He fell in love with the ancient lifestyle of the Maasai, photographing their rituals. He was tasked to pursue Mau Mau rebels, but never caught them. He adopted a lion cub, got boils from riding camels, and read the Riot Act in Kenya’s wild northern frontier-land. Hugh liked ‘wild and woolly’ places and was not unhappy to be posted next to the Aden Insurgency. He supplied favoured Yemeni tribes with guns, ammunition and silver Maria Theresa dollars, surviving assassination threats and escaping Aden just one week before his successor was blown up by a bomb placed in a plane. ‘There but for the grace of God went I’, he once told me; ‘it was shocking’. He decided to leave the colonial service, which he loved for its open air life in untamed places. He had disagreed with some decisions taken by his superiors, and later in life wrote bitterly about how the British government broke its promises to Kenya’s Somali population that they would be allowed to secede after Kenyan independence. Talking to me later, he admitted that colonialism could be seen as a ‘huge disaster’, but he still believed British rule gave many countries a structure and stability from which they benefited then, and even today. In the 1970s, he headed the BBC’s Somali Service and then moved to Hong Kong as a civil administrator. In 1982, a long letter arrived from a woman called Deirdre, my mother. She told him, gently, she was his sister, and he had another sister, Audrey. Deirdre had tracked down her birth mother who confessed there were three siblings. Hugh flew over from Hong Kong and we were able to meet and offer him the family love he had never known. My mother and aunt were with him at Buckingham Palace when he was awarded the MBE. He eventually retired to Sherborne in Dorset, and married the artist Anne Moorse whom he had first met in Aden, living a happy life with her extended family. (PH/SH 44-48)
ROSS, Michael Ian (Ian) Died on 18 January 2020, aged 89. (SH 45-50) GARNETT, Robin Miles Died in Zimbabwe on 16 December 2020, aged 88. (HS 46-50) NATHAN, Bruce Died on 5 February 2020, aged 88, after a short illness. (SH 47-50) GARDNER, Christopher Died on 13 June 2019, aged 85. (PH 47-52)
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O L D TO N B R I D G I A N N E W S
KITCHING, John Died after a short illness on 27 December 2020, aged 85. Distinguished Past President of the OTS, he will be greatly missed by his family and many friends.
The following obituary was written by Robert Lisvane (SH 63-68) With the death of John Kitching on 27 December 2020 the School, Trinity Hall and the Skinners’ Company have lost a faithful friend, advocate and supporter; his widow Aline and his children Dodo, Johnny, Nicola and Hélène a kindly, generous and beloved husband and father; and a world-wide circle of friends a delightful companion. John was born on 10 December 1934 in Colombo, Ceylon (as it then was). He went to a boarding school in Nuwara Eliya and then, aged 10, travelled to England to go to Brunswick School and then to Tonbridge, to Manor House. His sporting and academic career at Tonbridge was stellar: he was in the XI, the XV, the Hockey XI, and also in first teams for athletics and squash. He was successively Head of House and Head of the School; and he won a scholarship to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. No wonder that several of his Tonbridge contemporaries describe him as “an Olympian figure”. John’s National Service was spent in the Royal Air Force (where he made lifelong friends), first at RAF Kirton-in-Lindsey in Lincolnshire, where he was appointed Senior Cadet and became one of 20 Acting Pilot Officers selected for pilot training in Canada. At RCAF Penhold in Alberta John trained on Harvards (making many friends among the cosmopolitan course) and then graduated to the T33 Silver Star jet aircraft. He was awarded his Wings in February 1955, returned to the UK and trained on Meteor IVs at RAF Driffield, followed by a course at RAF Pembrey battle school flying Vampire Vs. He continued as a Flying Officer in the RAAF until the Auxiliary Squadrons were disbanded in 1957. At Cambridge, as well as being an all-round sportsman and scholar (he described himself as reading “athletics and history, in roughly that order”) it was in athletics that he excelled, gaining an athletics Blue and coming first in the high jump in the 1957 Varsity Match and second in the javelin (reversing those places in the following year’s Match). He was a member of the combined Oxford and Cambridge athletics team which toured the USA in 1957, and he
