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T h e O l d S t a t i o n e r - N o 8 7 I last visited Geraint at home in Harewood just a couple of weeks ago. As always, he and Marj made me extremely welcome and after a lovely lunch we spent a few very happy hours speaking mostly about Jewin and travelling. In the good tradition which Geraint taught me, I now have in my diary notes of excellent itineraries for Germany and the Netherlands and I am now particularly determined to visit Potsdam and Delft having listened to Geraint’s recommendations. These places were brought alive to me by him. Rounding off the day with three kinds of cake from Betty’s Tea Shop, I set off back to London very glad to have been in Geraint’s company; encouraged by his support; inspired by the way he always lived life to the full even in the face of his illness; and strengthened by the sincere care, encouragement and concern he always gave to others and the love and care with which he was constantly surrounded and upheld from Marj, Mair and Bethan and all his family and friends. ge Geraint, Our Contemporary With Head Boy, Robert Duncan and Deputy, Ray Houldsworth, 1982 chips at a restaurant near the church with him and Gareth Owen, one of our organists at Jewin, and now also an elder of the church. Geraint always wanted to make people feel part of the family of the church. Geraint worked hard with the elders to arrange a Service of Thanksgiving to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the new building of Jewin Church in September 2011. The service was truly memorable with a large congregation of former members and friends making special efforts and long journeys to attend. The sermon was preached by the Rev’d J.E. Wynne Davies, who has been unfailing in his guidance and support for the church through the years. The service was followed by a lecture delivered by Mr Davies on aspects of the history of Jewin, tracing events to the opening of the new building in 1961. Following the lecture, in collaboration with the Rev’d J.E. Wynne Davies, Geraint was responsible for the publication of a book on the history of Jewin written by Mr Davies in English for the benefit of the children of the church and so many members and friends. Geraint also initiated and arranged another extremely meaningful service in November 2015 to celebrate the centenary of the Induction of the Rev’d D.S.Owen, minister of Jewin from 1915 until 1959, and Geraint’s much loved and greatly revered grandfather. Geraint was also chairman of the Cymdeithas at Jewin for years and practically every year he gave us an evening on where he had been and what he had seen. He would always send postcards to members and friends of Jewin when he went abroad. To live in Wales is to be conscious At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the wild sky, Dyeing the immaculate rivers in all their courses* Geraint, or Pritch as we knew him, joined the school from Rhodes Avenue Primary School, Muswell Hill, in 1954 and remained until 1962. Everybody knew who he was but he knew much more about us than we ever did about him since he was a very private person. His was a quiet and disciplined approach to life and he always seemed to be very aware of everything that was going on. He seldom, if ever, graced the detention room and certainly never missed a merit half. It was clear early on that he was ‘prefect material’ and in due course a good prefect he turned out to be. He relished being Welsh and his Welshspeaking family of whom he was very proud. Geraint’s father supplied medical instruments and Geraint sometimes accompanied him on his travels and this may well have stimulated his love of geography and his journeys at home and abroad in later life. He had two sisters whom he rarely talked about but was close to throughout his life - Mair who became Head Girl at Hornsey High School and 22
T h e O l d S t a t i o n e r - N o 8 7 later held very senior posts in the commercial world and Bethan who became a primary school teacher. Since ours was a boys’ school these girls must have given a good balance to his life and, if he felt that his sisters were ‘snapping at his heels’, he definitely did not show it. He spent most summer holidays, certainly in his early school years, on his uncle’s farm on Anglesey where he gained a good general understanding of agriculture. Geraint also would speak warmly of his grandfather saying that he wanted to go to university and get a degree like him. At his funeral service we discovered that this grandfather, the Rev D S Owen** was Minister of Jewin Chapel in the City of London for 44 years and was greatly respected. Geraint enjoyed sport. I remember that he could throw a cricket ball further than most of us and he served Meredith House well in all sporting activities. His greatest physical achievements though were in the water and he was awarded an Instructor’s Certificate in Lifesaving in 1958, the Bronze Medallion for Lifesaving in 1959 and came second in the Pascoe Lifesaving Competition (senior boys) in 1961 - Roger Melling was first. In later life, of course, he played for Old Stationers’ football teams and got a great deal of pleasure from this. If memory serves me correctly he was ‘a good sport’ in another sense as well since he took the risk of going on one of Beaky Davis’ school holidays in France and enjoyed it! Non-sporting achievements included coming top of Form 4A in 1958, winning the C F Clay Memorial Prize for elocution and a prize for a Civics Essay in 1961. Geraint’s best subjects were Latin and Geography which he pursued through to A levels. His first Latin teacher was Gus Thomas and this was followed by Johnny Gore who told us all to forget everything Gus had taught us since we were to start again and do it ‘his way’ . He achieved very high grades in Latin at both O and A level. Geography though was his passion and whereas the rest of us were largely uninspired by Sam Read’s requirement that we learn by heart the names of all the countries in South America and their capitals, Geraint ‘lapped it up’. Another of Mr Read’s tests was to draw a map of the City of London which Geraint had no difficulty in doing taking into account his love of Geography and his regular attendance at a City Chapel. He greatly admired Joe Symons and considered it a great privilege to have studied under him and then to work with him later as a fellow teacher at the school. His third A level was French but he always felt that he should have chosen another subject. One of the set books, in French of course, was the ‘Crime of Sylvester Bonnard’ by Anatole France - a strange book which did not appeal to him. ‘Well, what was his crime? It was not obvious and nobody clarified it’ was a repeated observation he was still making fifty years later. It is perhaps just as well that he pursued Geography and not French at Sheffield University after he left school There are two events involving Geraint’s association with Mr Gore that are perhaps worth mentioning. He was present when another lad, early in the A level Latin course, was asked to translate aloud for the class a sentence from a passage of Latin that he should have prepared for homework. The Latin word for ‘to speak to each other’ is ‘interloquor’ and the story involved a man and a woman in adjacent prison cells having a conversation which the fumbling boy translated as ‘they had intercourse through the wall’. The result of this was immediate and permanent expulsion from the Latin set! The second event was that in later life Geraint maintained telephone contact with Johnny Gore until the redoubtable Mr Gore brought his last call to an early end by asking him whether he had nothing better to do with his time than chat to an old man. This assiduity in making and maintaining contact with people, though, paid dividends since many of us owe our membership of the Association to being tracked down and canvassed by Geraint. Geraint was a good friend to have and when his best friend from school, Roger Scola, who was clever and an excellent cricketer, was diagnosed in his early twenties with Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Geraint kept in regular contact until Roger’s death in his late thirties. It is also interesting that although the general consensus was that the boy ‘chucked out’ of the Latin set got what he deserved, Geraint who was friendly with him, maintained that this was wrong and ‘would never be allowed to happen today’. He believed in rightness and fairness. For example, earlier in his school career he took it upon himself to approach Mr Topley, his form master, to ask whether there would be a school outing as in other years, only to be told, quite firmly, that there would not be. As mentioned Geraint always seemed to know what was going on and those of us who took A level History are indebted to him for checking out our syllabus. For almost 2 years we had been learning about Emperor Napoleon the Third of France but Geraint, although he was not doing this course himself, discovered that this had been taken off the syllabus. The consequence of this was that the ‘Social History of Victorian England’ had to be ‘crammed in’ at almost the last minute. The outcome was that at least some of the class passed A level History and his action certainly saved all members of this group from turning up for this paper and finding that none of the subject areas had been covered. Geraint’s adult life was very full. He was a great traveller and as the other articles in this magazine show he made major and beneficial contributions as a teacher at Stationers and St Albans, as a longstanding OSA Committee Member, and as the very diligent editor of this magazine. He ‘played his cards close to his chest’ though and was full of surprises. Everybody thought he was a confirmed bachelor until, at a recent President’s Day cricket match, he arrived with his delightful long term partner, Marj***, who was such a great support to him in his last years. His links with his Chapel were known but nobody would have predicted their extent or that he would become an Elder. Nobody would have thought he would have the moral courage and strength of mind to stay in his last teaching post in a tough East London Comprehensive School where pupils had told him during his first week that his ‘days were numbered’. Nor could anybody have foreseen the amazingly brave and positive way in which he coped with his final illness. Yet, the greatest surprise is probably that this essentially quiet boy grew into a man who made such a great success of his life in so many different spheres. Geraint’s passing is sad but it is entirely fitting that at his funeral service in Anglesey his coffin was brought into the Chapel with Alfie Boe singing ‘Bring him home’ since Wales was his spiritual home. It is equally suitable that during the service the school song was sung by the 18 Old Stationers**** present, since Stationers’ School was such a large part of his life and, of course, it is very apt that his coffin left the Chapel to the music of ‘Streets of London’ since although he was Welsh he was a Londoner as well. Well done Geraint. Rest in Peace. Richard Phillippo * Opening lines from ‘Welsh Landscape’ by R S Thomas (1913-2000), a celebrated Welsh poet who lived in Anglesey. ** The Reverend David Samuel Owen arrived at Jewin Chapel in 1915 and served there for 44 years. The Chapel was bombed in 23
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