John George Fryer (Cheltondale, 1942)

The following tribute has been provided by John’s daughter, Philippa Blois-Brooke.

John was brought up in Wargrave, the youngest of four children. His recollection of his school years was that he was no good at either lessons or sport. Aged 10 he contracted double bronchial pneumonia and, after some days in the home of the Junior School Headmaster and his wife, Mr & Mrs Johnston, was sent home where he spent the next 18 months in bed. The doctor put him on M&B, a forerunner of penicillin, and then a relatively untried drug which his parents were warned would probably cause him to grow up to be a weakling. The M&B worked and John grew to 6ft4, but he missed a lot of schooling. 

The Headmaster at Cheltenham College was persuaded to take John without a CE pass and he joined Cheltondale house in September 1938. He was very fond of his Housemaster, Ronnie Juckes, a 'very understanding and forgiving person.' John took up the trumpet, ending up as lead trumpeter in the College Army Cadet Force Band and the orchestra. He also loved Chapel and singing in the choir. 

John recalled how, when the young masters were called up at the start of the war and older teachers were brought out of retirement to replace them, they ended up with ‘some very funny teachers, such as the swimming master who could not swim!'’ Groundsmen were also in short supply, and John would help with the mowing of the playing fields and rolling the cricket pitch. The elderly master in charge of Engineering Drawing and the workshop taught him everything he ever learnt on the subject, and he also learnt to make parts in the machine-shop, to keep the College equipment in running order. He enjoyed the carpentry shop where he began a lifetime of making furniture, shelves and so on. 

Having scraped through the School Certificate at the second attempt, John was moved with three others into Remove where he was taught by Percy Fletcher, the Deputy Head. He was the first person who related academic learning to practical life, and maths suddenly became interesting. Next came a place as a Government Engineering Student, and John believed that the folder of drawings that the College engineering master had helped him make up went a long way to getting him past the interview board.

He enlisted in the regular army in 1944, having been accepted into the 60th Rifles despite his dreadful eyesight. He was part of a team that supervised the transport of thousands of German prisoners of war back home after the Allied victory. He was made adjutant, he thought mainly due to his height and loud voice! His job was to repatriate German prisoners, mainly by train, but his main task was to bring the trains back as the Russians liked stealing them, using all kinds of incentives to get the Brits away from the trains at night. They met their match in John who was both resourceful and determined to fend them off.

In 1946 he was demobbed and joined his father at precision engineers Allen & Simmonds in Reading, initially in the drawing office. They made mainly agricultural rotavators, as well as parts for the comet aeroplane, then the latest thing in jet passenger planes, and Rolls Royce engines.

John married Maureen Swoffer, a Guernsey girl, in 1950, and they had two children, Simon and Philippa. In 1955 he became Reading Borough Council’s then youngest elected councillor, and when he left in 1965, was chairman of Transport, chair of Civil Defence, vice chair of Highways and a governor of five schools. The family enjoyed their holidays with a caravan, initially at Mudeford where he had a dinghy, then towing the caravan, in the days before motorways, down to the South of France each year. 

After some years in Caversham, John and Maureen moved to Peppard Common, and finally back to Wargrave in 1984. By now they had four grandsons and a busy social life in Wargrave with many good friends, both old and new. 

John retired fully aged 65 but continued to be busy, having taken up cooking, tapestry and fly fishing, which became his passion and which he still enjoyed in his 90s. He also became a parish councillor aged 90, was an active member of the local branches of the Royal British Legion and RNLI, mowed the village green for 25 years and still drove ‘old’ people to hospital, many of them considerably younger than him!

He was initially very lonely without Maureen, who died in 2017 after 67 years of happy marriage, but like so many of his generation he had an extremely positive approach to life, and a year or so ago he told his family that he had no regrets as he had lived a long and happy life. He died peacefully at home in Wargrave, as he had wished, aged 98.