Obituaries
Jane’s, and wrote a biography of King Hussein of Jordan that was published in 1998. He was an instinctive and accomplished journalist who was proficient in five languages and had a real passion for Latin America. He married Rita and together they had two daughters. In recent years, he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease and lived his last years in Pickering House, a care home in Dorking, Surrey, run by the Journalists’ Charity. A memorial service was held for Roland at St Bride’s, the journalists’ church in Fleet Street, London. He is survived by his wife, Rita, daughters, Sarah and Kate, and several grandchildren, to all of whom he was devoted.
to tighten its belt, including persuading 25% of the academic staff to retire early, which meant the School lost many of its most experienced staff who were world authorities in their fields. He managed the contraction of SOAS with great skill and laid the foundation for the School’s recovery from the late 1980s onwards. In 1988 he was appointed CBE and he stepped down as Director of SOAS in 1989, but this scarcely meant he was retiring from active life. A Dulwich resident, Jeremy had become a governor of JAGS in 1977 and had added the College and Alleyn’s in 1980 and became a trustee of the Dulwich Estate in 1985, continuing all of the latter three of these appointments until 1998. He was Vice Chair of the College Governors during the 1990s. He also chaired the British Academic Committee for Southeast Asian Studies between 1990 and 1997, and he was a member of the Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Golf Club until his health recently deteriorated. He first married Mary Vetter and they had two daughters but that marriage was dissolved in 1960. He married Daphne Whittam in 1962 and they remained married until her death in 2004. He is survived by his partner, Veronica, and by one of his daughters (the other one predeceased him). Obituaries were published in The Times and on the SOAS website, on which this obituary is based.
David Albert Easton (1929-35) 09.03.1917 – 04.01.2010
David Easton came to Dulwich from Bickley Park School, was in Drake, and whilst at the College was in the Scouts and was a prefect. On leaving Dulwich, he joined banking firm, Morgan, Grenfell & Co, but subsequently claimed that
he had only been offered that job because he was a useful cricketer. His colleagues at the bank persuaded him to join the RAF reserve force and he flew a Tiger Moth solo at Biggin Hill in early 1939. Like so many of his generation, at the age of only 22 his life was changed forever by the Second World War. He joined up immediately and was posted to 248 Squadron, flying Blenheims. His only sister, Joan, also joined up, and was a submarine spotter for the WRNS on the Queen Mary in the North Atlantic. David was a shy man and his mild manner perhaps guided the authorities to assign him to relatively uneventful patrols over Norway, where he recounted dodging into clouds to avoid Messerschmitts. In 1942, when returning from a long night patrol, they suddenly found themselves flying directly at what seemed to be the lights of a radio mast. David pulled the plane up sharply and it skidded and crashed along an airfield runway; they had been, in fact, disoriented and diving almost vertically towards the airfield lights on the ground! He was quickly retrained on Sunderlands and transferred to 201 Squadron for North Atlantic anti-submarine and convoy protection patrols. His last RAF plane, the Sunderland ML 814, is now preserved in the Weeks Fantasy of Flight museum in Florida. He was wryly amused to find his name included with the men of 248 Squadron on the 2005 Battle of Britain Monument on the Victoria Embankment in London. After the war, he joined BOAC as a pilot on the Flying Boat routes to South Africa, landing on African lakes. This is where he met his wife, Kathleen Pett, who was an air hostess. He eventually retired as a captain of Boeing 707s after 40 years of flying. He never
Roland Dallas (1946-54) 08.10.1935 – 08.06.2013
Roland Dallas came to the College from the Prep and was in Sidney and boarded in Blew House. He was captain of the Sidney 2nd XV in his final year and also secretary of the Dramatic and 20th Century Play Society. After leaving Dulwich,
he did National Service with the Royal Artillery in Hong Kong before going to Lincoln College, Oxford. He graduated in 1959 with a degree in PPE, before moving to the USA and studying at Cornell University for a year and then the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. After a year with the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts, he joined Reuters’ New York Bureau before moving on to their United Nations team two years later. During more than 15 years with Reuters, he reported from many news centres, mainly in Europe and the Americas. While he was Assistant Manager for Reuters in Latin America, he helped set up a Reuters regional news agency for Latin America in 1970 as a joint venture with leading South American newspapers. In 1981, he joined The Economist to edit their Foreign Report , an eight-page digest of news and speculative stories from around the world. He also contributed to the main Economist magazine, mainly about Latin America. He moved again in 1995, taking the newsletter with him, to specialist defence and security publisher,
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