Obituaries
he moved to become Director of Music and an assistant master of languages at Aldenham School in 1939, but was absent on War Service from 1940 to 1946. During WW2, Freddie was in the Intelligence Corps and was mentioned in dispatches. He started out as a 2nd Lieutenant, but was promoted to Lieutenant in 1942, Captain in 1943 and finally Major in 1944, when Field Marshal Montgomery decided he needed at least a Major signing his papers. After the War he returned briefly to Aldenham School but in 1947, he took up a post as County Organiser of Music and Drama for Bedfordshire. He became Bedfordshire Assistant Director of Education in 1952, moving on to become Chief Inspector of Schools in 1960, Chief Advisor in 1970, and finally General Advisor in 1974 until he retired in 1977. During his years in Bedford, he was active in the Bedford Musical Society between 1952 and 1965, conducting J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in 1952 and St. Matthew Passion in 1954. He was so committed to the idea that music should be heard ‘live’ that he never owned a high quality music system to hear the classical music that meant so much to him. He married into an Anglo-Swiss family in 1944, taking on the responsibility for two young girls, whose father died as Chaplain of HMS Dorsetshire, which was sunk by the Japanese in the Indian Ocean on Easter Sunday in 1942. It also allowed him to become fluent in French. Freddie’s first son was born in 1946 and a second son followed in 1948. His first wife died in a car crash in 1960, but he remarried in 1963 and subsequently had two daughters. The four elder children had all left home by this time, and after living in Bedford for many years, Freddie decided it was time to move out to the countryside, so the family home for the next 30 or so years was in Felmersham, a small village in North Bedfordshire. He was active in village life and enjoyed long walks in the surrounding countryside. He continued to play his beloved Bechstein piano every day, and was often in demand to play the organ in various churches in the surrounding villages. Sometimes this was just to cover for the resident organist being ill, but one of these ‘stand-ins’ lasted for many years. He and his second wife divorced in the mid-1980s, and he lived alone in the house in Felmersham once his two daughters had left home to start off their own adult lives. Freddie was very formal, and for many years, he would rarely be seen without a jacket even indoors. In those years, he was a great reader, often about politics, history or religion, and he often had several large books ‘on the go’ at the same time. After a serious fall in 1992, his health deteriorated slowly. In 2009, he was hospitalised for a week, but as he could no longer cook for himself, had failing short- term memory and unsatisfactory home care help, it
was decided that the only alternative was a care home. His short-term memory may have been uncertain, but his long-term memory of music or his early years was very good, and he could talk at length about these subjects. He had little trouble remembering family, friends and neighbours, but had great difficulty with the frequently changing care home staff. He stayed for a short time at a care home in Bedford, before moving out to a better care home in the village of Sharnbrook, which is close to Felmersham. Here, he was visited almost daily by family, friends, or former neighbours. On his 100th birthday, one of the care staff asked him what his secret was for living so long, and he replied with a straight face, ‘Keep breathing’. And in his very last years, the care home staff remarked on his unchanging daily routine and discipline of jacket, tie and white handkerchief. He was hospitalised very briefly in September 2014, at the age of 102, and died two days later on Thursday 11 September. His funeral was held in an almost full village church in Felmersham, where he is also buried. His son, Mark Stevens and grand-daughter, Lotte Simpson, contributed significantly to this obituary. Competition in 1943, was a school prefect and played in the 2nd XV. His main sport was fives though, and he represented Dulwich in the 1st IV in 1941, 1942 and 1943. He was briefly a member of the College Scout troop, but transferred to the Air Training Corps (ATC) on its formation. Derrick left Dulwich while WW2 was still raging and had to do something for the war effort. The ATC had clearly cast its spell on him because he immediately joined the RAF as an aircrew cadet. After training as a navigator in the UK, with his initial training at Paignton in Devon, and with several training courses in Canada and the Bahamas, the war was over, but he remained in the RAF and spent six months in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a navigator with No 203 Squadron. His squadron was then moved back to the UK and initially based at RAF Leuchars in Scotland for five months, before moving again to RAF St Eval in Cornwall, by which time Derrick had been promoted to Navigation Leader. In the late 1940s he spent a couple of years in the Air Ministry in London, performing staff duties allocating postings for military personnel in the Department of the Air Member for Personnel (AMP). At the time, the RAF’s AMP was Air Chief Marshal Sir Leslie Hollinghurst OA. In 1950, he returned to Cornwall and the School of Maritime Derrick Ross Stratton (1936-43) 01.03.1925 – 10.07.2014 Derrick Stratton came to Dulwich from Bonneville Road LCC School, Clapham, with an LCC Scholarship as the elder of two brothers at the College, and was in Drake. While at Dulwich, he won the Form and Art Prizes in 1939, the German Prose
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