12/2/2013
Godfrey Clark O.D.(48-54)
Extract from the Register
Clark.Godfrey William: b.27/07/35,S.of G,G,Clark L.D.S(Dunelm),50 Walker Terrace, Bensham Road,Gateshead. P.H. Father of C.Clark O.D.
Basketball VIII 1953/4,Cricket XI 1953/4. left Summer 1954,VIIB.
King's College, Durham Univ. Diploma in Economics.
Managing Dirsctor District Estates.
KIng's College,Univ.of Durham Cricket XI. Full Royal for Cricket 1959, R.A.F. (National Service)
Vice Pres. Gosforth Rugby Club, Chairman Gatesheaf Fell Cricket Club.

I saw Godfrey on many occasions at School when he supported the cricket. (His son Chris was a highly accomplished player). Also at rugby matches at School and
Newcastle.
A very keen sportsman he became involved in managing student games.

3/9/2012
Donald William Limon
b 29/10/1932 Son of A.Limon, 50 Belmont Lane, West Hartlepool.
C. Mon. Head of House. Greek Prose, English Essay, Ancient History, Bunbury and Music Prizes in 1949 and 1950. Music Society (baritone soloist). Dramatic Society. Sec;Debating Society. left Christmas 1950 UV1. Lincoln Coll. Oxford B.A. Hons. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 1956. M.A. 1960.
House of Commons as Asst. Clerk 1956, Sen. Clerk 1960. Dep. Principal Clerk 1972.
Sec. to the House of Commons Commission, 1978, Clerk of Financial Committees, 1989 to date.
Served with 29th Infantry Brigade in Korea, 1952-53. Asst. Editor Erskine Mays Parliamentary Practice (18th & 21st Editions). Pres. Churt Cricket Club, 1989 to date.
C.B. 1993, K.C.B. 1997.
died 26 July 2012.
Obituaries published in the Telegraph and Independent.

Derek Best Memorial Service

Obituaries

4/8/2011

Boothie's Final over.

Cricket in the western suburbs has lost one of its greatest and best loved servants with the recent death of former Claremont-Nedlands coach Ron Booth.
Boothie as he was universally known coached Claremont to its first WACA A grade premiership and club championship in 1990.
He played for University,Claremont, Cottesloe and Swanbourne with distinction as a crafty medium pace bowler.
When he retired from work he became a groundsman and curator- a role he performed with skill at Cresswell Park in Swanbourne, Pat Goodridge Reserve in Floreat until ill health finally defeated him.
As great a player and curator he was his true genius was coaching. He loved cricket with a passion and had a deep knowledge of all aspects of the game.
Coaching players young or inexperienced, good or bad came naturally to him.
Every player was important in Boothie's eyes. No one was hopeless. Anyone could improve , provided thet were prepared to work hard at their technique and practise like they were playing.
He was so good at it that at the age of 64 and then for the next 14 seasons he spent the Australian winter in England at the prestigious Durham School and at Brandon Cricket Club.
It was impossible not to like Boothie. He was always positive, humorous and enthusiastic. He liked to talk - but luckily for the listener he was a good talker.
He believed in and played by the traditional values of cricket.
He was a wonderful father of four children, a wicked ballroom dancer and a passionate but misguided supporter of Claremont Football Club.
It was fitting that his funeral was in the open air at Creswell Park, Claremont-Nedlands home ground. The outfield was as he would have wanted it, in immaculate condition.
Cricketing greats Graham Mckenzie, John Inverarity, Laurie Mayne, Ross Edawards and Ian Brayshaw all called Cresswell Park home but none of them pulled as big a crowd as the one that came to farewell Boothie.

The above was written by Robert Mazza and provided by Mike Hirsch his long time friend and colleague.

23/3/2011

Versatile actor on stage and screen who achieved international celebrity at 72 as Batman’s butler, Alfred

Tall, lean and with prominent eyebrows, Michael Gough was a prolific and highly respected stage and screen actor who achieved international recognition only in his 72nd year with his performance as the butler Alfred Pennyworth in the film Batman.
In the preceding 50 years he had become a familiar face, if not name, through a surprisingly varied canon of work that took in everything from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio to Suez (1979), lan Curteis’s three-hour TV dramatisation of the Suez crisis in which, unusually, he took a starring role as an understated Anthony Eden opposite Robert Stephens’s hammy Nasser.  The critic Herbert Kretzmer said Gough had been "stunningly well cast" and provided "a richly layered portrait". Sir Anthony Nutting, Eden’s ,Minister of State at the Foreign Office, drily observed: "Michael Gough acting Eden has made a much better case for Suez than Eden ever made for himself.”
He also memorably portrayed Livingstone in the epic 1971 television series The Search for the Nile.
Michael Gough was born to British parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, in 1917. He attended Rose Hill School, Tunbridge Wells, Durham School, and, initially fancying a career in farming, Wye Agricultural College. But having enjoyed some success in school stage productions, he later plumped for acting, enrolling at the Webber-Douglas drama school and then, in 1936, the Old Vic School. He made his stage debut at the Old Vic that year and played small parts during the 1936-37 season.
He made his first appearance on the New York stage in 1937 as Philip Vesey in Love of Women, but it was not until 1948 that he first attracted attention as Hugo, the reluctant murderer, in George More O’Ferrall’s play Crime Passionel at the Lyric Hammersmith, and subsequently the Garrick. He demonstrated his versatility as Laertes to Alec Guinness’s Hamlet (New Theatre, 1951), Nicky Lancaster in Coward’s The Vortex (Criterion, 1952) and Duddard in lonesco’s Rhinoceros, starring Laurence Olivier and directed by Orson Welles (Strand Theatre, 1960). He was Pastor Manders opposite Wendy Hiller’s Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in 1972, and two years later took the title role in King Lear (Belgrade, Coventry), which he regarded as his favourite part.
During the 1970s he was in several productions at the National Theatre, notably the premiere of Alan Ayckborn’s barbed suburban comedy Bedroom Farce, which transferred to Broadway and won Gough a Tony award. He supported Rex Harrison in Frederick Lonsdale’s Aren’t We All? at the Haymarket (1984), and at the same theatre appeared in drag as Baron von Epp in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me.
In a third visit to the Haymarket in 1986 he played Dillwyn Knox, boss of the computer pioneer Alan Turing (Derek Jacobi), in Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code. He repeated the performance in Washington and in New York, where he was nominated for a Tony, He was Firs in The Cherry Orchard, directed by the 24-year-old Sam Mendes (Aldwych, 1989).
His film career started promisingly in 1948 with the Victorian melodrama Blanche Fury, in which he played Valerie Hobson’s husband, and three years later he was the mill owner engaged to Joan Greenwood in the Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit. He played Dighton in Olivier’s Richard III (1955) but he was soon reduced to appearing in what he called GTMAR (get the money and run) productions.
The problem was that his sexually repressed Arthur Holmwood in Hammer’s landmark 1958 film Dracula led to him being typecast in a series of lurid low-budget shockers such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Horrors of the Black Museum and Konga. In the last of these he played the creator of a giant gorilla who had to exclaim, when the creature held him over its shoulders: "Put me down, Konga". He declared: "lt was one of my great lines." He professed himself content to be a mere ‘jobbing actor" and he once admonished a young actor: "You do not complain about bad material. You make the best of it." Not that the material was always poor. He was in Ken Russell’s Women in Love and Savage Messiah and Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, and he relished the chance to appear with Olivier again in The Boys from Brazil and played Lord Delamere in Out of Africa. On television he played Dr Grant in the serialised adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.
For Derek Jarman he was Cardinal Del Monte in Caravaggio and Bertrand Russell in Wittgenstein and in 1993 he was directed by Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence. But it was his comparatively minor and somewhat anaemic part of Alfred Pennyworth in Batman (l989) and its three sequels that brought him his first taste of international fame. Tim Burton, the director who initiated the cycle of Batman films, had personally cast him since he had been an avid fan of his old horror films. The project appealed to Gough since he had been a close friend of the English actor Alan Napier who had played Alfred in the Batman series on television. Gough was, however, taken by surprise by the film’s success. He recalled travelling home on a bus shortly after the film opened when someone had poked him in the back and said: "You’re him, aren’t you?" Gough smiled indulgently and told the man he was indeed Peter Cushing, which appeared to placate him. He went on to have roles in two more Burton films, Sleepy Hollow and Corpse Bride.
A later television role that gave him much personal satisfaction was in Dennis Potter’s Blackeyes (1989). Denounced by critics as misogynistic and exploitative, it brought Potter some of his worst notices, but Gough’s portrayal of the disgusting old writer who had sexually abused his young niece was all too creepily credible.
Gough never took himself terribly seriously — "I’d rather sit and watch my knickers fly around inside the washing machine than myself on film", he once observed. But he was much loved and admired within the profession. One of his closest friends was Rex Harrison, with whom he had lodged for a time in Los Angeles. His wonderfully bohemian five-bedroom house near Wandsworth Common in South London, an eclectic mix of Paisley, plaid, batik, Indian mirror cloth and lace, attracted a steady stream of friends towards the end of his life. He also had a home in Fontmell Magna in Dorset where he indulged his passion for gardening.
It said everything about Gough’s professionalism that when his father died in l957 while he was rehearsing in Manchester for a television play he instructed the producer not to tell other members of the cast what had happened, and, without complaint, fulfilled all his obligations before flying to Ireland for the funeral.
Gough was married four times. His first wife was Diana Graves, the second Anne Leon, the third Anneke Wills and the fourth Henrietta Lawrence. All were actresses. He had four children, including a daughter who predeceased him in 1982.

Michael Gough, actor, was born on November 23,1917. He died on March 17, 2011, aged 93.

(by kind permission of The Times)

18/3/2011
Today's Times and Telegraph reported death of famous actor and Old Dunelmian Francis Michael Gough 31-35, aged 93. Born 23/11/1916 son of F.B. Gough O.D., Saringitt Estate, Semenyth, Selangor. F.M.S.School house left summer 1935. Mod. UV. Leading roles in Films and on Television including David Livingstone in the B.B.C's "The Search for the Nile" (1971) and Dennis Potter's " Black Eyes".

The above comes from the Durham School Register fifth edition.

Peter Tarn Bainbridge O.D. 1941-45
Born 8/8/1927 died 15/3/2010. Son of W.M.Bainbridge, Cleveland Avenue, Darlington.
Poole House brother of G.T., W.G.,and D.T. Bainbridge O.D.s.
Mon. Cambell Kerr Cup. Rowing 1st IV 1945. Rugby XV 1943-45. Capt. 1945.
Sgt.J.T.C. left Summer 1945, Mod.LV1 F.R.I.C.S.,F.A.A.V.
Partner Tarn Bainbridge, Chartered Surveyors and Auctioneers, Darlington.
Rhine Army XV 1947-48. Durham County XV1948-49, 1950-51.
Team Sec. Durham County R.F.U.1958-70. 2nd Royal Tank Regiment 1947-48 2nd Lieut.
Governor Mowden Hall School, Stocksfield.
Director Darlington Building Society. Trustee Sir. E.D.Walker homes, Darlington.
The above is from the Durham School Register.

Tributes to rugby club stalwart from the Northern Echo 15 March 2010.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Editor.

Darlington Rugby Club has honoured one of its greatest servants, Peter Bainbridge who died last week.
Mr. Bainbridge Club president from 1996-2000 died on Thursday aged 83.
The club held a minutes silence before its game with Morpeth on Saturday as a mark of respect for the former estate agent.
His friend of more than 70 years Frank Nelson, club treasurer, yesterday paid tribute to Mr. Bainbridge. "He was a very outgoing, mischievous man who was always willing for a party", he said. "He was a big rugby man. He was club captain for two years running, he was a county player and he also played for the British Army of the Rhine during his service. He was a good scrum half".
Mr Bainbridge who lived in Piercebridge had four children, Simon, Kate, Andrew and Michael. His wife Carol died 18 months ago.
His elder brother G.Tarn Bainbridge O.D.30-33, was President of the Rugby Football Union 1975-76.died.
David Tarn Bainbridge O.D. 39-43 died in 1966.
William Gibson Bainbridge O.D. 35-38.
William Tarn Bainbridge O.D. son of W.G.B.64-69.
I remember sitting with W.G.B. at a rugby dinner at School.
Peter Bainbridge had the remarkable knack of making you feel happy.
I had broken my neck playing rugby for Darlington R.F.C. and was languishing in the Memorial Hospital undergoing traction to separate the discs and he came to visit. He raised my spirits and gave me a copy of Reach for the Sky the story of Douglas Bader. I recall his kindness.
Peter came to watch School on the Playground and as we walked off he joked that if we had the ball that is now used we would all be internationals. Perhaps in his case.
Frank Nelson who gave the interview to the Northern Echo is an O.D. 44-47.

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