Correspondence

Horatio Georgestone was one of the first intake of Kingsford Scholars at the college graduating in 2009.  As a pupil, he quickly made his mark on the school community and quickly made many friends.  But how has he spent his gap year and has he kept up the pace for which he became known?

When I think about my walk to work each morning - negotiating the daily hazards of speeding tuk tuks, fierce geese, falling mangos and a decidedly rickety rope bridge - it’s hard to believe that most of the time I do forget that I am in Guatemala. I have only been living in the quiet town of San Agustín, Acasaguastlán for five months, but already it feels like my second home.

I am sorry to have to report the death here on the Isle of Wight on 28 October of Col David Travers Worsley Gibson (ex staff). I had seen DTWG intermittently, socially, over the years, and can vouch for the fact that he remained remarkably alert and interested until very near the end of his 92 years. He taught physics and ran the RN section of the CCF at the College. I have always been conscious of his personal influence, for he inadvertently curtailed my early ambitions to join the Royal Navy, and subsequently his one-to-one physics tuition in the final Oxbridge entrance term propelled me into Cambridge to read medicine instead.

You may be interested to know that I have done an interview for the BBC's "The One Show" and I am told it will be broadcast on September 13 on their 7.00pm show.

The broadcast is to mark the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the CITY OF BENARES on 17 September 1940. Apart from the BBC I think The Daily Telegraph and the BBC 'South Today' may have some accounts. The sinking of the CITY OF BENARES was probably the worse disaster concerning children at sea. I am very lucky to have survived. There is an excellent book about the event 'Miracles on the Water' by Tom Nagorski which is available from Amazon.com. You can read excerpts here.

I am writing to inform you that I will be stepping down as chairman of the Board of Governors of Brighton College at the end of this Michaelmas term. I will have been in office for thirteen years. During this period, it has been my great good fortune to see Brighton College rise, both in pupil numbers and in their achievements, to the position of one of the outstanding schools in the land.

John Gifford Stower (H. 1932-33), born September 15th 1916 in the Province of Jujuy, North of Argentina, came to the UK as a youngster in 1925, spending his first years at a small school in Worthing, before finishing his education at Brighton College via Sedbergh. Two years later, aged 20, he returned to Argentina to work in a sugar cane mill close to his place of birth.

Europe is now haunted by the spectre of debt. All European leaders quail before it. To exorcise the demon, they are putting their economies through the wringer.

John Maynard Keynes's generation of economists assumed that as people became more efficient at satisfying their wants, they would, and should as rational agents, work less and enjoy life more. Yet power relationships and the insatiability of human wants are such that we have maintained an ethic of acquisitiveness.

The Service of Remembrance at the College is essentially based around music and readings, including personal accounts of those whose lives were affected by war on and off the fighting fields. It is a demanding occasion for the College and Prep School Choirs and other musicians, but it is also an opportunity for deep reflection for the congregation which, as always, was made up of current pupils, parents, current and former staff and Old Brightonians. This year, the Chapel was bursting at the seams and it was fitting in this, the 60th anniversary of Armistice Day but also the 160th anniversary of the founding of Brighton College and Dr Seldon’s final term.