John Wood (FS 32-37) died on 3rd January 2013:

John was born in 1915, the first son of farmers William and Constance Wood. Having been sent for schooling in Lincolnshire and Sussex, he entered St Bees as a boarder in 1932 on Foundation South, from where he proceeded to read Chemistry at Merton College, Oxford in 1937. A talented and keen sportsman as well as a gifted academic, he played rugby and cricket for his college, while also representing the university at chess and bridge. At the outbreak of the second world war, he was called up as a second lieutenant in the Cheshire Regiment as a machine gunner, but he soon transferred to the Leicestershire Regiment and went off to fight in Belgium. As part of the Allied evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940, he spent eighteen precarious hours getting his company off the beach and on to destroyers while under constant air attack. The conflict then took him to Sierra Leone before he ended up in Burma in 1944 fighting the Japanese.

After the war his careers reflected the character of a man who was never afraid to try something different. He farmed from 1946 to 1952 and then became landlord of a pub for two years before starting a teaching career in 1954 as assistant lecturer at Leicester College of Science and Technology. By now he was the father of three sons, of whom the eldest says: ‘He was always head of the family and involved in country life, but never deviated from his passion of playing cricket at Egerton Park. We have lots of memories of a hard-working, very intelligent man, whose determination was astonishing.’

Later John became headmaster of a mixed Greek and Turkish secondary school in Cyprus; he also began his fifty three year marriage to his second wife Joyce while on that island. But as tensions grew between the two communities, the position of British citizens became difficult, and following a thinly disguised death-threat, John and his wife returned to Melton in 1959 where he joined the staff of the King Edward VII Grammar School, to become known as a strict, but charismatic teacher of mathematics. In 1963 he moved to St Edmund’s College and remained there for the rest of his career, becoming head of maths, master in charge of sport, and careers master, before his retirement in 1984.

As well as being a stalwart of Egerton Park C.C., he was also a keen student of the turf and became horse racing correspondent for the Hertfordshire Mercury in 1967. Two years later his talent for bridge earned him an invitation to participate in a national tournament, which also featured Omar Sharif!

John lived a very full life and will be sadly missed by his family and long remembered by many people.

 

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