Obituaries

WILLIAM BARRETT (BARRY) CAPP AM (TC 1952) 12 July 1933 – 5 August 2020

A “kind, gentle and generous man”, Barry Capp joined Trinity in 1952, studying engineering and winning the Alcock Scholarship. He represented the College in football, athletics and rowing and played for the University Blacks. Barry was an emergency member of the winning Melbourne rowing crew at the Australian University Championships at Murray Bridge, South Australia, in 1952. He served as Trinity’s outdoor representative on the TCAC in 1954 and was Captain of Boats in 1955. He graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Engineering and Bachelor of Commerce and, later, a Bachelor of Arts. He married Margot Lethlean, née Greening, in 1983.

Acknowledged as a “corporate doctor”, Barry served on the boards of a number of leading listed companies in Australia and New Zealand. He was chairman of National Foods and Exicom, and a director of Ariadne Australia, the Australian Infrastructure Fund, Freight Rail Corporation, Hawthorn International Education, Melbourne University Private, Touchcorp and Westpac.

He was also a director of the Australian Industry Development Corporation. In the community, Barry was a member of the board of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, chairman of the William Buckland Foundation, a council member of Philanthropy Australia and was on the board of the Geelong Community Foundation.

Barry was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2012 for “service to business and to the community through a range of philanthropic, social welfare and educational organisations”.

Barry served as the second chairman of the Board of Trinity College from 1997 to 2004. He was made a Fellow of the College in 2002 and a Senior Fellow in May 2020. In 2005, Barry and Margot endowed a scholarship, at the time anonymously, for a talented all-rounder, preferably from a rural background, studying medicine.

Barry died peacefully in St John’s intensive care unit, with Mozart playing in the background. His son Peter described him as “empathetic, patient, devoted and fun, an inspiring role model with strong social values and moral compass, and a trusted and caring counsel”. At Trinity, he displayed all these qualities to the full.

WILLIAM (JOHN) DOUGLAS STOCKDALE 12 October 1924 – 29 August 2020

The Reverend John Stockdale trained at Moore College, Sydney, taking the Licentiate in Theology. He was ordained deacon by Archbishop Booth in Melbourne in 1951 and, following a curacy at the Melbourne Diocesan Centre, ordained priest in 1952, alongside Angus Cooper, Stan Moss and David Warner. In 1953, John was sent back to Wilcannia in the Diocese of Riverina, NSW, where he oversaw a very large parish.

He served there for eight years, working closely with the Bush Church Aid Society.

In 1962, John was called as Assistant Priest to Holy Trinity, Doncaster, serving there until 1969. He was also Victorian Secretary of the Bush Church Aid Society until 1969, when he was appointed vicar of Holy Trinity, Thornbury, beginning a near 20-year ministry there. During that time, he was an industrial chaplain to APM and the Herald and Weekly Times, under the leadership of the Revd Laurie Styles of the InterChurch Trade and Industry Mission. John remained at the Herald until 1995. From 2005, he served at Box Hill, assisting there in his retirement.

John married Jeanne Graham in 1953. Jeanne was involved with the Girls’ Friendly Society, serving on the board of its hostel in North Melbourne, Edith Head Hall, for more than 30 years. Jeanne died in 2011. The Stockdales had no children of their own and John also outlived his three siblings – all younger – Owen, Beatrice and Eileen. He died at Faversham House, Canterbury, aged 95.

In 2018, John approached Trinity about endowing a lectureship at the Theological School. Before his death, he made the first of expected annual donations to create the John and Jeanne Stockdale Chair in Practical Theology and Ethics, strengthening the Theological School’s ability to offer a full and broad curriculum. Trinity College is deeply grateful for John’s generous vision for excellent and comprehensive theological education.

CLIVE (ROGER) HELE BROOKES (TC 1953) 26 September 1929 – 25 July 2020

Roger entered Trinity in 1953 as a third-year commerce student. He was the great-grandson of Alfred Deakin through his daughter Ivy, who married Herbert Brookes (TC 1888), and the son of industrialist Sir Wilfred Brookes (TC 1925). In an interview in 1990, Roger cited the fond recollections of college life of his grandfather, who said it was about mixing and living with people who brought different perspectives, and the networks it provided which underpinned a successful business career thereafter. Herbert and Ivy were significant donors to the University of Melbourne, and Roger continued this tradition.

On graduation, Roger worked briefly for Dunlop before going to help on a family sheep station in central Queensland. He then bought a share in a property near Glenrowan in central Victoria, but suffered considerably from the dust and soon returned to Melbourne to work in accounts for Colonial Gas and then Alcoa (1973 to 1985).

During a long history of philanthropic giving, Roger aligned himself most closely with cultural organisations, including the National Gallery of Victoria and State Library of Victoria, and, due to obvious family connections, Deakin University. In 2006, he established the annual Brookes Oration at the Deakin Business School to “encourage thoughtful debate about the contribution of corporate Australia to the global community”. He created the Sir Wilfred Brookes Charitable Trust in 2007 and, in 2020, founded the Brookes Cultural Heritage Scholarship in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin to support research in cultural heritage and museum studies.

In retirement, Roger renewed his interests in medieval history – his adopted name comes from Sir Roger de la Hele (c.1285–c.1340) of Devon – and music. From 2000, he was closely associated with the Australian Tennis Museum at Kooyong, with purchase of the club’s Glenferrie Road site in 1919 having been promoted by his great-uncle Norman Brookes, Australia’s first Wimbledon champion. Roger was a significant donor to Trinity, giving to music, art and chaplaincy funds, as well as to buildings. The Brookes Tutorial Room in the Gateway Building perpetuates his memory within the College.

CHARLES (IAN) EDWARD DONALDSON (TC 1954) 6 May 1935 – 18 March 2020 (pictured)

Ian Donaldson was secretary of the TCAC in 1956 and Senior Student in 1957, the year he won the Leeper Scripture Prize and graduated Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English literature. He then went to Oxford where he took a Bachelor and Master of Arts. Ian was tutorial Fellow in English at Wadham College and chair of the Oxford English Faculty for a year before his return to Australia in 1969. In 1974, while Professor of English at the ANU, he became the founding director of the new Humanities Research Centre (HRC), building it to international prominence. Ian returned to the UK in 1991 as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and then, from 1995, Grace I Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. Between 2004 and 2007, he was back in Canberra as director of the HRC. In retirement, Ian was Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Regarded as “perhaps the finest scholar of Ben Jonson the world has ever seen”, he published The World Upside-Down: Comedy From Jonson to Fielding (1970), Ben Jonson: Poems (1975), The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (1982), Ben Jonson (1985), Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (1997), and the widely praised Ben Jonson: A Life (2011). He was also a general editor of the seven-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). He was made a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was a fellow and past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, for whom he produced several influential reports on the place of philanthropy in the humanities and the revitalisation of languages in Australia’s universities.

In 2012, Ian was inducted as a Fellow of Trinity College. In his later years, he assisted in investigating the Shakespeare ‘Second Folio’ held in the Trinity College library. He married Tamsin Procter in 1962, having two children, Benjamin and Sadie. He is survived by them and by his second wife, Grazia Gunn, whom he married in 1991. Australian author Peter Robb once said that Ian was “a scholar and a gentleman, maybe one of the last, and it is almost certain that we shall not look upon his like again”.