John R M Davies (OW 1959)

(15 April 1941 – April 2023)

The Waynflete Office has been informed by OW Will Wyatt (1961) of the death of his friend John Davies. John, known as ‘Tich’ featured in Will’s book Oxford Boy and with permission we reproduce that excerpt here:

He had a big, round expressive face, a slight Welsh accent and loved an argument at which he was both passionate and eloquent. His father was the several times unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the Oxford parliamentary seat. Tich won the annual recitation competition more than once, memorably with Naming of Parts by Henry Reed. The poem alternates a military lecture on using a rifle with dreamy thoughts of nature and Tich found both the humour and the poignancy, shifting the direction of his stance as he moved between the two voices. He had to be Antony but there was a problem: Antony is a mighty general, a military hero, and Tich a spindly non-sporty boy. He began coming to school with large bags of nuts which he ate by the handful. He had, he told us, signed up for a Charles Atlas body building course. Advertisements for this were everywhere in the newspapers, magazines and comics. They showed the immense shiny torso of Charles Atlas gleaming with strength and wellbeing. Alongside was a drawing of a fearful looking skinny youth and the exhortation, “Don’t be a seven-stone weakling, don’t let them kick sand in your face” The answer was the secret of “Dynamic Tension” and, evidently, a nut filled diet. After several weeks of this regime the dress rehearsal arrived. Alas, when Tich slipped on his cardboard armour to play Antony “triple pillar of the world”, his arm stuck out as a broom handle through a port hole. It didn’t matter; few boys would have spoken the verse better. Tich went on to star in Oxford Union debates and in 1987 stood for Labour against Mrs Thatcher in her Finchley constituency, making a small dent in her majority.

An obituary for John written by his friend Robert Chesshyre was printed in The Guardian on 23 June 2023. You can read that here.