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DOWNING COLLEGE ASSOCIATIONO BITUARIESWe receive notification of deaths of members from a variety of sources.Some are accompanied by obituaries or eulogies from relatives or friends. Wherewe receive no such material and we find a published obituary we may useextracts from that with the publisher’s permission which has never beenwithheld. There are some members for whom we have only the basic factssent to us by solicitors. Overall we try to include information which will be ofinterest to the contemporaries of the deceased as well as matters which may beof wider interest.Richard Malvern Allen (1954) died on 3rd July 2009. His younger brotherTerry Allen (1956) tells us that Dick came up to Downing from Bedford School,after National Service in the Royal Air Force, where he was commissioned as aPilot Officer. He read Maths Part 1, but switched in his second year toEconomics, and maintained his interest in the RAF as a navigator with theUniversity Air Squadron. After graduating in 1957, Dick joined the ColonialService and remained at Cambridge for a further year, learning the languageand customs of the Bemba tribe in Northern Rhodesia, where he was to starthis career a year later as a District Officer. He spent nine years in NorthernRhodesia which, while he was there, gained its independence. Afterindependence, he transferred to the newly-established Zambian Governmentin the Game and Fisheries Department. Leaving Zambia in 1967, Dick movedto the Overseas Development Administration in the UK Civil Service. A fewyears later, he and the family were back in Africa, this time in Botswana, wherehe spent a couple of years as Director of Central Statistics. He then returned tothe UK, where he remained for the rest of his career with the OverseasDevelopment Administration, travelling widely around the world in his role asChief Statistician. On retirement, Dick and his wife, Jennifer, moved toBlythburgh in Suffolk. He greatly enjoyed life in his adopted county, where heand Jennifer quickly became involved in a wide range of local activities. Heappeared to have conquered the cancer, which he had first experienced someyears earlier. Sadly, it returned. However during the last six months of his life,he showed tremendous courage in continuing to experience, as far as possible,the many things he loved in life – his family, his Church, his friends, his music,his books, his interest in sport and his adopted county. He enjoyed a helicopterflight over the Suffolk coast a few weeks before he died peacefully at home.Eric Aspin (1945) has passed away. A call was received from his wife Celia.30