OBITUARIES
DEATHS AND OBITUARIES
DEATHS AND OBITUARIES
OBITUARIES
We regret to announce the passing of the
following OPs and we extend our sympathy to
their families and friends:
Norman Ogle Barnes (46-51) of Yapham,
Pocklington, 3 March 2017, aged 81.
Roger Broadhead (54-64) of Southwell,
Nottinghamshire, November 2016, aged 70.
Dr James Michael Butterfield Carr (44-
51), of Grimsby, 26 August 2017, aged 83.
Dr Philip Neil Cretney (34-43) of Blaby,
Leicestershire, 3 September 2016, aged 91.
Christopher William Fewson (61-70) of
Skirlaugh, 4 March 2016, aged 64.
David Henry French (43-52) of Hertford,
19 March 2017, aged 83.
Alan Vasey Grace (49-59), of Pickering,
6 December 2016, aged 75.
John Herbert Hughes (28-34), of York,
21 April 2017, aged 98.
Geoffrey William Kelly (48-56), of
Pocklington, 23 February 2017, aged 78.
Alan Kent (34-42), of Stourbridge, West
Midlands, 22 September 2015.
Tom L Moody (58-62), of Leicester,
14 January 2017, aged 72.
Denis Moor (41-46), of Pocklington,
18 August 2017, aged 88.
Dr Philip Neil Cretney (34-43) was a very good
rugby player and played in the school’s 1st XV. He was
also awarded his 2nd XI cricket colours. He was an
excellent swimmer and a fearless gymnast, becoming
team captain in both sports. After Pocklington, he
served in the army and was discharged after the war
as a CSM. He went to St Bartholomew’s Hospital,
London teaching hospital and qualified as a doctor
and after many years as a hospital doctor in York
later became a GP with his partner and brother Dr
Eric J Cretney (34-44).
(Eric Cretney, 34-44)
Pat (William Patchett) Nutt (40-46),
of Snaiton, Scarborough, 22 March 2017,
aged 87.
Albert William Richardson (42-49),
of Pocklington, 15 November 2016, aged 84.
John Edward J Richardson (34-39), of
Wetherby, 6 May 2017, aged 93.
Shawn J Russell (80-89), 11 June 2017,
aged 45.
Grahame Arthur Sutton (71-02, Former
Staff), of Pocklington, 26 September 2016,
aged 79.
Desmond (Des) Townsend (60-65),
of Beverley, 6 March 2017, aged 70.
Thomas Arthur Usher (45-50), of Rawcliffe,
Goole, 13 December 2016, aged 83.
John Wise (49-54), of Beverley, 1 June 2017,
aged 79.
Born in Bridlington on 30 May 1933, French was the
younger son of Harry, a police officer, and his wife,
Muriel (nee Frank). David’s brother, John, and his
mother were killed in 1941 when a German plane
dropped leftover bombs over Hull before heading
off over the North Sea. David went to Pocklington
School as a direct grant pupil, and thence, thanks to
a gifted classics teacher, to St Catharine’s College,
Cambridge, before completing a PhD in the mid-
‘60s on connections between the Aegean region and
Anatolia in the early bronze age.
Through survey work in Greece and Turkey aimed
at the identification and dating of prehistoric sites, he
rapidly established himself as one of the outstanding
field archaeologists of the region. He also excavated
widely in Greece, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and at Hacilar
and Gordion in Turkey; before undertaking between
1961 and 1970 the Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites
at Can Hasan in south central Turkey, designed as a
complement and in some respects a corrective to
the more famous British excavation of 1961‑65 of
Çatal Höyük, directed by his older colleague James
Mellaart.
Both scholars were tenacious field workers but
fundamentally different in their temperament
and intellectual approach. In sharp contrast to
Mellaart, French combined his brilliant skills of field
observation with an ascetic style of publication, in
which he rigorously distinguished between the
accurate and precise recording of primary data and
the articulation of interpretative hypotheses.
George Frederick Noel Pedley (34-38),
of Northampton, 6 October 2016, aged 95.
John Robert Rix (44-51), of Driffield,
3 August 2017, aged 82.
experience and an intimate knowledge of Turkey
to acquire a more profound understanding of the
topographical history of Anatolia – Asiatic Turkey –
than any other scholar past or present. His passion
for roads and routes extended from the Roman
empire back to its Hittite and Persian predecessors
and forward to the Ottoman period. At the start of
his project, about 450 milestones were known from
Asia Minor; by 2016, his discoveries had raised this
number to more than 1,200. The research, carried
out single-handed in the company of a series of
Turkish government representatives, was a perfect
match for his skills and character.
David French, right, with a Turkish government
representative taking a break on a Roman road in
eastern Turkey.
David Henry French (43-52) was a scholar,
archaeologist and former director of the British
Institute in Ankara. In the early 1970s, a short
article by a little-known US scholar reported
the discovery of an ancient road near the site of
Gordion, the capital city of the ancient kingdom of
Phrygia. This article, and his own chance encounter
on a family picnic with a batch of undocumented
Roman milestones next to a stretch of road west
of the modern Turkish capital, Ankara, inspired the
archaeologist David French, who died aged 83 on
19 March 2017, to start the project that occupied
him for the rest of his life. This was a comprehensive
study, based on fieldwork, which took him to
every corner of Turkey, of all aspects of the Roman
roads of Asia Minor: milestones, road surfaces,
bridges, the imperial road stations and military
installations.
He combined classical training with archaeological
He became director of the British Institute at Ankara
in 1968. In the same year, inspired by new theoretical
approaches that were emerging in Cambridge, he
began an interdisciplinary archaeological project
at Asvan, near Elaziğ, in eastern Turkey, involving
rescue excavations on four sites due to be flooded
by the Keban Dam lake and a comprehensive
environmental study of the threatened region that
placed special emphasis on archaeobotany.
The Asvan project finished in 1973, and was
followed during the 80s by another rescue
excavation on the west bank of the Euphrates at
Tille Höyük near Adıyaman. French’s exemplary
skills and high standards as an excavator attracted
younger archaeologists to work with him. They took
responsibility for publishing the rescue projects and
subsequently developed important careers of their
own in field archaeology.
After his retirement from the British Institute in 1994,
the scholarly emphasis of his life shifted from field
work to publication, although he continued active
research in Turkey until he was 80. The culmination
of his life’s work takes the form of 10 volumes in the
series Roman Roads and Milestones of Asia Minor,
his main published legacy produced in a phenomenal
burst of energy between 2012 and 2016.
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