George Robson (FN 57-64) remembers the Reverend Geoffrey Moule. “For generation after generation whole school photographs featured a chaplain. For most of the 1950s until the early 1960s the school chaplain was the Reverend Geoffrey Moule.
Other than carrying out his duties as chaplain the Reverend taught Latin and Divinity. However, he was truly a passionate ornithologist and during his hours not on duty he was, whatever the weather, to be found with notebook and binoculars wandering about the Head or somewhere else in the locale in the hope of a ‘find’. The Reverend hit the national ornithologist headlines at one point in the mid fifties when he saw, photographed and reported a bird that had never been seen before in Britain. The name of this bird I do not recollect but I am sure a reader of this will oblige the Society by reporting its name. This led to over a week of the beach carparks being full and lots of twitchers replete with camera, binoculars notebook, sandwiches and flask ascending and descending the Head. In 1961 the Reverend gave up schoolmastering to take on a parish in the Midlands where a few years later I paid him a flying visit during which time I photographed him (see photo).
	On retirement and clearly driven by his happy memories of St Bees he bought a small cottage on the Rottington Road on the outskirts of St Bees where he could resume his birdwatching. The school persuaded him to refamiliarize himself with the chapel and so he occasionally led morning services. He lived to a great age (92) and on his death in 1996 his ashes were placed and marked in the Priory churchyard. It is worth adding that Horace Moule was descended from Handley Moule who was Bishop of Durham from 1901 to 1920.”

 

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St Bees School,    St Bees,    Cumbria,    CA27 0DS.

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