For The Record No. 18 Autumn 2013

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The OKS Association FOR THE RECORD AUTUMN 2013 No. 18 NEWS OF OKS Richard Murphy (MO 1941-42) has sent a copy of The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012 to the School Library. The volume includes some recent poems, and commentary on the background to several of his best known works. Adrian O’Sullivan (WL 1954-58) was awarded his DLitt et Phil in History by the University of South Africa (UNISA) in April. His thesis was on German covert initiatives and Allied security measures in Persia (Iran) during the Second World War. By 1941, the espionage activity and subversive potential of the large German expatriate community in Persia had become unacceptable to the British and Soviets, leading them to invade and occupy the country in August of that year. When the Sixth Army was defeated at Stalingrad and Army Group South retreated from the Caucasus, planners in Berlin concentrated on sabotaging the landlease supply route across Persia, though unsuccessfully. (A fuller account appears on the OKS website, Members’ News). James Hamilton-Paterson (WL 1955-61) has published a novel, Under the Radar, drawing on his very considerable knowledge of post-War aeronautics. It can be seen as a fictional counterpart to the wellreceived Empire of the Clouds. Christopher Seaman (MR 195560), one of the most distinguished

OKS musicians from Edred Wright’s years, has published a reflective book, Inside Conducting. He is well-qualified to do so as in his time he has been Conductor of the BBC Scottish Orchestra (1971-77), of the Northern Sinfonia, Utrecht Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Conductor in Residence), Music Director of the Naples (Florida) Philharmonic and Rochester (New York) Philharmonic Orchestras. More recently, he has become renowned for his teaching at the Guildhall School of Music. In short chapters, the author offers plain, practical advice: “A tighter grip of the baton produces a harder tone”; when conducting For unto Us a Child is born, don’t let the sopranos look glum: “If I ask them to look like happy midwives, their sound brightens immediately”. Richard Halsey (GL 1956-62) has conducted the Occasional Singers of St. Mary’s, Merton since 2009, and their concert in the church on 27 April was attended by the Deputy Mayor of Merton and the MP for Wimbledon as well as a packed audience, a sign of how well regarded they are locally. Richard likes to describe himself as a Heineken musician, refreshing and performing remoter parts of the repertoire – and on this occasion it was St. Mary’s curate Kat CampionSpall (MT 1995-97) who sang the soprano solo in O May I Join the Choir Invisible by Cyril Rootham (18751938), a setting of a George Eliot 1

poem which features “glorious, sweeping melodies, backed by often simple harmony”. Richard is always conscious of his debt to musicians in Canterbury – Tony Curry, Sidney Campbell, Allan Wicks, Ronald Smith, Edred Wright – and in watching the Enthronement on TV found “its musical summit the singing of Psalm 8 to that rare Walter Parratt chant, with supremely beautiful phrasing”. Michael Morpurgo (GL 1957-62) is focusing on the football match played between British and German soldiers in No Man’s Land during the brief Christmas Day truce of 1914. An abridged version of the play will be performed on the battlefield at Ypres on the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. Sir Brian Pomeroy (LX 1957-62) was the Senior Partner of Deloitte Consulting until 1999 when he took up a number of public, private and voluntary sector appointments. He is a director and Deputy Chairman of QBE Insurance Europe Ltd, a Board Member of the Social Market Foundation, and Chairman of the Photographers’ Gallery; and he is a non-executive Board Member of the Financial Conduct Authority. Sebastian Barker (WL 1958-63) attended a recitation of his poem Damnatio Memoriae: Erased from Memory in the Cathedral Crypt on Sunday evening, 15 September. The work is ‘A Poem in Six Movements Scored for Many Voices’, and the reading was interspersed with music from the


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