FORMER STAFF OBITUARIES
BILL GRAY 1948-2024
‘ Rock solid, utterly reliable, someone you’ d want on your side.’ Bill Gray was all of that and so much more: cricketer, footballer, Physics teacher, tutor. Not one to blow his own trumpet, his quiet, powerful personality made him a linchpin of the Common Room, a fine teacher and a trusted and respected friend of colleagues and pupils.
Jim was appointed IC Tutor in 1988 and struck up a good partnership with Housemaster Peter Winter and his wife Adwoa. He subsequently became a supportive Assistant Housemaster to Steve Connors who joined the IC in 1993. Jim was an amusing, intelligent man with wide cultural interests and enjoyed long, interesting discussions late into the night. He was also a quiet maverick, instinctively averse to authority, and liked to steer his own path on a number of issues. There was something undeniably cool about him and he garnered respect. Amongst many IC boys he was extremely popular and elevated to legend status, doubtless in part because of his non-conformist streak.
Jim was a private man and gave little away but enjoyed the company of his dog and driving his VW campervan to the West Country on weekends off to stay in his house in Crewkerne.
Jim always remained slightly mysterious and didn’ t like to stop too long in any one place. In 1997, he took a teaching job in Cairo, later moving to a house in Luxor where he could watch the feluccas on the Nile. Jim enjoyed the life he created for himself in his beloved Egypt and it was there that he died of brain cancer in 2022.
Jim was a good man and a congenial colleague. May he rest in peace.
Peter Winter, Steve Connors and Roger Woodward
Bill joined Sevenoaks in 1971 from Oxford, after a year in Uganda. In the classroom he was thorough and clear, equally at home with Oxbridge teaching as with Junior Combined Science. Old Sennockians will remember well his catchphrases which, as so often with well-liked teachers, were mimicked good naturedly. The same calm steadiness made him an excellent pastoral tutor and then Divisional Head of the Middle School. That steadiness was most needed and appreciated when he took over Johnsons for a term at short notice when help was required. I too owe him much for the help he gave us in running the stimulating madhouse that was the IC in the 1970s.
Always an excellent player and coach, Bill demanded much of his teams: a member of his soccer 1st XI recalls running up and down the steep sides of Duke’ s Meadow until he was ready to drop – or as Bill would have put it,‘ reached peak fitness’. Such was the success of football at the time that it threatened to rival rugby as the premier ascendant sport. It was, however, on the cricket field that he excelled: a prolific and obdurate opening batsman, he was limpet-like at the crease, a big man who hit the ball with considerable power and was captain of the Vine.
At Sevenoaks, then still a bachelor, he helped lead a memorable 6000-mile expedition to Scandinavia( remembered with great fondness in the 2023 Sennockian by Guy Hollamby). A colleague remembers him as indeed‘ someone you’ d want at your side’. When a thunderstorm outside Rheims split their tent roof, Bill calmly went and bought a new one the next morning. Bill also sang and his pleasure in choral music led him to his lifelong partner, Alison.
138 ALUMNI