Rhubarb 2017

30 ST EDWARD’S r h u b a r b

OSE Obituaries

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

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

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

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

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