Friends and colleagues paid tribute to the internationally renowned Suffolk archaeologist. Dr John Wymer, who lived in Bildeston, Suffolk was an expert on the Palaeolithic period, otherwise known as the 'Old Stone Age', and died on February 10, aged 77, at Southampton Hospital following a short illness.
Footnote: from Peter Cox:.........John was an SOG who lived in the next village to me. I never got round to meeting him but did speak to him on the phone about our Reunions, which he was interested to hear.
Editor's footnote:........As one volunteer out of a hundred at the Kew Bridge Steam Museum I was in conversation with the wife of a Trustee of the Museum at a recent Exhibition opening. The particular study for which John was renowned had also been her own enthusiasm for many years and she was very aware of his standing. A photograph of John, taken from the Daily Telegraph, can be seen at the Photo Gallery in FAMILIAR FACES Part 3.
.....and from Eric Foote......................I have now reached the age when scanning the Obituaries column in the Daily Telegraph can be rewarding and interesting, but also very sad. The latter applies to last Friday's column. I read of the death of John Wymer. He had been a friend of my young brother, Raymond and guest at our home before Raymond went to the U.S.A. The obituary referred to the fact that John had been"...educated at Richmond and East Sheen County School..." and ..."In his spare time, Wymer enjoyed blues and jazz..". In the early 1940's, Raymond and three of his colleagues from R.& E. S. County (John Wymer, Snelling (John?), Padday (?)) gathered at West Park Rd, Kew Gardens, where our family lived. The group took over our front sitting room where we had a baby-grand piano. Their jazz sessions livened up our household, but, thankfully, our neighbours must have been very tolerant or hard of hearing. Raymond was the pianist, and I think that the other instruments played were the clarinet, guitar and drums. The atmosphere was always very, very smoky but generally happy. Raymond managed to buy original jazz and blues records and even had some shipped over from the USA. There were visits to London jazz clubs to hear the UK's best or instrumentalists from other countries. I am glad to say that although the sessions at our home were noisy and very often discordant, I still enjoy blues and traditional jazz!
This obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 3rd March, 2006
JOHN WYMER, who died on February 10 aged 77, was Britain’s foremost authority on early Stone Age settlement and had a major impact on the development of Stone Age studies inWestern Europe.
His career as an archaeologist began with the discovery in 1955 of Swanscombe Woman, the fossil remains of a skull of a woman who lived in the ThamesValley around 400,000 BC; they are among the oldest human remains ever discovered in Europe.
Wymer spent 40 years in a variety of investigations of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites which he expanded into a remarkable and comprehensive two-volume study of The Lower Palaeolithic Occupation of Britain.
He also carried out major programmes of research in South Africa, most notably at Klasies River Mouth, west of Port Elizabeth, where a remarkable stratigraphic sequence, more than 25m thick and spanning the entire Middle and Late Stone Age, was discovered. The sample contained more than 250,000 stone tools, as well as animal bones, sea shells and other detritus, but most important, a number of human bones. One of these was 100,000 years old, and was at the time of its discovery the world’s oldest specimen of the truly modern Homo Sapiens.
John James Wymer was born on March 5 1928 and brought up near KewGardens in London. Educated at Richmond and EastSheenCountySchool and at ShoreditchTrainingCollege he was introduced to the pleasures of the Stone Age by his parents, who took him flint-hunting in gravel pits.
He began his career as a teacher but soon turned to archaeology, and in 1956 was appointed to the staff of ReadingMuseum, where he continued his search for Palaeolithic implements in the Quarternary sediments of the river Thames. This research soon led to his first monograph, Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the ThamesValley, published in 1968, which catalogued thousands of discoveries and used them as a basis for a chronology of the Lower Palaeolithic period. The volume was illustrated by hundreds of Wymer’s own meticulously-crafted pen-and-ink drawings of hand-axes and other flint tools
In 1965 he was recruited by Professor Ronald Singer of the University of Chicago to direct a series of excavations at sites in South Africa including the Klasies River Mouth. Returning toEngland in 1968, he went on to carry out excavations at key Palaeolithic sites, including Clacton, Hoxne and Ipswich.
His management of these excavations set new standards for prehistoric archaeology and each excavation was fully published. In 1979-80 Wymer was appointed Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia which bore fruit in The Palaeolithic Age (1982) and Palaeolithic Sites in East Anglia (1985).
By the time these appeared in print Wymer had been recruited to dig sites of later periods in Essex and then Norfolk. Although he had bought a house at Bildeston, Suffolk, he moved with his second wife, Mollie, to Great Cressingham in Norfolk and, between 1983 and 1990 worked for the Norfolk Archaeological Unit, investigating many sites at different periods.
From 1991 he began a project to relate every Palaeolithic discovery yet made in Britain to its relevant geological deposit, in order to construct an authoritative survey of the early presence of people in Britain.
The project was enormous, but in only six years Wymer had personally visited almost every site and significant museum collection in the country. The result was a series of detailed reports which could be used by mineral extraction companies and planners to tell them of the potential importance of different Quaternary sediments. In 1998 it was distilled into his two-volume study The Lower Palaeolithic Occupation of Britain.
Wymer was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1963 and of the BritishAcademy in 1996.
In his spare time, Wymer enjoyed blues and jazz, gardening and real ale; he was a supporter of CAMRA and a regular at his local pub where he cut the cheese in his ploughman’s lunch with an ancient flint knife.
John Wymer married first, in 1948, Pauline May. The marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in l976 Mollie (nee Spurling), who died in 1999 He is survived by two sons and three daughters of his first marriage.
The Guardian, Friday. 10th March, 2006
JOHN JAMES WYMER, archaeologist, born 5th March 5 1928; died 10th February, 2006
Enthusiastic hunter of skulls, stone tools and the roots of history
In the mid-1930s, a dentist found two pieces of the same ancient human skull in the quarries at SwanscomBe, Kent. Twenty years later, John Wymer who has died aged 77, unearthed a new piece of the same skull which had, he said, the ‘consistency of wet soap’ At 400,000 years old, it remains the only pre-Neanderthal skull from Britain. Thus began Wymer’s career pursuing early human history, though he had started as a teenager with his father, a professional artist, who had been searching for palaeolithic flint handaxes in Kent for decades.
Wymer was born and brought up in Richmond, Surrey, and educated at East Sheen County School and Shoreditch Training College. After the Swanscombe find, he became Curator at Reading Museum, having worked as a journalist, a British Rail clerk and a teacher. For 10 years he studied Reading’s handaxe collection and directed excavations at mesolithic hunter-gatherer camps in the Kennet valley. The most important was at Thatcham, where he recovered artefacts and animal bone refuse at a site used by generations of hunters.
His next excavations were in South Africa (1965-68). At thesuggestion of the great palaeontologist Louis Leakey, Ronald Singer, of Chicago University, employed Wymer to direct work at Saldanha Bay and then at Klasies River Mouth, near Port Elizabeth. At a time of apartheid and widespread ignorance of the nation’s history, Singer was seeking to drive back the story of homo sapiens. At the Kiasies caves, Wymer found human fossils up to 110.000 years old with rich deposits of artefacts and animal remains, all indicative of what were then the world’s oldest modern humans.
Singer moved Wymer back to Britain to excavate already well-known palaeolithic sites, including those at Clacton. Essex and Hoxne, Suffolk. Then, after excavating in the 1980s for archaeological consultancies in Essex and Norfolk, in 1990 Wymer began a unique survey of the evidence for the country’s earliest humans. The importance of sites like Swanscombe, Clacton and Hoxne lies in pristine remains preserved in undisturbed geological deposits. Such cases are rare. A 1989 planning application to quarry a hill at Dunbridge. Hampshire, where more than 1.000 handaxes had been found, exposed general ignorance of the greater mass of unstratified tools.
A chastened English Heritage commissioned the Southern Rivers Palaeolithic Survey, with Wymer as project manager. After its successful completion in 1994 came the national English Rivers Palaeolithic Survey, while Cadw, the Welsh Assembly’s historic environment division, conducted a parallel study. Based near Salisbury, Wymer visited almost every known palaeolithic site. His comprehensive reports now inform research, and guide planning and development.
Wymer was efficient at publishing his excavations. Illustrating stone tools is a difficult task that demands proper understanding of the technology. He taught himself to knap flint, and made superb technical drawings. His first publication in Nature was about the Swanscombe find: last December, 50 years later, his drawings of the 700,000 old flint tools from Pakefield, Suffolk, illustrated another Nature contribution.
He was president of the Quaternary Research Association, vice-president of the Prehistoric Society and chair of the Lithic Studies Society. The Geological Society awarded him their Stopes medal. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the British Academy.
The drier paths of Wymer’s discipline and the rigours of fieldwork were dispensed with much humour. His mother had played piano to silent films, and he became an accomplished and entertaining blues pianist; he also played guitar. His love of real ales was famous. He is survived by three daughters and two sons from his first marriage. His second wife. Mollie, died in 1999.
DAVID CATFORD, died February 2006
AN EXTRACT FROM THE BARNES AND MORTLAKE HISTORY SOCIETY MAGAZINE
'……..Mike Smith presented to the February 2006 meeting the talk prepared by David Catford, as a tribute to a much-appreciated member of the Society who had died just two weeks earlier.
Mike reminded us that David as a real local, having lived all his life in East Sheen, was ideally suited to taking us for a truly nostalgic walk along the Upper Richmond Road West.
David began at Priests Bridge, directing our imaginary walk to Sheen Lane on the North side, and then from Gilpin Avenue to Sheen Lane again on the South.
We stopped at every shop to hear David’s comments about the shopkeepers and their merchandise, reminding us of the days when we had a multiplicity of small family-owned shops, (grocers, greengrocers, bakers and butchers) before the era of the supermarket and restaurants offering cuisine from every part of the globe.
Only one of these shops serves the same purpose today as it did sixty years ago - the bakery now known as the Parish Bakery - but the Westminster and Midland Banks are still on their old sites, although under new names.
For those who do not know the Upper Richmond Road, there were reminders of what it was like to shop in wartime with long queues, the fiddling to cut out coupons or mark ration books, and the problems facing, for example, the butcher trying to cut a piece of meat to exactly the value of the weekly ration - which was one shilling and twopence at one time (roughly 6p. in today’s coinage).
Do you remember when you could buy sweets for half an old penny? And do you recall those overhead wire systems in the draper’s that catapulted your money and the bill in a metal box to the cashier, and returned your change?
Finally David recalled the Sheen Odeon, one of the 1930’s picture palaces, sadly demolished in 1960, to be replaced by Parkway House.
It was a very special occasion, and in effect a David Catford memorial evening. We shall remember him'
MICHAEL MOCKRIDGE
June, 2006
After National Service Michael went to Balliol College, Oxford to read Geography and later qualified as a solicitor. His step-father was also a solicitor.
Michael became a partner in the City firm Coward Chance where he specialised in advising large companies and multinationals.
He was a member of St. Peter's and St. John's Church and on the Kensington Deanery Synod. He was also a trustee of the Church Urban Fund and of the Working Men's College and chaired the Management Committee and the Finance and General Purposes Committee.
He lived for many years in East London until he moved to Notting Hill seven years ago.
Michael Mockridge
Pat Healy
Wednesday July 26, 2006
The Guardian
Michael Mockridge, who has died aged 70, was a lawyer with a passion for social causes. His voluntary work improved the lives of young people in the East End of London and brought recognition to the social history of older people in Kensington and Chelsea.
Son of Cyril, a printer, and Rose, Michael was educated at Shene grammar school and Balliol College, Oxford. He met his first wife, the author Penelope Farmer, at Oxford.
After completing national service, Michael followed his flamboyant stepfather "Tiger" Tim Taylor into the law firm Coward Chance in 1959, becoming a partner in 1967. He helped to negotiate the merger with Clifford Turner, to create Clifford Chance, now one of the biggest international law firms in the world. His work included leading the legal team that privatised the water industry on behalf of the then Department of the Environment.
He retired early in 1993 to spend time with his second family and pursue his passionate commitment to social causes through involvement with local and national charities. This passion had been awakened when he and several university friends had run a youth club at Dame Colet House Settlement in east London. Asked many legal questions by the club's young people, they started a legal advice centre. This later became the Stepney Green Law Centre, one of the earliest in Britain.
For many years Michael was executive chair of Dame Colet House, where he met his second wife, Olivia Dix, a charity worker with a particular interest in health. He resigned in the early 1990s after moving to Kensington, because he believed it should be run entirely by local people, but he continued to be involved in East End schemes.
Michael was a trustee of the Mental Health Foundation, the College of Health and the Working Men's College for Men and Women, and an independent chair hearing NHS complaints.
When he moved to Kensington and Chelsea, he became involved in two local charities - History Talk, a local history group which he chaired for several years, and Campden Charities, a grant-making trust with a brief to alleviate poverty in Kensington. For the Church of England he was a trustee of the Church Urban Fund, a member of the review of synodical government and of the local deanery synod and parochial church council.
A modest man, Michael worked hard and unobtrusively, making full use of his legal and negotiating skills and showing infinite courtesy, patience and good humour. His colleagues at History Talk regarded him as "a perfect gent".
His is survived by his wife and their daughter Hannah; by Clare and Thomas, his children from his first marriage; and by three grandchildren.
An e-mail to the Editor from Trevor Griffiths, a Shene contemporary of Michael Mockridge:
Many thanks for your email. Strangely, I was only thinking about Michael Mockridge a few minutes earlier. I had been listening to the Radio Four programme about techniques for developing a good memory, and remembered that once I was understudying Mockridge for a school play and he was off sick so I spent one evening learning the part. (I would tell my tutees about it and my method sometimes when they said how difficult it was to learn chemistry!) The next day, when I was confident I knew the part, I was told by the master in charge (Mr White?) that Mockridge was better and would be back in time for the performance. Thus was my thespian opportunity quenched!
Michael Mockridge is yet another of Shene Grammar School's products who has led a productive and honourable life, and I am glad to have known him, and to find out what he did after he left school.
TOM TOWNDROW ex East Sheen County School, September, 2006
TOM TOWNDROW ex East Sheen County School, September, 2006
The following appeared in the Barnes and District History Society magazine:
A remarkable local link with the Dunkirk evacuation was recalled with the death on September 4th, 2006 of Tom Towndrow aged 91. Thomas Austin Towndrow was born at Barnes on October 6th and from East Sheen County School he joined the staff of Barnes Urban District Council. He also enlisted with 1st Mortlake Sea Scouts and was immediately involved in refitting the scouts 'former Naval steam pinnace, the 45-foot Minotaur. He became her skipper and by 1940 was Senior Scout Leader at Mortlake.
When a quarter of a million British troops plus French units sought to evacuate Dunkirk on May 26th of that year the Admiralty called for every seaworthy craft to cross the Channel and help the rescue. Towndrow skippered Minotaur with a Sea Scout crew down the Thames to Southend and then Ramsgate. Placed under Naval control, she took on stores and fuel - and two ratings with .303 rifles and 600 rounds of ammunition to counter German dive-bombers and E-boats.
Minotaur made the initial Channel crossing safely and over the next few days Towndrow piloted her on numerous voyages to the foreshore West of Dunkirk, ferrying exausted soldiers from shallow water out to bigger transports and destroyers as well as towing small boats.
The hard-worked engine began to fade and, with fuel running low, Towndrow decided to embark a final batch of French Troops with the plan of getting them back to England if his gallant craft could manage the distance. A trawler relieved him of his passengers and Minotaur, despite her engine problems, was able to make port having played a part in evacuating 338,000 troops. The Admiralty had believed little better than 45,000 could be saved.
Minotaur was patched up and transferred to coastal patrol while Towndrow was commissioned into the RNVR spending much of the remainder of the War as a liaison officer with the Free French Navy.
One posting was with the submarine La Sultan based at Oran in Algeria and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his services which included his part in landing agents in Occupied France.
After the War Towndrow returned to local government settling at Bexley and qualifying as a solicitor. He held posts at Maidenhead and Windsor and finally became Town Clerk at Frome in Somerset.
He retired to Lymington, Hampshire where he was active in the local Sailing Club and the Sea Scouts unit.
Editor's Note: Tom's photograph appears in the Photo Gallery under Familiar Faces, Part 6
Alan Morgan
Alan Morgan
I was Rob's Vice-Captain when he was School Captain in 1959. He was a great footballer and tried valiantly to encourage me, but when "Plug" Rawlings introduced the oval ball I realised that rugby union/scrum-half was my forte! I recall that Rob was always top in German (a language I never came to terms with). Even at that relatively tender age I accepted that he was too good for me, and most of the others in our year group, at this particular subject - and a few other subjects, I seem to recall......and so it is interesting, but not surprising, that he was living in that country.
Albert John Richardson (Taffy)....... I would not say that I knew Rob well but I always liked meeting him, he was always so friendly and above all knew who I was. We cannot afford to lose too many old boys of his calibre, especially the younger ones
Jeremy Chapman...........Rob was my first cricket captain and also school captain in my second year at school in 1958-59. An absolute cat of a goalkeeper, the best I ever saw at that level, who represented the county, and equally agile as a fielder at cricket. (had to be good at something as he never made more than ten runs and didn't bowl).
A first-class linguist and a most interesting man who always had time for you, a good human being and a good companion, which made him a fine school captain. He was not in my year so, outside the cricket and my support for the football team (both school and county), I never got to know him closely but he is remembered with great affection and admiration. A most tremendous credit to Shene Grammar.
David Wright......... We both lived in Palmerston Road. I remember him mostly because he used to play goalkeeper in the 1st XI, although I didn't know him particularly well. It is very sad to hear of his passing.
David Hackett....................My principal memories of Rob were playing football together for the Old Boys, where he was, of course the goalkeeper whose height would dominate the goal area.
One dark January, Saturday afternoon, Rob conceded an unlikely goal scored by yours truly. It was pouring with rain, we were ankle deep in mud and from somewhere near the halfway line I decided that a pass back to the goalkeeper was safer than trying to turn round in the gluepot and punt the ball upfield. I connected rather well but found, to my dismay, that Rob was propping up a post trying to keep dry, or warm. He had hardly moved before the ball entered the net. Fortunately we won the game........
Ken Waring..........I always will remember Rob’s fearless goal keeping exploits...too fearless sometimes. Rob challenged for a ball under the crossbar, jumped too high and pretty well knocked himself out on the crossbar. I think the match may have been 1st XI v staff.
Peter Flewitt............. Rob's brother, John Vaughan and I were good mates in our latter school days and for a few years after, until he went to work in Germany. Rob, of course, was a few years older than us so he moved in a different social circle, other than after soccer on a Saturday, so I can't really offer any anecdotes other than my memories of an Easter Tour to Germany, meticulously planned and run by him with a bunch of unruly teenage 16-50 year olds such as Bloxham, Harlow and I think Jeffs which he ran in his trademark calm and good humoured manner. I'll leave the real stories to others better placed..............
..........but, to use an Aussie expression, I'll bet London to a brick that you'll have a hard job finding anybody with a harsh word about him and, to use another one that's about as high praise as any Aussie ever gives, a real good bloke. Even from half way round the world and almost 40 years away he'll be missed.
Brian Roddis..................I remember Rob as a very affable, gentle giant of a man - and a damned good goalkeeper to boot. As I'm sure many others will also recall, Rob organised the groundbreaking Old Boys tour to Czechoslovakia in the mid-60s - a tour which I was lucky enough to take part in.
Richard Jones...............I remember Rob as our first School Captain at a time when the prefects were feared and respected - not sure it quite carried through to when we became prefects. My next contact was after I left School and joined the OB Rugby
Club. Rob kept goal for the Old Boys and we crossed paths after soccer and rugby games.
My last contact was just three months ago at the Reunion and his passing is a shock.
Brian Susman...................My memory of Rob is as a gentle giant in the school 1st football XI in about 1957 when the team went through a full season with a 100% record. In later years, he became a goalkeeper, progressing, I believe, to the likes of Kingstonian but in the school team, he played more often at right back. He was a big lad even then.
Indeed the defence as a whole frightened the opposition when we ran out on the field that season. As well as Rob at right back, standing about 6ft 2ins, we had John Corby at centre half (football teams were in 2-3-5 formation in those days!) who was 6ft 4ins at 14, as I recall, and myself at left back at 6ft 5ins. Little wonder that the opposition forward line didn't want to know...!
Nick Crisp.....................Sorry to hear about Rob - easily the tallest goalkeeper I've ever played with.........!
Michael Collett.................... Rob was a few years after me at school, but I do remember our visit to Germany and Holland for a couple of friendly football matches when Rob was our "representative" and made a speech at one of the dinners being the only one of us courageous enough to speak German in public.
The fact that he was in Germany so recently suggests to me that his German was somewhat more advanced than I had realised.
Len Timms..................Taffy, Very, very sad to get your message re Rob. I used to see him a lot at Craven Cottage in the Press Box. He was also the goalkeeper for the OG's when they beat Ham FC, so I will never live that down!
This Obituary appeared in the Sports Section of the Kingston Leader newspaper on 18th October, 2007..........
The description of "one of nature's gentlemen" is vastly overused but, in the case of Bob Vaughan, World Soccer's eastern European correspondent for years, is amply justified.
Bob, who has died aged 67, extended his original boyhood devotion to football to a playing peak as a goalkeeper with Kingstonian FC but his "real" career led him into education and ultimately to a role with the British Institute in Vienna, which with his command of German, opened doors for him throughout central Europe.
Later he turned to sports journalism as a means of pursuing his love of football and began writing for World Soccer in the 1970s.
For well over a decade his insight into not only eastern European football but also its cultural and political context made him unique among the region's commentators and observers.
The subsequent coincidence of retirement and reunification took Bob back to Germany and a new home in Berlin, where he died suddenly.
My last memory of Bob was seeing him edge his way seamlessly through the media scrum at this year's Champions League Final in Athens; that was Bob Vaughan - not only one of nature's gentlemen but also, to summon up another cliché that would have prompted an appropriate smile, a gentle giant.
Alan Wicks....................Your e-mail (Memorial Service) about RV came as a little surprise, because that was the first I had heard about his death. Maybe I missed an earlier e-mail, but I doubt it. Remember, Taffy that I don't have any internet facility here.
Anyway, how sad for one so young. I spoke to Allan Ward and to Rick Emptage to see if they knew any details - all that Rick could tell was the content of an obituary in The Times...'after a short illness'. Rob and I had spoken at length at London Welsh so recently. His inspiration and leadership made many many consecutive Easters on the Continent so memorable (despite the drubbings that we invariably received at the hands of the Hun). Also France, Holland and Czechoslovakia had been on the itineraries.
MEMORIAL SERVICE
This took place at Christ Church, East Sheen on November 13th, 2007 at noon and was attended by the following Old Boys, among others: Alan Bloxham, Derek Carr, Hugh Coulston, Bob Cullen, John Curry, Rick Emptage, Terry Gazzard, Peter Godfrey, Sid Lines, Russell Nimmo, Jack Parker, Peter Penney, Morgan Reynolds, David Richardson, John Simpson, Edward Steers, Len Timms and Mike Turner.
Tributes were paid by Russell Nimmo, Bob Cullen and Alan Bloxham.
Prayers were said by Edward Steers who is the Parish Reader at Christ Church
ROGER HOUGHTON
ROGER HOUGHTON
July, 2007
Roger had been in hospital several times since he assisted with the arrangements for Reunion 2006 and during this period had displayed great fortitude and determination. His funeral at Putney Vale Crematorium was attended by Old Boys, Harry Purchase, Hugh Coulston (both ex business associates) and David Richardson
Roger's memoirs can be seen on the 1950s intake page
AUDREY PARKER 2007
AUDREY PARKER 2007
via Colin Winger..............Audrey Parker passed away in Spain where she had lived for many years.
Audrey will be well remembered by Old Grammarian footballers of the 1950s. Audrey and Beryl Netherway were a much valued part of Tony Pitman's Queens Road after-match refreshment team...........
DENNIS KEENE
DENNIS KEENE
November, 2007
Dennis Keene: Poet and translator
Obituary published in 'The Independent' on Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Dennis Keene was a man of literature through and through. He wrote poetry and wrote about poetry; he read English literature voraciously and lectured on it; he wrote articles and books on Japanese literature and used much of his creative talent translating it. In 1991 his translation of Maruya Saiichi's Rain in the Wind was given a Special Award by the judges of the first Independent Award for Foreign Fiction.
This collection of four stories ranges from action to contemplation of nature to intellectual detective work, and the judges praised Keene's success in "encompassing the lyrical and the demotic with equal ease". He was an exemplary translator, humble before his author but always ensuring that the completed work was a creative whole. He had that rare gift among translators of being able to stay close to the changing moods and rhythms of the original but at the same time give the reader the satisfaction of having read a novel rather than a translated novel; maybe this was because Keene was a close friend of both his principal authors, Kita Morio and Maruya Saiichi; maybe it was because he both loved the literature he was translating and loved to be writing literature himself.
Dennis Keene was born in 1934 and grew up in Richmond, Surrey, where he attended Richmond and East Sheen County Grammar School for Boys. While there, at the age of 16, he first encountered the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and was overwhelmed by the universality of its reference, a prose poem on the way a child experiences death bringing back memories of the loss of the family dog eight years previously. It was here also that he first met the future scholar and critic John Carey and they remained lifelong friends, later going to Oxford together.
At Oxford, Keene read English Language and Literature at St John's College and immersed himself in extracurricular poetry. With Peter Ferguson he became joint editor of Oxford Poetry, the literary journal whose editors have included Robert Graves, Anthony Thwaite and John Fuller. After Oxford he became a British Council lecturer in Singapore and Malaysia, but a turning point in his life came when he was appointed Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Kyoto University in 1961. He met his future wife Keiko in Kyoto and they were married there in 1962. Japan was now firmly a part of his life.
After a year at Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, during which Dennis and Keiko unsuccessfully tried to find Rimbaud's house in Harar, there came another job in Japan and another turning point in Keene's life: a lectureship in English Literature at Kyushu University in Fukuoka.
Here a chance visit to a bookseller on the way to the dentist yielded the prize of the novel Ghosts by Kita Morio and the start of Keene's love affair with Japanese literature. His translation of Ghosts won a real prize some 20 years later (the Noma Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1992). This novel, which follows a boy's growing awareness of his own sexuality in an atmosphere saturated by natural references, was a revelation to Keene, who compared his response to what he felt when reading Rimbaud and Proust.
For this love affair to mature Keene felt he had to return to Oxford and write a doctoral thesis on Japanese literature. I was appointed his supervisor. Dennis's namesake, Donald Keene, the leading Western scholar of Japanese literature, once asked me what it was like supervising Dennis Keene. I described my task as restraining genius. I would spend hours listening in awe to this pupil, as he produced insight after insight from his by now encyclopaedic knowledge of modern Japanese novels. My only function was to help him channel these into a mould that was acceptable for an academic thesis. He was later, in 1980, to publish two impressive books, a monograph on the subject of his thesis, Yokomitsu Riichi: modernist, and an anthology, The Modern Japanese Prose Poem.
During this period Keene also published two books of poetry with Carcanet: Surviving (1980) and Universe and Other Poems (1984). In the note that Keene adds to Surviving he supposes that "the poems remain essentially symbolist". But "the reader will find the language ordinary". Ordinary yes, but brimming with the emotions that he felt so strongly – for example, these lines from "Burdens", about the death of a (his?) mother's brother in the First World War:
Father
Did not go out. Her brother (uncle) did,
But nothing clearly him nor his came back.
Apart from a brief period as a full-time writer and translator in the UK, the last 20 years of Dennis Keene's career were spent in Tokyo as a professor at the prestigious Japan Women's University. After retirement in 1993 he and Keiko returned to Britain, where their daughter Shima was living. Dennis continued writing and translating; Keiko, a ballet and dance critic, was writing by his side. This settled suburban life in Oxford came to an end in 2007 with the onset of the disease that finally took his life.
Brian Powell
Dennis Keene, scholar, poet and translator: born London 10 July 1934; Lecturer in English Language and Literature, Kyoto University 1961-63; Professor in English Literature, Haile Selassie I University, Addis Ababa 1964-65; Lecturer in English Literature, Kyushu University 1965-69; Assistant Professor of English Literature, Japan Women's University, Tokyo 1970-76, Professor 1976-81, 1984-93; Part-time Lecturer in English Literature, Tokyo Metropolitan University 1978-79, 1987-88; married 1962 Keiko Kurose (one daughter); died Oxford 30 November 2007.
ROY LEAVER
ROY LEAVER
January, 2008
Obituary by Roger Smith
Roy was born in 1931 and was a pupil at Richmond & East Sheen County Grammar School until in or about 1947/8 when he left school and became a trainee with Barclays Bank. Apparently one of his first jobs was in Brentford and involved counting the cash amounts paid into the Bank by Brentford Football Club. With attendances at Grffin Park in those days frequently over 30,000 that was clearly no small task!
I first met Roy in the early to mid 1970s when a client of my law firm took delight in introducing me to his bank manager, Roy Leaver By then Roy was the manager of the Westcombe Park Branch of Barclays Bank and it did not take many minutes to discover at that first meeting that Roy had grown up just off the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen and had been a pupil at the School.
From Westcombe Park Roy moved to be the manager of the Sutton Branch of Barclays Bank and eventually took early retirement in the mid 1980s to run a pig farm near Ashford, Kent with his two sons - a venture that seems to have been unsuccessful on account of the changing market conditions within the EEC.
The pig farm land was sold during the 1990s for residential development and Roy and his wife, Margaret, moved a few years ago to Wells in Somerset where Roy lived out his last few years, becoming a victim of Alzheimer's Disease several years ago.
Roy was a friendly, outgoing man who in later years became a staunch member of the Baptist Church. He leaves a widow, Margaret, to whom he had been married for more than 51 years, four children and a number of grandchildren. It was a pleasure to have known him.
SIR JOHN HILL
SIR JOHN HILL
January 2008
Obituary Published in The Daily Telegraph 27th February, 2008
Sir John Hill, who has died aged 86, was the leader of the British nuclear industry as chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and of two of its commercial offshoots, British Nuclear Fuels and Amersham International.
Sir John Hill: far too many ostriches think that Britain can live on a buried treasure of fossil fuel
Hill's appointment to run the AEA - by Tony Benn when he was minister of technology in 1967 - marked a shift in the prime focus of the British nuclear industry from the creation of weapons of deterrence to the commercialisation of nuclear power.
Hill's predecessor, the distinguished scientist Lord Penney, had worked on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos and had run the Aldermaston weapons research establishment.
Hill was also a physicist by background, but came to the AEA chair at the age of 46 with the reputation of a modern businessman and top-class man-manager who had made a notable success of the production and reprocessing of nuclear fuels at AEA sites such as Windscale, in Cumbria, and Capenhurst in Cheshire.
The profitable fuels business was hived off into a new company, British Nuclear Fuels, in 1971, with Hill as its chairman.
The smaller radiochemical research arm of the authority was also turned into a stand-alone business and became, as Amersham International, one of the first state entities to be successfully privatised by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1982; again Hill was chairman, a post he held until 1988.
In its central role of leading the development of British nuclear power generation, however, the AEA was caught in interminable political wrangles throughout Hill's tenure, which ended in 1980.
The argument boiled down to a choice between steam-generating heavy water reactors (of which Dounreay was the forerunner and in which British manufacturers claimed a world lead) and pressurised water reactors designed by Westinghouse Corporation of America.
Progress towards a new generation of British-designed and built nuclear plants had stalled by 1974, when Hill and other industry leaders supported a switch to the American design - but Lord Carrington, Edward Heath's energy minister, held out in favour of buying British. Labour returned to power shortly afterwards, and Tony Benn also argued against the American design.
But Hill reconfirmed his view in a report to Benn in 1976, in which he argued that the increased availability of natural gas as a power source, and the rising projected cost of the British reactors, made the original programme uneconomic. The net result was that no new nuclear power stations were built until after Hill's time - when Sizewell, with a Westinghouse reactor, went ahead in the early 1980s.
Throughout these debates Hill treated the views of his opponents with patience and respect. But he defended his industry vehemently against those who, on grounds of safety, opposed it in its entirety. There were, he declared in 1979, "far too many ostriches" who believed that Britain could continue to live on "a buried treasure of fossil fuel".
On the especially sensitive issue of the disposal of nuclear waste, he said that the industry itself, by seeking perfection, had led the public to believe the problem to be worse than it really was: "To say in one breath that [nuclear waste] is not dangerous but that we want to bury it 1,000 feet deep does not sound convincing. Our own caution leads to disbelief."
John McGregor Hill was born in Chester on February 21 1921, the son of a schools' inspector. The family moved to Richmond-upon-Thames, where he went to school; he took a First in Physics at King's College, London, in two years, before serving in the RAF from 1941 to 1946 as an officer in the radar branch.
He returned to academe to take a doctorate at St John's College, Cambridge, working in the Cavendish Laboratory, and subsequently to teach Physics at London University.
In 1950 Hill joined what was then the department of atomic energy in the Ministry of Supply, and took up his first appointment at Windscale.
After the formation of the Atomic Energy Authority in 1954 he was its assistant director of technical policy, based at Risley in Lancashire; he became technical director and subsequently managing director of its production group, and became a member of the authority in 1964.
After leaving the AEA, Hill was chairman of Aurora Holdings, a Sheffield-based engineering group, and of Rea Brothers, a City investment firm. He was president of the British Nuclear Forum from 1984 to 1992.
Hill was knighted in 1969. He received the Melchett Medal of the Institute of Energy in 1974 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981.
A keen golfer, he was captain and president of the Royal Mid-Surrey club.
Sir John Hill, who died on January 14, married, in 1947, Nora Hellett; they had two sons and a daughter.