Gale, Charles

OT 276 - East

Date of Death: 22/12/2009

Extracts from The Gazette 51.

Peter Gale, passed away after a six-month fight in hospital with cancer of the lower spine. Peter was a memorable character at Ottershaw, playing significant roles in swimming and rugby teams and acting as School Captain. His passion for classical music was well known. He left school in 1958 and, after a short spell in the RAF, found his niche as a science teacher, an occupation he pursued in Yorkshire, East Africa and New Zealand, where he died.

His friends will remember long, sociable evenings spent with him, listening to music and generally sorting out world problems with a glass in hand. He leaves behind Jo, his wife, and two sons, Anthony and James.
Jim Gale (Peter’s brother)

 

Some memories of Peter Gale  – a lifelong friend by David Nokes, OT 282, West House 1952-58

Peter and I met and became friends as a result of being in the swimming team, he a breaststroker, I a backstroker, starting as under-14s and progressing on throughout our time at Ottershaw, always being members of the medley relay foursome. We progressed together up the Royal Life Saving Society Awards, both ending up with the Award of Merit. We swiftly discovered several other burgeoning shared interests, classical music and Goon humour being the most significant.

Peter’s mother, a wonderful lady, very kindly used to invite me for part of the school holidays to Ivy Cottage in Ewhurst, where Peter and I would try to help tame the ever unruly garden between cycling expeditions in the pretty and hilly
environs of rural Surrey. Ivy Cottage was deeply civilised, having lots of books, some of them from the Folio Society, of which I have been a member for almost fifty years as a direct result, and a great many 78 r.p.m. classical records, including a boxed set of The Rite of Spring on which we became hooked.

Peter’s father was a figure of mystery, usually abroad in Iraq or Kuwait working in the oil industry. During some vacations, Peter flew out to the Middle East and would return full of stories of desert adventures and the eccentric doings
of the polyglot expat circle of pals and colleagues of his father.

As we became sixth-formers and praefects, Peter and his pals Minett (317) and Jones (311) would often visit our West House Common Room, where they found a more relaxing ambience in which to consume “slizens” of toast, play
classical music and have “deep” conversations. Jake Buttery memorably termed them the “refugees” and seemed quite pleased to have them, probably because he could tease the rival East and North housemasters. Peter became a keen member of the Air Training Corps, won a Flying Scholarship and was taught to fly at Fairoaks in Chipmunks at the RAF’s expense. He became adept at wheedling buildings and equipment out of the RAF. His greatest triumph was to have delivered and installed a very substantial wooden hut, fully furnished and with several rooms, much bigger than Mr Hall’s nearby geography log cabin. He even persuaded a gullible quartermaster of the necessity of equipping it with a snooker table, a dartboard and capacious armchairs “officers for the use of”.

After school, Peter joined the RAF but was bitterly disappointed at failing to qualify as a pilot for some obscure and minor deficiency of the inner ear. Although offered training as a navigator, he left the service and took digs in London near Olympia and employment with a Nigerian import-export business connected in some way with groundnuts. I was living in West London, and we used to go to the Festival Hall and Promenade concerts together. Driven from his Olympia digs by lack of sleep arising from the nocturnal activities of an unfortunate female he termed ‘Miss Bladder Freak 1959’ who used to visit and flush the adjacent loo at half hourly intervals, he moved to Dalston and shared a flat with Bill Minett before deciding to train as a teacher at what was then Trent Teachers Training College in Nottingham, where I was resident on the other side of the river at the University. We overlapped for a year, during which there were many hilarious evenings, mostly spent in pubs as we neglected our studies.

After College, Peter taught at Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School, where he was initially resident in a caravan in the garden of a colleague. Arriving on a visit late one night, I found him deeply immersed in one of the Teach Yourself books, in this case Swahili, as he had decided to go for a teaching post in East Africa, whither he duly departed some time later with his new wife, Jo. There followed a period of four decades when we both had families and Peter remained abroad, ending up in New Zealand. We kept in touch, but it was not until we were both in our sixties that we met again when he visited the UK, and we took up where we had left off forty years previously.

A couple of years later, on another visit, he persuaded me to organise a pub and culture crawl of the UK based on a wonderful book he had sent me called English Country Pubs. We accomplished this in two separate weeks, basing ourselves first with David and Mary Howell near Exeter and then with his brother Jim and his wife Rowena near Leominster, all exemplary hosts, visiting some twenty high-quality pubs, several cathedrals, churches and County Towns and the Elgar Museum near Worcester. Peter Jones joined us on both weeks, and it was a truly memorable experience. Peter had hoped to continue these jaunts on a later visit, but his deteriorating health sadly precluded this ambition. I shall miss him, but not forget him or the many marvellous times we shared.