This is the full version of the tribute from Ian read at Rod's funeral.
It is said that most men have only five close friends during their lifetime.
Rod was one of mine. He was my good friend for more than 62 years, even though we lived on opposite sides of the world for the past 46 of them. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to visit the UK on many occasions during that time, and always managed to catch up with Rod each time. It was great to welcome Rod and Lindsay to our home in Adelaide in South Australia during one of their overseas adventures, and to share with them a little bit of my part of the world. Each time we met, it was almost as if we’d seen each other only a few weeks ago, instead of the months and years that had passed, and we picked up the conversation easily.
It was partly thanks to Rod that I got through my ‘A’ level Maths. I started the course three weeks late and so missed the introduction to the basic concepts and processes. As a result, I was struggling with the work. It was Rod and our other class mate Peter Brewer who took me aside and gave me some intensive tuition in the fundamentals. To this day, I remember how Rod and Pete showed me how to take moments about a point and resolve a force in two directions.
Several of Rod’s friends from school sent condolences when they heard about his passing: Roy Birch, Martin Mitchinson, John Townley, John Maddox, Alan Tin, Bob Grant and former PE teacher David Francis.
Roy commented: “At school, I was always in awe of him and regarded him as by far the most hard-working in the class.”
Martin referred to Rod as: “A really decent bloke, a good person and a close friend in our time at Bristol Uni together” and John Townley, who knew him from primary school called him “an honest, decent bloke”.
Three things about Rod stick in my mind.
On the surface, he was reserved and serious. He was the gang member who appeared to be the rational and sensible one. And he was. Most of the time. But underneath, there was an adventurous streak – a streak that saw him take flying lessons at a gliding school; that gave him a passion for cars; that took him to car races, and saw him driving in rallies. He was a good driver and loved the excitement of the race track and the adventure of the open road.
He also liked precision, accuracy and organisation. And I recall a time when the two traits came together:
Some of the old gang arranged to meet up in Cornwall for a few days camping. We each made our separate way there. Rod decided to make the journey part of the adventure and plotted himself a route that first took him south to the coast near Southampton, then west through Dorset and Devon and on into Cornwall. We were waiting at the rendezvous at the appointed hour when Rod arrived in his beloved Mini car. I saw he had a clipboard with many sheets of paper. The pages were covered in rows and columns. It was a list of waypoints and landmarks, with turn-by-turn directions from one to the next, distances and timings between each, and a running record of total time elapsed. This was his analog GPS, decades before the era of sat navs. It must have taken him hours to put it together. But for Rod that was part of the fun. As he got out of the car, he ticked off the last item and heaved a slightly grumpy sigh. After two days and several hundred miles he was three minutes late.
He also had dry, slightly wicked sense of humour that was well-hidden much of the time. He sometimes let it out after a couple of drinks or when he was in disguise. I remember driving back from “The Engine” pub once, and Rod yelled out of the window as we passed a group of young women. But being Rod, it was not the usual kind of crude remark; it was gentle, almost poetic. When we did school plays, and later when we continued the theatre tradition as old scholars, Rod was invariably cast as the doctor or vicar – the sensible, reliable, calm person amidst the growing confusion or chaos of the plot.
One year we produced the play “Here We Come Gathering” – a very British comedy. Rod was of course the vicar. After the full dress rehearsal, we quickly changed and headed off to The Chestnut Tree pub nearby. It wasn’t until we pushed our way to the bar to get the drinks that we realised that Rod was still in full vicar make-up and costume. And he stayed that way and in character for the rest of the night, much to the confusion of many of the regular patrons.
He carried many of those traits through all the years I knew him.
I shall miss his dry humour and flashes of wit. I shall miss the sense of mischief that he let slip out now and again, and his occasional sharp but perceptive comments when he felt strongly about something.
I shall miss that warm, almost shy smile when we greeted each other after a gap of a year or more. And I shall miss our conversations, his inquiring mind, his generosity of spirit, and our shared adventures.
Rest easy, Rod.
Ian Short
Adelaide, South Australia
December 2020.