in West Africa. His next position was in Bermuda where he started a branch from scratch, building the staff numbers from one to one hundred with substantial annual profits. He remained in insurance and went to Canada as Claims Manager for Prudential Assurance, but he found life in Canada too cold and soon moved on to the Bahamas with Lloyds of London. While he was in Nassau, the Bahamas was hit by Hurricane Betsy in September 1965, the first hurricane in the area to cause $1 billion in damage, so it is now popularly known as ‘Billion Dollar Betsy’. Continuing his insurance world tour, he then moved to Australia, initially working in Sydney, New South Wales, before moving to Darwin as Northern Territory Manager. While in Australia, he was also involved with Rotary International and was also a carer at the Leper colony, located in the bush fifty miles from Darwin. He finally moved to become the Managing Director in Barbados, West Indies, living in the nearest house to the East Point Lighthouse at Ragged Point, with a view of over several thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Veere had a life-long interest in the sea and as a boy had been a Sea Scout, and eventually joined the P&O Shipping Group and worked for them for nearly ten years. By the end of his working life, Veere was still a life member of the Mombasa Sailing Club in Kenya and had been a member of the Darwin Sailing Club and the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. Veere met and married Kathleen Mildenhall from Haywards Heath, Sussex, in 1962 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. They had a mini honeymoon in Gambia after marrying, and a longer honeymoon at the end of his placement in West Africa. The
longer honeymoon consisted of travelling in a banana boat to the West Indies, spending several months in St Vincent. They then boarded the ‘Federal Palm’ as it visited most islands in the West Indies and then toured the USA before joining the original Queen Mary sailing from New York to Southampton. In Veere’s opinion, the ‘Queen Mary’ was one of the best ships ever built, with excellent service, and wonderful food and entertainment, and more modern ships do not come up to the same standard. Veere and Kathleen had two daughters, Angela, born in Sussex, and Suzanna, born in the Bahamas. The family always travelled to all Veere’s international placements in the insurance industry, so the girls’ education was disjointed in the Bahamas, Australia, Battle Abbey in Sussex, before moving on again to Switzerland and Florida, USA. On retirement, Veere moved to the Royal Alfred Society Care home in Eastbourne for twenty years, and finally the Royal Alfred Seafarers Nursing home in Banstead, Surrey. Veere wrote his own obituary which was forwarded to the club by his sister, Beryl Pollak. Christopher Oliver Payne [1950-57] 22.07.1939 – 20.10.2015 Christopher Payne’s father
university when he went to study Medicine at King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill, which was very near the family home. At King’s he met his future wife, Hilda, known as Paddy, and they married in July 1963 when he graduated as MRCS, LRCP, MB, BS. In 1962 he had joined the RAF as a medical cadet, and from 1965 to 1968 he worked at Changi Hospital in Singapore, leaving the RAF on his return as a squadron leader. In 1971 the family moved to Iran with the Church Missionary Society, where Chris was physician in the Diocese of Iran’s Christian hospital in Shiraz. They spent seven happy and fulfilling years in Shiraz, and the family’s experiences in Iran and their friends in the Farsi and English-speaking church congregations became an enduring part of their lives. Their time in Iran was brought to an abrupt end by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and they returned to the UK. In 1980 Chris became a GP at the Bermondsey Medical Mission, and in more than twenty-four years as a partner there, he was instrumental in developing it into a large training practice. He served on many NHS committees and was a director of community health services. In 1993, Chris spent a sabbatical year as locum chief medical officer at the American Mission Hospital in Bahrain, accompanied by Paddy in a welcome return to the Middle East. In retirement Chris was a school governor and developed his love of poetry as a tutor with the creative arts retreat movement, publishing his own poetry collection Outbox from Inner Space. He ran a faith in action group at a drop-in centre in Deptford, encouraging members to express themselves in poetry and song. He relished spending time with his extended family, and rejoiced in the arrival of each of his
was a music hall variety artist who had left school at 12, his mother
was a shorthand typist, and the family lived in Herne Hill. Chris was proud to have won a scholarship to Dulwich College from Dulwich Hamlet. At the College, he was in Spenser, was in the boxing team and the RAF section of the CCF. He became the first member of his family to go to
84
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online