Last year the ODU Chair Wilbur Van Niekerk, the school archivist Paul Murray and the UK Secretary Nicky Bicket attended - virtually - the milestone birthday of John Hueton in Canada.  Paul was asked to give an account of John's time at Bishops, and afterwards. 

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John Whitburn Hueton was at Bishops from 1939 to 1948 (Gray House, Matric 1947; Post Matric, 1948).  He was made a House Prefect in Gray House in 1948, his Post Matric Year. He was a student officer in the Cadet Corps in 1948. In his Matric Year (1947) he got a First Class Pass and won the OD Special Prize for Chemistry in that year.

In his Post Matric Year he was the Honorary Secretary of the Democritus Society and at one of the meetings that year, he delivered the main paper on "Relativity".   He established that space and time must be interdependent and postulated the space-time continuum as the true world in which events happen and must be described. The paper concluded with a few of the proofs of the correctness of Einstein's theories.  

John was a member of the Ornithological Society where he read a paper on " Sea Birds of the Cape Coasts". He gave a description of the plumage and habits of most of the sea birds, and he illustrated the lecture from his own experience.

He graduated from the University of Cape Town with a B.Sc in Applied and Industrial Chemistry in 1952. He had a career in England, Scotland but for the most part Canada where he spent fifteen years in the startup and early operation of seven nuclear reactors.

Over the years John kept in touch with his colleagues from school, especially Ted Roy, Hugh Galpin, Jos Forsyth, Bruce Relly, John Ness, Pete Carstens, John Gardener, John Sampson, Duncan Thom, Martin Van Schoor and others.

He joined the ODU on 18 November 1948, 73 years ago and from the fifties was a member of the ODU Branch in Canada, and took up the position of Secretary for the Canada Branch of the OD Union in 1976; and in 1989, of East Canada (when the two branches split due to the vast distances of the country) and served in that capacity for an uninterrupted period of 42 years.  He always sent in thorough reports from his Branch such as the one in September 1978 in which he described a trip to the Arctic and showed slides and films about it at one of the Branch meetings.  The team managed to record the flying of the Diocesan ColIege pennant, together with those of other schools (see the photograph below).  

A truer son of Bishops than John Hueton, would be hard to find!  

We wish John well as he approaches his 91st year when it will be an honour for us to post an update.

Best wishes from Bishops and the OD Union!

Paul Murray, School Archivist.