Obituaries
for growing fruit and vegetables, alongside his bee keeping and craft cider making. He also realised a life- long ambition to become a church bell ringer, and was a member of the British Legion and a local fundraiser. In 2013, Mike was diagnosed with brain cancer which, ten months later, led to his very sudden, but peaceful death at home. In all aspects of his life, Mike engendered respect. This was very evident at his funeral when many local people, as well as friends from further afield, filled the church. His fellow bell ringers rang him in and rang him out of the church. So many of the tributes sent to his family can be summarised in the words of his unit commander on leaving the Royal Engineers more than fifty years earlier, describing Mike as ‘an intelligent, well-mannered man – he gives of his best at all times’. He has a memorial bench in the vegetable garden at RHS Rosemoor with the inscription ‘He who plants a garden plants happiness’. Mike is survived by his wife, Pauline, their daughter and two grandchildren. Pauline contributed significantly to this obituary. being taken each morning to be milked in a dairy next to the railway station. He came to the College with a School Scholarship from the Prep in 1940, after a brief spell at Cranbrook at the start of the Second World War, and was in Raleigh. He was part of the Classical Fourth of 1939/40 that still has Founder’s Day reunions organised by Peter Hart, which Neville attended with great pleasure until 2011. He flourished in the academic environment of Dulwich and remained appreciative throughout his life of the opportunities that the College gave him, speaking with continued affection of characters like the Master, Christopher Gilkes. Being at the College during WW2 provided some unique additions to the curriculum, like fire-watching from the roof of the Great Hall, and farming camps in Warwickshire, with Neville cycling to and from one of those in the summer of 1943. He played 1st XV rugby and 1st XI cricket and was School Captain in 1944/45, Head of the Classical Side, and President of the Christian Union. He won the Hugh Oldham Classics Scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but the War was not quite finished so he had to postpone university and joined the Royal Navy in early 1945. Neville Henry Jones (1940-45) 24.08.1926 – 24.09.2013 Neville Jones was born to a father who was a piano manufacturer, Hulbert and Jones, in Stockwell, and a mother who was a fashion designer. He grew up in a house on Gipsy Hill, from which he recalled being able to see cows
Despite joining the navy, he was posted to Bedford, almost as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England, to train as a Japanese translator. But VJ Day arrived before his training ended, and he was posted instead to the submarine attack aircraft carrier HMS Fencer as its Education Officer, and embarked on a voyage as far as Ceylon via Egypt. It was during this military service that he realised he was a born teacher. While at Oxford, he was President of the Corpus Christi JCR, and contributed to college reviews with his tenor voice and piano-playing. He had thought that his career would be in hospital administration in the newly- formed National Health Service but, while waiting for an NHS administrative appointment, he went to teach for a year at Winchester House, a prep school in Brackley, Northamptonshire. It was soon apparent that he had found a truer vocation in teaching than in medical administration, and in teaching his passion to understand people and his patience with them could be put to better use. While at Winchester House in the early 1950s, he met Nancy. They married in 1953, had one son and were happily married for over 50 years . After a brief stint in the NHS at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, he returned to teaching at Sebright School in Wolverley, near Kidderminster, remaining there for three years. In 1957 he moved to Gresham’s School at Holt, in Norfolk, and he remained there for the rest of his career. Over the next forty years, he must have directly taught more than two thousand boys and girls, and influenced many more in his roles as housemaster and then headmaster. With his classics languages background, he initially taught Latin, Greek and General Studies at Gresham’s, but his principal subject ended up as Junior Maths. He was a keen all-round sportsman, coaching school rugby until his late fifties, and he ran the Social Services, a non-military alternative to the CCF, at Gresham’s where his natural rapport with all types of people served him well. His contributions to end-of- term staff parties at Gresham’s, as both a writer and a performer, were widely appreciated. He retired as Headmaster of the Junior School in 1984, but continued to teach and tutor well into the 1990s. When he finally retired from Gresham’s School, he and Nancy moved to a house in Thornage, near Holt, where they were active in village life until Nancy’s death in 2005. Neville remained active in the village until a serious illness late in 2012, dying in September 2013, aged 87. Neville and Nancy’s son, Nic, contributed significantly to this obituary.
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