The Salopian Summer 2023

SALOPIAN CLUB NEWS 111
Head of Chemistry, Housemaster of Rigg’s Hall for 11 years, and
finally Director of Studies. One theme which stands out time and
again in recollections is the dedication he showed to mentoring
and supporting boys and colleagues.
Richard was always active, practical and competitive. He
masterminded some notable sporting victories for Rigg’s over the
years and was involved in numerous activities, including Basic
Year, athletics, shooting and staff football. As Director of Studies,
he played a central role over many years in ensuring high
standards of teaching and strong exam results. He was someone
to whom everyone turned for advice, who ‘just knew how
everything worked’! He led the School through Ofsted’s first
inspection of an independent boys’ boarding school and was
instrumental in the introduction of computer systems. Figuring
out how to programme the School timetable efficiently was no
mean feat!
Retirement was only a partial concept. Richard became a
Governor at Moreton Hall, teaching there for some time
as well. His biggest undertaking was to be the clerkship of
the Shrewsbury Drapers Guild, a role to which he brought
steadiness, diplomacy and perseverance for many years. His
crowning achievement was his involvement in the planning
and building of a new set of almshouses, which required
fund-raising, negotiations with government officials and
constant site visits.
He continued to live just outside the School Gates in Porthill
Gardens, and many of his former colleagues became golfing
and walking companions. His love of galleries and historic
sites had been deepened by his enjoyment of School art trips
across Europe. Walking and the geology of Shropshire were
also passions, and he continued to walk the hills until his final
weeks. He played golf keenly, albeit with self-declared modest
talent. Regular golfing tours to North Wales and further afield
were much enjoyed in the company of other former Shrewsbury
staff including Richard Raven, Hugh Ramsbotham and Chris
Conway. Family life was always central, and long school
holidays allowed Richard to drive Caroline and their children,
James and Bridget, on many extended camping trips around
Europe in a lime-green VW camper. In his retirement he devoted
huge energies to DIY projects in his children’s homes, never
able to sit still. He loved being around his four granddaughters,
Zoe, Jenny, Hazel and Cora.
Richard remained engaged, practical and a reliable soundingboard
to the end. His lasting influence on Shrewsbury and
the hundreds of boys who passed through during his time
is exceptional and he will be much missed by the Salopian
community. as well as by his family and friends.
[James Auger (Rb 1986-91)]
Merrick Stuart
Baker-Bates
(M 1953-58)
Merrick Baker-Bates was
born in Crosby, then in
Lancashire, in 1939, six
weeks before the start of the
Second World War. He was
the second of five children
of Norah (née Stuart) and
Eric Baker-Bates. His parents
separated when he was ten
and he was sent to live with
a friend of his father’s whom
he called ‘Auntie Kath’. He was educated at a prep school in the
Lake District before arriving in Moser’s Hall in 1953.
At Shrewsbury, his experiences of the legendary schoolmasters
Anthony Chenevix-Trench and Frank (‘Kek’) McEachran
made a great impression on him. He recalled the former’s
habit of making boys recite Latin verse outside his window
while he was shaving in the early morning, and a trip to
Italy with the latter, during which Kek became locked inside
a toilet, the eventual escape prompting Kek to say, “O! It’s
broken the lock and splintered the door”, a quotation from
McEachran’s anthology Spells.
Merrick went on after Shrewsbury to read history at Hertford
College, Oxford. On graduating, he spent a year at the College
of Europe in Bruges, followed by a spell in Brussels as a
journalist, before he passed the civil service exam and joined the
Foreign Office.
Posted to Japan in 1963 at the start of his diplomatic career,
he later became one of his generation’s most accomplished
speakers of Japanese. He and his wife Chrystal narrated the live
satellite broadcast of the wedding of Charles and Diana on NHK
Television. In the English language he was also an impressive
orator – the style of his delivery often able to bring a rapt silence
to a crowd.
His witty, gentlemanly manner, occasionally sprinkled with a
certain Northern English grit, gained him a wide circle of the rich
and famous, particularly during his time in Los Angeles. He was
credited among other things with introducing Elizabeth Taylor to
John Warner, her sixth husband. His charitable involvement with
the homeless in Long Beach, California, also led him to strike up
an unlikely if brief friendship with one Calvin Broadus, later to
become the rapper Snoop Dogg.
But perhaps unusually for someone with a position at the heart
of the British establishment, he was always more enthusiastic
about the ordinary people in the countries in which he lived. He
befriended taxi drivers, mechanics, golf caddies and teachers -
often becoming intimately involved with their lives. In Japan, this
gave him a subtle understanding of the way the Japanese saw
Britain and the West, a quality often overlooked by the office
in London as the ‘economic miracle’ played out. It was because
of this that he was perhaps the best ambassador to Japan that
Britain never had.
While a member of several philanthropic charities in his
latter years, he also assumed a largely independent and selfdirected
role as mentor, teacher or simply a good friend of the
disadvantaged. His almost daily involvement with drug addicts,
former gangsters and thieves sometimes alarmed his family. A
habit of offering accommodation to otherwise homeless people
at his house in the rural village of Creaton, Northamptonshire,