished writer and speaker.

Perfect timing Fisher could not have chosen a better time to start specialising in homeopathy. He graduated from Cambridge in 1976 during the evolution of the new “pick n’ mix” medical culture and amid a growing realisation that care professionals could never provide the personal engagement many patients wanted. The thalidomide scandal had shaken public faith in modern medicines, and homeopathy and other forms of complementary medicine were coming in from the cold—with a helping hand from Prince Charles and an unquestioning media that gave more prominence to royal patronage than to evidence-based medicine.

But Fisher’s conversion to unorthodox medicine and homeopathy was far removed from the turmoil in the NHS. A self-confessed communist revolutionary during his student days, he was one of the first Westerners to go to China after US President Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972, which had ended 25 years of no communication or diplomatic ties between the two countries.

In what was a life changing trip, Fisher saw a woman on an operating table in a provincial hospital, her entire abdomen open, having half her stomach resected. Her anaesthesia consisted of three needles in her left ear.

This was, he thought, not something that he “had been taught in Cambridge.” For a while he considered studying traditional Chinese medicine.

He first used homeopathy himself after developing an unspecified complaint. After “various distinguished physicians” claimed that nothing could be done for him a US friend recommended “the magic of the minimum dose.” Speaking in 2012 to the World of Homeopathy website, he recalled: “The first thing [after taking the remedy], I had a terrible aggravation. It made me realise

86

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

at least it did something. And then it helped, and that sort of started the ball rolling.”

Life and career The son of Antony and Eve Fisher, Peter was educated at Tonbridge School and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After completing his training at Westminster Hospital, London, he became a research fellow in the department of rheumatology and clinical pharmacology at Barts and was the lead researcher in one of the first homeopathy studies to be published in a leading medical journal.

Formerly an honorary consultant rheumatologist at King’s College Hospital, he was at the time of his death director of research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine (formerly the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital), Europe’s largest centre for integrative medicine. For over 25 years he was also editor in chief of Homeopathy, the only Medline indexed homeopathic journal (a status he was extremely proud of). His elevation as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians enraged many fellow doctors.

He became homeopathic physician to the Queen in 2001 and claimed to have treated her entire family.

Prince Charles was a particular ally who, Fisher noted, was “very friendly and not afraid to stick his neck out.”

Challenges But his role as a champion of homeopathy had become increasingly challenging. In 1993 Edzard Ernst gave up a prestigious chair in Vienna to become the world’s first professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter. Complementary medicine specialists initially saw Ernst’s appointment as a golden public relations opportunity, but Ernst quickly built an international reputation for successfully applying science to test the value of alternative therapies. He was regularly interviewed on television and radio and became an invaluable contact for many journalists.

Media coverage of homeopathy and complementary medicine became increasingly critical and questioning.

Ernst was also committed, it seemed, to “debating anyone, anytime.”

In a Head to Head debate with Ernst in The BMJ, Fisher urged doctors to put aside any bias based on the alleged implausibility of homeopathy, arguing that, when integrated with standard care, it was safe and popular with patients and that it improved clinical outcomes without increasing costs.

But Ernst argued that the £3m-£5m (€3.3m-€5.6m; $3.9m-$6.5m) that the NHS spent on homeopathy would be better used elsewhere and that, although patient choice was important, it should be evidence based. He did not accept the premise that homeopathy was safe, arguing that even a placebo could cause harm if it replaced an effective treatment.

In June this year Fisher must have been bitterly disheartened when a High Court judge upheld NHS England’s decision to stop funding homeopathic remedies, but this did not dampen his ambition or campaigning zeal. He had turned a speculative eye on polypharmacy in elderly patients, arguing that little attention had been given to alternatives.

He married Nina Oxenham in 1999. They were divorced in 2017. He leaves their two daughters, Lily and Evie, who are at university. Known for his wit, he loved music, art, and philosophy and was a keen gardener.

(MH 64-68)

CHAMBERLAIN, Richard Maitland Died suddenly at home in Hindolveston, Norfolk, on 28 February 2018, aged 52.

(Sc 79-83)

RAVINDRAN, Jaya Shanker Jaya, my greatest friend, you above all the people I have known understood me the best. We met in September 1983 at Tonbridge and were inseparable until we left school in July 1988. Our friendship was, in your words, forged in that crucible of a “tough, English boarding school”. We were the only two non-scholars in a class of very smart young men, I remember well how inadequate we both felt amongst such talent, yet we always held our own. Pushed in to taking far too many O levels we both excelled, and shared our love of chemistry and biology at A level, both wanting to go to medical school. You went on to Nottingham and did precisely that: driven by your desire to serve others. I sold my soul for History at Cambridge and went to the City. To many we were unlikely friends: you a hardworking, shy lad from Malaysia and miles from home and me the competitive, annoying head-of-prep school type who needed taking down a peg or two.

We shared a crazy sense of humour, a love of science, a passion for 70s rock and we attended our first concert together, watching Bob Dylan in 1986. I always admired your immense capacity for hard work: and if there is any success I can claim from those school days academically, I owe so much of it to you and your patience, when rather than revise what you needed to revise, you would be helping me learn what I had should already have learned. I took you to our farm in Kent for many weekends over the years and you became one of the family. I taught you to ride motorbikes on our farm, drive huge tractors and operate heavy machinery: all quite outside your comfort zone but you were always game for an adventure. I remember when we were stopped by a charming policeman miles from home at the age of 16 for riding two up on the road on a bright yellow moped with no number plate: you were my passenger. I am sure you had told me this was a bad idea but I was

never very good at following your sensible advice. I was wearing an old 1930s helmet and you were wearing a riding hat. When the policeman asked me who you were, I told him you had just arrived as an exchange student from India, couldn’t speak English and had reluctantly agreed to my mad bike ride idea. He turned and asked you what your name was, asked you why you were wearing a riding hat and you, quite brilliantly, patiently shook your head saying: “No speak English”.

“Ok”, said the policeman, “I’ll leave the Indian Gentlemen out of this but you son” (pointing to me): “I got you on 7 charges…you had better come down the station”. That story sums up our relationship: me and my hairbrained schemes and you always there, quite aware of possible disaster but always game for an adventure.

In 1989 we travelled in Thailand together for 2 months: two young men on one huge adventure. We hopped from island to island in the south, and explored the remote north on another motorcycle, covering 1500 miles of wild territory armed with a small backpack and one map…a map that you famously lost when we were already lost. “I have lost the map” you told me calmly.

You have always reminded me of that story and how angry I was with you and how patient you were with me knowing that it would all be fine in the end.

We lost touch around 2001. We were reunited in the spring of 2017 when your wife reached out to me to tell me of your illness. When we first spoke on Skype the magic was still there: it was as though we had never been apart. I learned of your illness and all I could think was how courageously you had faced the events up until then: never bitter, always grateful. I dragged you kicking and screaming into new technology: we opened a WhatsApp chat line and chatted every day.

We spoke after you had learned of your relapse: and with immense courage you decided you would face the task of survival one day at a time and launch a long wished-for project: to publish your poetry. We married this objective with your desire to give something back and raise money for two blood cancer charities.

Together with a formidable team we launched Project Hope: your poetry was published, the fundraising started and we raised £26,000. New to the digital age, we had you working on LinkedIn and Facebook and Giles Pittman (PS 1984-89) filmed a series of video logs.

Whenever you forgot a password or couldn’t access a platform you would call me and tell me: “I have lost the map again!” Your Video logs are themselves some of the most honest, courageous content I have seen, and a testament to the grace and bravery with which you faced your illness.

You told me that, when you learned of your relapse in 2017, you felt that you were drowning. I remember swimming with you in a dark Malaysian sea at midnight in 1989 and you got into trouble and I swam out to rescue you. You were panicking and I told you that if you didn’t stop panicking I would have to knock you out and drag you in. You stopped panicking and I pulled you to safety. We shared this story again, and Project Hope became your life raft. I was utterly privileged to have been part of this project. We saw

APRIL 2019

87

each other again in November 2017: despite your predicament you were there: funny, modest, patient and so intelligent, and for a moment we were like boys again at Tonbridge.

And in April this year when you were admitted to hospital we talked every day. As your health deteriorated we talked about the best rock bands of the 70s, the poetry of the First World War, the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, the classical education instilled upon us by Geoff Allibone and our memories of Tonbridge. I rode a motorcycle across the Rockies and shared with you photographs of those amazing snow-capped mountains and we laughed so hard when I told you I was staying in a tiny camper in the Utah desert all alone in the middle of nowhere too scared to read the scary book I had brought. You would ask what band I would listen to on the road that day: Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?

We both agreed that Abbey Road was probably the best album ever written. And during the last weeks of your life I read you the war poetry of Sassoon every night and put together a series of lectures about the American Civil War. You listened, I would talk about my own utterly insignificant issues and neuroses and you would just listen, patiently, with those eyes that always said: “I understand you”. Your last words to me were: “I love you my brother”. We were on a video call, I had a picture of the two of us in Thailand from 1989 clutched to my chest, but words escaped me.

Jaya, you are a part of my family, part of all my memories: you are my Viking brother. You are the bravest man I have known; I count myself lucky to have been your friend. Rest in peace my friend.

(PS 83-88)

CROOKS, Christopher Anthony Died on Saturday 3 March 2018, aged 40.

(Sc 91-96)

CRAWFORD, Bertram (Bertie) Died in November 2018, aged 19. His Housemaster, Patrick North writes: “One by one, they were all becoming shades.

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade dismally with age”.

- James Joyce, ‘Dubliners’ Bertie Crawford, who passed away in November 2018, aged 19, was at Hill Side between 2012-17. Arriving at Tonbridge from Aylesbury Grammar School, his Novi

88

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

end of year report said, “there is no doubt that Bertie is academically curious and able, and I am sure that we can look forward to some excellent public exam results when the time comes”. This was certainly prescient.

Bertie went on to achieve no less than 6 A*s at GCSE, together with 3 As and a B, and at A Level, A*AA. He went on to Bristol University to read English. These bald results, however, do not do justice to Bertie’s quickness of mind and bullish sense of humour, a blend of un-alloyed cheek and comic sharpness. He was one of those boys that make teaching worthwhile, and who you remember long after they’ve left the school.

In Hill Side, he was something of an ‘underground leader’, his irreverent personality and (apparently) relaxed approach to life making him a firm favourite across the various year groups; these boys didn’t, perhaps, see the disciplined and ambitious approach to his work that he carefully disguised. As he approached his A Levels, his room (usually the house ‘chill-out zone’ with its mood-lighting, soft furnishings and atmospheric music), became nothing short of a campaign room with mind-maps, diagrams and definitions covering all the walls. It was the model of how an ambitious student should approach their exams. His massive and very visible work ethic over his last couple of terms made him an excellent role model to the younger boys – and there are boys currently in the house who would not be thriving to the extent they are, if it was not for the example that Bertie, who they respected so deeply, set them.

Bertie brought three things to almost everything he did: a combination of prolific strength, determination, and (sometimes excruciating) attention to detail. Bertie enjoyed working outdoors and was becoming a craftsman. He relished working with wood. He took great satisfaction and pride in helping build a grand deck with Oak and White Ash at his parents’ home. And his final and signature piece, which combined his love of timber, craft and being a DJ, were the beautiful and geometrically accurate speaker stands he built for his (irritatingly loud) sound system.

Those who knew him will have their favourite memories of him, whether that be winning a runner-up prize in the Staveley Poetry Prize with his poem, I Really Hate Aylesbury; pointedly walking the CRAS (as some kind of protest against The System?); keeping his team going with his sense of humour in the biting cold and driving snow of an Easter Dartmoor Duke of Edinburgh trip; or nutmegging his Housemaster in the Hill Side Staff vs Leavers’ football match in 2017. Above all, though, he will be remembered for his uncommonly caring nature.

He was a generous and big-hearted individual, a truly authentic character who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, enjoyed the rarest of things – he lived, he wasn’t happy just to exist. His example and influence lives on, and he will always be part of Hill Side and Tonbridge.

(HS 12-17)

SARO-WIWA, Suanu Lucas Cameron Died in October 2018, aged 18. Son to Ken (PS 82-86) and Olivia, brother of Felix (PS 10-15). Grandson of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoniland campaigner who was unjustly executed by the Nigerian regime in 1995.

Suanu joined Tonbridge from The Hawthorns School, entering Parkside where his brother, Felix, was in the LVI and where his father, Ken, had attended in the 1980s. Academically gifted, Suanu had secured a scholarship. His sporting prowess was clear, certainly matching up to the illustrious on-field achievements of both Ken and Felix. Suanu represented the 1st XV for two seasons, playing full-back in the NatWest Champions Trophy winning side of 2016 while in his LVI year. He also debuted for the 1st XI football team in the LVI. Suanu was the driving force behind the introduction of cookery as a Wednesday Afternoon Activity for boys in the Sixth Form. After leaving Tonbridge in July 2018, Suanu began a gap year and returned to Toronto, Canada where he was born and had lived as a young boy. He started an internship at Thomson Reuters and was soon an integral part of their team.

Some words from their eulogy: Suanu quickly built friendships with many of our employees. From providing well thought out insights in meetings, to writing an important speech delivered before leaders of the Canadian legal and business community, Suanu showed an eloquence, intelligence and maturity well beyond his years.

Suanu was the consummate ‘foody’ and he had quite the appetite!! His love of food was second only to his undeniable love of sport. On more than one occasion he proudly showed his colleagues videos of his rugby matches. It was clear to all of us that some of his happiest memories and closest friends were made on the field.

With his incredible family history of which he was so proud, he brought a refreshing global perspective and energy to our community. Suanu was truly a bright light; he was a young man on the rise and seemed to truly love his work.

Suanu had a genetic heart condition and tragically suffered a cardiac arrest within a few weeks of his arrival.

His funeral in November was so well attended by friends and family, including many OTs and members of the Common Room, that it was standing-room only.

The following words are taken from two of the eulogies given on that day.

Scholar, sportsman, chef, Suanu could do it all,

but having spoken with boys in his House, year group, rugby team, football side since his passing, the word that perhaps is missing is ‘friend’. A fiercely loyal friend, Suanu was respected by his peers, idolized, looked up to and held in the highest esteem, a boy of precocious talent but a certain humility and laconic nature with it.

Speaking to his teachers and sports coaches, and from my own experience coaching Suanu, it would be fair to say that he didn’t do work in the classroom or indeed train on the games field for the sake of it.

Blessed with intelligence and innate sporting prowess he knew that when he took the pitch or sat the exam, he had the ability to ensure he’d get the job done. He was a big game player. …

Perhaps the proudest moment of my coaching career has been winning the Champions trophy rugby final. Suanu was a vital part of that team.

During that season he carried a lot on his strong shoulders, with the loss of his father and the diagnosis surrounding his heart, but in his own inimitable, personal way, he kept on fighting, the character he showed that year was, quite frankly, inspiring. …

In his final set of reports before leaving Tonbridge, just before his summer exams, his maths teacher wrote: ‘Tonbridge is not going to be quite the same without Suanu! From an academic perspective he can be rather frustrating to teach, as one can detect his obvious intellectual ability. I hold out some hope that he will have applied himself in the final run-up to the statistics exam.

Low and behold Suanu got an A… by 1 mark. His teacher emailed him saying he got lucky, Suanu merely replied – ‘I’m efficient, Sir’. …

Anyone who ever had the pleasure to know, coach, teach or share a field with Suanu will miss him dearly. Suanu didn’t let people in easily, I but will cherish the moments we had together where he was part of our very special team - and I’ll miss his smile.

- Chris Morgan, Director of Sport Suanu could be a pain. From when I met him in September of his first year at Tonbridge School, I don’t remember him not trying to do exactly what he wanted. At school, he would not go to Chapel, he was watching a film the night before his French A Level – and it wasn’t even in French – and he would arrive late to lessons, generally with a snack and a drink but never with an apology.

And yet, the number of people who are here to show their love today is a testament to his ability to inspire this love, from those who were willing to look for his sensitivity. Suanu was a vulnerable soul, something he often hid behind being grumpy. When he was in a good mood, he had the power to light up a whole room with his big smile and contagious laugh. When he was in a bad mood, we would all walk on egg shells around him. …

He had the smile of a young man who saw life as full of fun. He had a lively and original mind. He was kind, but, when he felt there had been unfairness or

APRIL 2019

89

injustice, he was prepared to fight – and would never back down.

We also talked a lot about his dad, and how devastated he was when Ken passed away. He had not only lost his hero, but it also made him ponder his relationship with his own mortality.

He realized and sometimes struggled to come to terms with the fact that, every single day, his own life could be swooped from under his feet. He carried a lot of pain and grief and was fearful of his condition, but he tried to live each day with a noble heart, focusing on what was most important to him: his family, his friends, sports and… food.

Suanu created moments that brought him closer to others. For me, it was Cooking club. In their Lower Sixth year, Suanu and Nico pestered me into attending a food hygiene course during my summer holidays so that, every Wednesday afternoon, they, along with Max, Hugo, Ben and Meurig could cook a great meal and share it with each other and a few carefully selected friends and teachers.

Those afternoons were some of my happiest memories at Tonbridge School. Suanu proclaimed himself ‘Meat Man’ and directed us all. His enthusiasm for cooking and good food was amazing. I am sure that he had some very happy moments in that kitchen – especially when we all cooked his Grandma’s famous jollof rice recipe. I saw so much pride on his face that day.

Suanu’s heart, even though fragile, was huge and I, like many others in this room, am so lucky to have played a part in his life. I cannot get my head around the fact that he is not here anymore, but I will cherish all the memories I shared with him forever. We are all feeling fragile right now. Be kind, look out for each other, and always remember Suanu, who lived such a rich life thanks to all of you.

- Esther Saurel, Former Head of French (PS 13-18)

STAFF OBITUARIES: DAY, Brian Eric Died on 6 January 2018, aged 87.

(CR 54-64) FRANCIS, Timothy Donald Died on 23 February 2018, aged 81. An obituary will be published in the next edition of OT Magazine.

(Director of PE 63-70) HOLCOMBE, Anthony John (Tony) Died in September 2018, aged 83. An obituary will be published in the next edition of OT Magazine.

(CR 71-76)

90

O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S

THOMSON, Stephen William Died on 25 May 2015. His pupil, Deryck Chan (JH 07-09) writes: Affectionately known as Steve and Mr T to his pupils, Mr. Thomson was Tonbridge's beloved harpsichord teacher. After graduating from Newcastle in harpsichord performance and spending a few years at the BBC in his early career, Steve decided that he preferred teaching over performance. He devoted every Monday and Tuesday of the last two decades of his career teaching the harpsichord and leading Baroque ensembles at Tonbridge. To make best use of his seemingly bottomless stamina, he would schedule lessons with boarding boys on Monday evenings to continue beyond 10pm and resume with Tuesday's first ensemble practice at 8am.

Steve was known for his apparent omnipresence, often visiting boarding houses at breakfast time to deliver sheet music or to discuss rehearsal schedules.

His familiar shouts of "hey-ho, is that a friend or a foe?", and his signature white shirts and glasses which earned him the nickname "Moleman", were a familiar scene to many generations of OTs. Steve's brand of music was one of holistic education: he taught us to practise an entire Bach suite to understand the mood when preparing to perform its Prelude or Sarabande; and his emphasis on figured bass and tuning was a rarity even among harpsichord teachers. Outside term-time, he would invite his pupils from Tonbridge, St. Paul's, and Milton Keynes to join weekend bandcamps in his home in Bentley, Hampshire, entertaining us with endless VHS tapes of Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, and maritime documentaries in addition to keyboard music. His warm hospitality meant that he was like an extra grandfather to many of his pupils, even though he had no children of his own.

After his retirement in 2013, Steve kept in touch with many of his students. He spoke of his "problems with being old” yet continued to serve as the organist of his parish church in Upper Froyle, Hampshire until the day before his sudden but peaceful death at home on 25 May 2015. He left behind no biological family, but a legacy of many generations of students who fondly remember an education under his wings.

(Harpsichord Teacher 96-15) OTHER OBITUARIES:

BAIRAMIAN, Robert MA (Cantab) Old boys of Holmewood House will be sorry to learn of the passing of their former Headmaster, Bob Bairamian, who died on 7 September 2018, aged 83. The following obituary was published in The Telegraph: Robert Bairamian was a prep-school headmaster and classics teacher whose pupils included the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, the current President of Ghana and Shane MacGowan, lead singer of the Celtic punk band Pogues.

In a teaching career lasting more than 60 years, Bairamian spread a love of Greek and Latin across prep schools in Kent, Surrey and north London. He taught with such a mixture of intellect, kindness and rascally wit that his pupils remembered him with deep fondness for the rest of their lives.

When not teaching boys the finer points of the gerundive, he encouraged them to put drawing pins on each other’s chairs. Driving a series of Audi and Mercedes cars, and immaculately dressed – with a silk handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket and a hint of Tabac aftershave – he brought a touch of glamour to the world of the post-war prep school.

He became headmaster at Holmewood House prep school, near Tunbridge Wells, at only 24. From the beginning, he encouraged admissions from across the world, particularly Nigeria and Ghana.

At his funeral, a message was read out from the President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, recalling Bairamian as his teacher in the 1950s: “A young Cambridge undergraduate, swarthy, handsome, charismatic, gregarious, a Cambridge hockey Blue, then part-time member of the staff, who loved sports and encouraged us to shed any feeling of inferiority, if any, both on the games field and in the classroom.”

Bairamian was gifted at bringing out the best in all pupils – whether in academic studies, sport, drama or music. For example, when Shane MacGowan attended Holmewood in the late 1960s, Bairamian was immediately struck by his talents.

“He was very unusual indeed,” Bairamian recalled, “one of the most unusual personalities I’ve ever, ever met. I thought he would end up in the drama scene. At Westminster School [where MacGowan went on to], they asked whether I’d written his English paper. They said they’d never seen anything like this before.”

Throughout his career, dozens of Bairamian’s pupils won scholarships to public schools. In the late 1960s he drove boys to their exams at Ampleforth in his dazzling white Mercedes. He liked to shout “Achtung Polizei!” at police cars and got his sons to translate pub signs into Latin when he was driving.

At Ampleforth, he stayed with the Benedictine monks while the boys – supported and encouraged by his presence – duly won their scholarships. The following year, when he drove up more boys for the scholarship exam, he took the previous year’s scholars out to dinner at a pub on the Yorkshire Moors, introducing them to the finest steak and Château d’Yquem.

Throughout his lessons, he peppered his conversation with the Latin he loved. To Haydn Keenan (now a film director in Australia) at Holmewood, he said,

on hearing his exam results: “Well, Keenan, you passed – mirabile dictu!”

As a classics master in the early 1980s at North Bridge House School, by Regent’s Park in north London, he taught the tricky ablative absolute by referring to himself as Bobo duce – “With Bob as our leader”.

He was known as Bob to friends, while the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, when he was at Aberdour School, Surrey, in the 1970s, nicknamed him “Cresta Bear” after the polar bear on Cresta fizzy drink bottles. Bairamian called Vine “In vino veritas”.

After one North Bridge House pupil won a scholarship to Westminster, Bairamian promptly whisked the boy’s parents off to a slap-up dinner at a grand restaurant with his friend, the broadcaster Sandy Gall. Bairamian paid for the dinner with the proceeds of a large bet he had wagered on the boy getting a scholarship. The identity of the punter who took the bet remains a mystery.

Robert Bairamian was born on March 18 1935 in Cyprus, where he spent his first 10 years. His father was Sir Vahe Bairamian, Chief Justice of Sierra Leone, a Judge of Appeal in Nigeria and editor of the Nigerian Law Reports. As Bob used to say, he was the “first and only Armenian to be knighted”. His mother was Eileen Elsie Connelly, headmistress of the English School in Nicosia, Cyprus.

At Dover College in Kent, Bairamian was head prefect, captain of cricket, hockey and squash and editor of The Dovorian. At St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, he read Classics and played cricket and hockey for the university.

In 1957, he became assistant headmaster at Holmewood House, before becoming headmaster in 1959. In 1975 he moved to Aberdour School, Surrey, then to North Bridge House in London, and then to Claremont School, East Sussex, in 1982, before his final post at St Christopher’s, Hove. He retired in 2001 but continued to tutor in classics until his death.

Bob Bairamian was married four times. His fourth wife Ros Daunt, whom he married in 1986, died in 2013; he is survived by two sons, Rupert and Justin (PH 77-82), from his first marriage to Jane Crawford, and seven stepsons.

(Headmaster of Holmewood House, Aberdour & Claremont)

To add a death notice or obitiary online, or in the next edition of OT Magazine, contact us at:  tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org +44 (0) 1732 304253

APRIL 2019

91

Tonbridge School High Street Tonbridge Kent TN9 1JP +44 (0) 1732 304253 tonbridgesociety@tonbridge-school.org tonbridgesociety.co.uk tonbridgeconnect.org

HOW ARE WE DOING? We always value feedback that helps us improve our services. Contact us with your ideas and suggestions using the contact details on this page.

Tonbridge School is a registered charity No. 1099162

APRIL 2019

92