He will be sadly missed by his family, friends and those who knew him from the School.

We are conscious that some people from the time when Jeremy was at the School may not be in contact with us and we would ask if you could pass on this information to those that you know.

As is the usual practice, we would like to place an obituary for Jeremy in the 2023-24 OI Journal and would be very grateful for any stories or memories you may wish to share which we could put together for the publication. Please address any contributions to oldipswichians@ipswich.school.

Nicholas Allen

OI Chairman

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So farewell, Jeremy Joseph Ronald, or Jerry as we knew him in our form. Three memories involving Jerry come to mind ranging from the classical, through the modern to the scary. Some ancient OIs will recall that we were given Latin names by Cabby Stonex, such as the splendid Millingtonius Magnus, the mundane Faber for me or plain Oxley where Cabby had given up completely. No doubt owing to his older brother Nigel, Jerry had the numerical handle Prattus Secundus, often to be seen chalked together with Faber on the blackboard's "Cab Rank" for Friday detention.

The Pratt brothers were a touch ahead of me in the motor vehicle stakes, owning between them a magnificent green Austin 7 ex-fishmonger's van with curious, elliptical rear windows and a dark blue 1938 Morris 8 saloon. Somehow I ended up buying my first car, the Morris 8, from Jerry for £8 7s 6d.

Jerry once proudly showed me an intact German incendiary bomb that had dropped on their Nacton home in WW2. We debated whether to scrape some magnesium from it to repeat Tom Glover's experiments with magnesium ribbon but some innate sense of self-preservation kicked in, giving us another 60 years.

David Smith (OI 1956-64)

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I knew Jeremy well and we remained friends right up until his untimely death. Jeremy was an engineer and in his twenties had a penchant for old cars. One of these – a very early Post Office van, which was named “Elo” after its number plate, is I think, still to be occasionally seen near Ipswich. But one enduring (if indirect) memory of “Jem” is the occasion he decided to remove the pre-selector gearbox from his current jalopy, a 1934 Lanchester, strip it down to it’s component parts, service and reassemble. The stripping down took place on his mother’s kitchen table, while she was out of the house.

Needless to say, the task took longer than he thought and the oily viscera of the gearbox were still spread out on the kitchen table when “Ma” returned….The rest of the story is probably best left to the reader’s imagination!

Stephen P G Collins (OI 1955-63)