Obituaries
Anthony Charles Stanley (1941-43) 26.05.1925 – 08.07.2015
Battalion was split up he accompanied Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, the Supreme Commander of all British forces remaining in India and Pakistan, on an inspection visit. Returning to London in 1948, Tony joined the Metropolitan Police, serving for 29 years and rising to the rank of superintendent and responding to the huge social changes that took place in the capital in the post-war years. Working in Brixton he welcomed the influx of people from Britain’s Caribbean colonies who, he felt, introduced jazz and exoticism to the area, and he encountered very little friction between native Londoners and the new arrivals, except when weekend parties became too exuberant. He also welcomed the advent of a more liberal approach to homosexuality brought about by the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957. But he still encountered real poverty, recalling how on Monday morning patrols he would see queues of men at pawnbrokers, pawning what they could to get money for the week’s food. In the 1960s, as superintendent of Savile Row police station, his brief ranged from raiding striptease clubs in Soho to interviewing misbehaving MPs and clergymen in the station’s charge room. During the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s Stanley kept bolt cutters at the ready to free protesters who sometimes chained themselves to railings near the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. After retiring from the Metropolitan Police in 1973 he moved to Oxfordshire and worked as a security adviser to British Home Stores for 13 years. Tony married Dorothy Glass in 1953 and they had two daughters. Dorothy died in 2001 and after her death Tony returned to London to live in the Barbican. His two daughters both survive him. An obituary was published in the Telegraph, on which this is based.
Tony Stanley was born in Streatham, London, into a family of modest means. When his father, Walter, died from influenza in 1932, his mother, who went out to work, sent her eight year old son to live with her parents in Poplar,
which at that time was the most deprived area of London’s docklands. He would later recall a close knit community where front doors were left open and games of hopscotch and cricket were played in the street, but he also remembered the grinding poverty, which meant that he had to wear his shoes after they became too small, so that his toes grew misshapen. He watched his grandmother do the weekly wash in a copper pan of water heated by a wood fire; and he saw poor households, terrified of a ‘pauper’s grave’, scrimp to make weekly insurance payments to ensure a ‘respectable death’, with the whole street coming out to see a coffin as it was carried to church by a horse and cart. After 18 months in Poplar he returned to Streatham, where his mother arranged for him to board in a large house. There he was taken under the wing of another resident, Paul Prentice, a civil servant, who treated him as a surrogate son, teaching him to read and love books, and taking him out on walks around London. He also insisted that Tony should sit the exam for Dulwich College. He passed the exam, attended as a day boy, and his mother changed jobs to earn enough money to pay the fees. At Dulwich he was in Marlowe, joined the Junior Training Corps and played 2nd XV rugby in 1942. As soon as he left Dulwich, having only recently turned 18, he was immediately called up for war service. He chose to join the Indian Army and went straight out to India, joining the 14th Punjab Regiment. During his cadet training in Bangalore he learned Urdu, drank ‘Gin Piaz’ cocktails (containing whole onions) and played hockey with Indian soldiers. His first posting was to Ferozepur in the Punjab, a region that was a hotbed of independence activism, and when trouble was expected in an area the local police brought in the troops to put on a show of force and, if necessary, to open fire. Tony taught himself Punjabi so he was able to work more closely with the native troops, and was promoted to Lieutenant in 1946. At the time of partition and independence he was assigned to the Punjab Defence Force at the heart of the upheavals and atrocities. He accompanied trains full of Muslims fleeing India from Delhi to Lahore, and trains full of Hindus fleeing in the opposite direction. Gangs often ambushed the trains, killing many of their occupants and sometimes his colleagues were killed as well. He also had to explain the political situation to 300 of his young Punjabi troops in the Boy’s Battalion so that they could choose between India and Pakistan. Shortly before the
Michael Alper Sterne (1947-48, 1952-54) 30.08.1936 – 15.11.2015
Michael Sterne was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Max Sterne and Tikvah Alper, respected Jewish scientists. Michael initially arrived at the College from Dulwich Hamlet School with a scholarship in September 1947 and was in
Marlowe. He left the College in December 1948 as the family returned to South Africa. They returned to London in 1951 because the South African government had refused to renew Tikvah’s passport after a laboratory colleague reported her criticism of the apartheid regime. Michael re-enrolled at Dulwich in January 1952, continuing his struggle as an avowed atheist in a school with enforced worship. A healthy cynicism towards authority was evident from his earliest years and he was frequently punished for pranks and answering back, as recalled by his school friend, John Dollar (47-54).
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