Jon Carlisle writes: I remember Derek Johnson (obituary, September 9) coming to Bryanston in about 1958 to open our new grass running track. An 880-yards race was staged in which he took on a relay team comprising three of the best sprinters in the school. I think the boys just got the better of him but it was close.
He was an inspirational, god-like figure to us 14-year-olds, and we were all alongside him in Melbourne later that year as he vainly fought down the finishing straight to hold off the giant American, Courtney, in that thrilling Olympic final.
Advertisement
Dr James Briggs writes: I was at school with Derek Johnson in 1944-51. For three of our first four years we were in the soame class at East Ham Grammar School. Not only was he an outstanding athlete, but he was also highly intelligent. In a class of very bright boys he was in the first three at the end of each term. Some of his contemporaries went on to excel in medicine, local government and academia — not bad for a school where many of our parents only managed to scrape along.
Margot Strickland writes: The sub-heading of your otherwise excellent obituary of Peter Posnette, (obituary, September 1), stating that he “helped make chocolate affordable” is insulting to Peter and the cosmopolitan (Polish, Swiss, South African, Scottish) team of agricultural scientists and their families at Tafo in Ghana. During the postwar years when food rationing was still in force in England, the nation was semi-starved and exhausted. It had early been realised that the chocolate/cocoa industry was a valuable source of nutrition in danger of being destroyed by the virus swollen-shoot. “Making chocolate affordable” became a secondary consideration and it is ironic that when the virus was conquered, in order to maintain price-levels harvests were dumped in the ocean.
Advertisement
Peter Posnette was a strikingly beautiful man of great gentleness and charm whose rapport with all nature was moving to all who came in contact with him: he was followed about his beautiful Kent home by a duckling he had hand-reared. His wife, Bunny (Isabelle), was a gifted artist who was presented at Court, and was munificently hospitable in the American way.
Jerome Ravetz writes: Might I offer two anecdotes from Sidney Morgenbesser’s (obituary, September 8) Swarthmore period in the late 1940s? The first concerns a lecture by A. J. Ayer, then on his American tour. He advanced his absolute distinction between assertions of fact and of value; and during question time dispatched all critics with cold cruelty. We students, packed into the Friends’ Meeting House on campus, were dismayed to see our leading scholars so humiliated. Then Sid rose, and launched a long question that seemed Talmudic in style, but sprinkled with logical terminology. There was silence, and Ayer had no answer. Afterwards we rushed up to our champion and asked him how he did it. He said that the question was technical in form, but in essence reduced to the following: “You’ve described how Aristotle, Kant and all the others got it wrong. How come you’re so smart and they’re all so dumb?” Once when I visited him in New York, he told me with delight of an incident in a baseball game played by some Hasidic boys. It seems that when one was sliding into home base, another touched him with the ball and called, “You’re out!” The runner protested that he had not felt the ball; and the other explained that he had touched him on his long side-lock of hair. Immediately both teams downed tools and engaged in a heated discussion of whether, in the light of the Talmud and the laws of baseball, the sidelocks constitute apart of the body.
Advertisement
Elizabeth Alliston writes: I should like to add a personal memory of Lord Richardson (obituary, August 27). I was his secretary for a few years in the 1950s. During this time I had two very minor medical problems. Lord Richardson was quick to spot these and arrange for investigations with great kindness, which I have remembered gratefully.
If you would like to add a personal view or recollection to a published obituary, you can send your contribution by post to Times Obituaries, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT; by fax to 020-7782 5870; or by e-mail to tributes@thetimes.co.uk