N O. 1 2 1 T H E T R U S T Y S E R VA N T
Peter Ellyatt Cattermole
Dr Andrew Wolters fondly remembers:
Dr Peter Cattermole was born on 14th February, 1950 in King’ s College Hospital, London. His unique and special qualities must have already been recognised, for he was delivered by the Queen’ s gynaecologist.
He went to Canford and then to Exeter University, where he met Ann. After university he moved straightaway into teaching, first for two years at Millfield before moving to Winchester in 1976, where he soon became Head of Chemistry. You could not wish for a better leader than Peter. He ran the Chemistry and later the whole Science Department from the front and absolutely superbly. His teaching too was masterful and legendary. His pupils revered him. He was a truly great communicator. He was, perhaps, even more in his element with his chemistry demonstrations, which he presented with great élan and flamboyance – he well recognised that the best teaching was the right balance of education and showmanship. Peter told me that the greatest sin in teaching was to be boring.‘ Never bore the boys,’ he exhorted. He never did – every word was considered, beautifully delivered, gold dust. As Head of Department he cared about everything and everyone. He nurtured and protected the fabric of the building and the people in it as if it were all an extension of his very body. Our problems were his problems. And he solved them.
Did he have faults? We are all flawed, are we not? Peter was a seeker of perfection. Is that a fault? If, in the search for perfection he could occasionally display a touch of irascibility, if he was not averse to a little contretemps, one thing was certain: as soon as the cause of the imperfection had been remedied then all became swiftly well once more and the smile and twinkle rapidly returned. In fact he loved to laugh and his grin positively lit his whole face.
Peter simply liked things to be right and he made sure they were right. Paradoxically, given this preference, his complexity was such that I sometimes thought he was at his happiest when things went wrong. One day he was demonstrating to a class the reaction between phosphorus and oxygen and he dropped a fairly large chunk of phosphorus, which, as luck would have it, fell down a hole in the bench which led to a waste trap and thence to the drain. The waste trap, presumably where the phosphorus now lay, was well below floor level. Peter knew that as long as the phosphorus was wet it was safe but if it dried out it would ignite.‘ Right. Everybody out. The laboratory is closed.’ Peter himself left and reappeared ten minutes later in his boiler suit and carrying a good assortment of tools. I said,
With the Duke of Edinburgh, May 1982
‘ Peter, is this not a job for the Maintenance Department?’‘ Maintenance Department? Absolutely not. This is a job for me.’ Up came the vinyl flooring, up came the floorboards, down went Peter into the abyss, clang went the pipes as they were merrily dismantled and I rather fancied I heard Peter singing: a man absolutely in his comfort zone. The phosphorus was duly extracted and the lab returned to normal.
The resolution of the paradox is clear. It was not perfection itself that Peter enjoyed; it was the solving of the problems en route to perfection. And he was a solver of problems par excellence and, apart for his tireless work in the Science Department, he put this trait to particularly good use when it came to helping the boys with their university and career plans – they flocked to him and he loved sorting out the tricky minutiae associated with the dreaded UCAS or Oxbridge application forms. Needless to say, he was equally brilliant on various committees, whether academic or otherwise. He was an indefatigable Chairman of the Salaries Committee( what a man to have on a young don’ s side in this, let’ s be honest, rather vital matter!).
In the late 1980s Peter oversaw the rebuilding of a large section of Science School. He played a major role in the specifications and ideally would have carried out all the work himself. That of course he could not he found at times a little irksome and certainly tiring. After its completion he took a well-deserved sabbatical. Then, after another decade of continued superb leadership, he took an even more well-deserved two-term sabbatical, during which he came to the conclusion that it would be a good time to move on to new ventures.
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