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Old Warwickians

F R (Derrick) Salkeld (WS 1926-33)

OW John Salkeld (WS 1952-61) provides the following obituary for his father, F.R. (Derrick) Salkeld, following his death in 2007. Derrick was a life member of the Association since he left Warwick School in 1933.
  
Dad died in August 2007 aged 91, and he always looked back on his childhood in Kenilworth and schooldays at Warwick with great affection. He took part in OW cricket weeks before the war and qualified as a civil engineer through night school. The war resulted in his getting a commission in the Royal Engineers and his unit was posted to the Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, (allegedly) laying an airstrip but according to the wads of photos unearthed by us since August, also playing a lot of tennis and football. He didn`t talk a lot about it in later years.

After the war Dad's career in local government can be charted by the cricket clubs he played for: Lincoln Lindum; Leicester Ivanhoe and Northampton Saints. By Northampton, golf was competing hard for his attention and when we moved to Wimbledon in 1957 the transition was complete. His contact with Warwick School was maintained by my brother Michael and my years there, and he enjoyed the renewed link with Jack Marshall, with whom he had played cricket at school and was now teaching us in the Junior School.
 
Dad continued to attend functions and keep up with Warwick matters down the years; he greatly enjoyed revisiting the school with me for the OW Millennium weekend, and in recent years his conversation had increasingly been dotted with his school contemporaries such as John Hacking; Gordon Redley; Harold Robinson; Godfrey Brown, Jack Marshall and a number of others.
 
It was hard for him when my mother, Monica, died in 1979, but he was fortunate in finding happiness a second time with Ursula, an old golfing friend of both my parents who helped him greatly as life became more difficult for him in the last couple of years.