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V A L E T E
O B I T U A R I E S
AUSTIN – On 26th September
2016, John Austin (F, 1942-
1946). John became a Chartered
Accountant in 1952, working for
Commercial Union Investment
Management from 1952 to 1968,
before becoming a Stockbroker
in 1968. He retired in 1985.
BARKER – On 13th May 2016,
Rev Peter Barker (E, 1942-
1946). The following obituary
has kindly been provided by
Mrs Barker:
A musician, a historian, a
journalist, an author, a publisher,
a linguist, an ethnographer;
Peter Barker was all of these
as well as an ordained minister
for 53 years, of which the
first two decades were with
the Presbyterian Church of
Ghana and the last three with
the United Reform Church.
At the Service of Thanksgiving
for his life, his friends spoke
of his enthusiasm, energy and
drive, not least in promoting
evangelism in Ghana, in
reaching out to troubled
teenagers in Derbyshire and
Nottinghamshire, in inspiring
and bringing people to share his
love of God, and in the enduring
impact he made on people,
projects and places.
Born in Feltham in 1928,
Peter was a chorister in
Winchester Cathedral and
completed his schooling in
Oxford. National Service
then sent him to East Africa,
where broadcasts from Nairobi
Cathedral led him to give his life
to the Lord’s work. He returned
to the UK, read History at
the University of Oxford, and
trained as a journalist. New
Nation magazine in Ghana
provided his first job, and he
then taught in a secondary
school until he felt the call to
preach the gospel full-time.
He studied in London and
Ghana and was ordained by
the Presbyterian Church of
Ghana in 1963, the same year
that he married Laura. He
ministered to a congregation in
Accra for three years and then
worked for the Ghana Christian
Council, founding the Asempa
Publishing house in 1968.
Much of Asempa’s output of
pamphlets, leaflets and books
were written or edited by Peter
himself.
In 1985 Peter and his family,
by then including Andrew and
Helen, returned to the UK
where Peter served for four
URC congregations in the East
Midlands. Peter threw himself
into preaching, teaching and
evangelism, bringing many
people to know the Lord. He
preached everywhere – at the
bus stop, in shops, on trains –
and having been accustomed to
travelling Ghana on two wheels
saw no reason not to tour his
parishes on his trusty moped.
In 1996, Peter, having already
reached retirement age, moved
to Cheam, serving as Assistant
Minister at St Andrew’s URC,
and continuing to lead Bible
study groups and inspire a
new community with his
enthusiasm and extraordinary
breadth of knowledge. In his
70th year he walked from
Cheam to Canterbury to raise
money for the church to hire a
youth worker and later hiked
the stretch from Winchester
to Cheam to complete the
Pilgrims’ Way. He continued
to write, making yearly trips
to write the story of Scripture
Union Ghana, Changed by the
Word, and to continue research
into the people of northern
Ghana.
A man of God, an apostle,
a wise mentor and tireless
evangelist: Peter Barker was
all of these and more. He
left us to be with his maker
in May 2016, survived by his
ever-supportive wife Laura,
their two children, and by the
thousands of people he met
and inspired in two continents.
BERGER – On 2nd January
2017, John Berger (A, 1940-
1943). The following obituary
has been taken from The New
York Times:
John Berger, the British
critic, novelist and screenwriter
whose ground-breaking 1972
television series and book,
Ways of Seeing, declared war
on traditional ways of thinking
about art and influenced a
generation of artists and
teachers, died at his home in
the Paris suburb of Antony.
He was 90.
As the host of Ways of
Seeing, Mr Berger was a public
intellectual who became a
countercultural celebrity in
1970s Britain, where the BBC
kept the four-part series in
frequent rotation. The book
became an art-school standard
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mr Berger’s intention was to
upend what he saw as centuries
of elitist critical tradition that
evaluated artworks mostly
formally, ignoring their social
and political context, and the
series came to be seen as an
assault on the historian Kenneth
Clark’s lofty Civilisation .
Among many other subjects,
Mr Berger burrowed into
the sexism underpinning the
tradition of the nude; the place
of high art in an image-saturated
modern world; the relationship
between art and advertising;
and, of particular importance
to him as a voice of the British
New Left, the way traditional oil
painting celebrated wealth and
materialism.
In academic circles the book
became, as one art historian
described it, the equivalent
of Mao’s Little Red Book, and
OSE Obituaries
it went on to sell more than a
million copies, never going out
of print. Mr Berger’s methods,
influenced by the ideas of
Walter Benjamin, tended to
attract either ardent admiration
or seething criticism, with little
in between.
John Peter Berger was
born in London on 5th
November 1926, and raised
in only moderate comfort,
with little high culture, in what
he described as a working-
class home. He studied at St
Edward’s School, then Chelsea
School of Art, now Chelsea
College of Arts, after a stint in
the Army.
Mr Berger wanted to be a
painter but found that he was
much better at writing. For a
decade he was an art critic for
The New Statesman, where he
made a name for himself by
antagonizing nearly everyone in
the art world in prose that was
beautifully spare and precise
but heavily moralizing and
also frequently humourless.
He was a champion of realism
during the rise of Abstract
Expressionism, and he took
on giants like Jackson Pollock,
whom he criticized as a
talented failure for being unable
to “see or think beyond the
decadence of the culture to
which he belongs”. But his love
for favourite artists - among
them Rembrandt, Velázquez,
van Gogh and Frida Kahlo - was
expressed with a fervour and
depth of intelligence matched
by few critics of his generation.
The year 1972 was Mr
Berger’s most prolific, with Ways
of Seeing and the publication
of his most critically acclaimed
novel, G., about the political
awakening of a Lothario in
pre-World War I Europe, which
was awarded the Booker Prize.
(Characteristically, Mr Berger
criticized the company that