Obituaries
Obituaries ..........................................................................................................
Jim Bush (77-84) Honorary Obituarist
The following pages contain obituaries for 43 Old Alleynians and Honorary Staff Members who died in 2013, as well as entries for others who died in previous years but for whom details were received in 2013. A list of Old Alleynians for whom no obituary could be produced for the 2014 Yearbook can be found on page 78. If you are able to help us with details of those OAs, please contact Jim Bush, c/o the Alleyn Club & Development Office: alleynclub @ dulwich.org.uk or +44 (0)20 8299 5335.
Henry William Abbey (1936-42) 09.04.1925 – 21.10.2013
Dr John Preston Amis (1936-39) 17.06.1922 – 01.08.2013
John Preston Amis was born in Dulwich as the younger of two children to his father James, who worked for the merchant bankers Seligmann Brothers, and his mother, Florence, who was a model at Harrods. Writer Kingsley Amis was
Henry Abbey came to Dulwich with a Junior County Scholarship from Sussex Road Primary School in Brixton. (Sussex Road has now disappeared, having been replaced by the vast Moorlands housing estate, but the school survives as Hill Mead Primary School.) He was in Spenser. On leaving the College during World War 2, he joined insurance company Prudential briefly but when he became 18 years old he joined the Royal Navy, and served in Australia and on HMS Venerable in the Far East. After the war ended, he returned to Prudential until 1950, when he joined the new family business, Dale Martin Promotions, where he was known as ‘Billy Dale’. Dale Martin Promotions held an exclusive wrestling contract with ITV from 1955 to 1985, which had its best years when shown on World of Sport between 1965 and 1985, and they were closely involved in World Championship Boxing in the 1960s and 70s. Henry became a chartered secretary, merged Dale Martin Promotions with Hurst Park Syndicate and floated the new company in 1964. He was a director and company secretary of this company until it was taken over by the William Hill Organisation in 1971. He became a director and subsequently Deputy Managing Director of William Hill, and was also a director of numerous other sporting, leisure and finance companies within the same group. He travelled widely on business in Europe and the USA before retiring from William Hill in 1988, when it merged with Mecca. Despite being a lifelong Marxist and advocate of social revolution, Henry was a Name at Lloyds insurance between 1973 and 1993. He was married with five children and his main leisure interests were literature, theatre, golf (where he was very proud to have once achieved a hole in one), bridge and cooking. Henry himself wrote his own obituary notes and would like his epitaph to be ‘Always bought his round and always fought his own corner’.
John’s first cousin and they were both born in 1922. He came to the College from the Prep, where he developed mastoiditis and lost the hearing in his left ear. At the Prep he developed a life-long friendship with future pianist and songwriter Donald Swann, but left under a cloud after being implicated in a raid on the school tuck shop by another boy. Despite this he continued his studies at the College. Because of his partial deafness, he did not have to do military service and he followed his father into banking but for only six weeks, before deciding to pursue his hobby, classical music, as a career. He initially joined EMG Handmade Gramophones, a record shop in Grape Street in central London, where staff were encouraged to take records home in order to familiarise themselves with the stock. Records were then made from shellac, which became scarce during wartime, and the record shop was soon struggling. He moved on to a job as secretary to the London Philharmonic Orchestra Arts Club, which brought him into contact with William Glock and Sir Michael Tippett, and he also sometimes turned pages for Dame Myra Hess at wartime concerts at the National Gallery and helping Tippett to organise concerts at Morley College. After the war, he became the London music critic for The Scotsman in 1946. In late 1947 he joined Sir Thomas Beecham’s newly- formed Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where he ran the concerts and printed the posters and programmes. Glock invited him to run a summer school for musicians at Bryanston School in Dorset in 1948. The summer school moved to Dartington in 1953 and John remained
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