Abingdon News No.40

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The Abingdon Foundation, Park Road, Abingdon, Oxford OX14 1DE 01235 521563 • Edited by Jane Warne – 01235 849123 • Design –
Hugh Leach was one of Abingdon’s
most distinguished post-war pupils.
Soldier, diplomat, Arabist, author,
explorer and circus owner, he spoke
fluent Arabic as well as Aramaic and
during the 1980s made a particular
study of modern trends in Islam. Leach
served with the Royal Tank Regiment
during the 1950s, most notably during
the Suez Crisis in 1956 when his was
the first tank ashore at Port Said. Whilst
in the army he took on intelligence
gathering duties in the Oman, living with
the Bedouin, a period he described as
one of the best in his life. On retirement
from the army he joined the Foreign
Office and served in the Middle East until
1989. A prominent member of the Royal
Society for Asian Affairs and co-author
of its centennial history; in 1998 he was
awarded the Society’s Lawrence of
Arabia Memorial Medal.
Hugh Leach
OBE, MBE (Military) 1934-2015
Abingdon Out of the Past
The School bought the Waste Court
estate, house, outbuildings and nine acres
of land, in 1928 as a memorial to the
seventy-three members of the Abingdon
community who died during the First
World War. In 2015 it was decided to
acknowledge the purpose of the purchase
by changing the name of the boarding
house from Waste Court to Austin
House. The name commemorates Alan
Murray Austin, the first Abingdonian to be
killed when his ship, HMS Hawke, was
torpedoed in the North Sea on
15 October 1914.
The name Austin
also stands as a
reminder of the
tragic impact
of war on so
many families
during the 20th
Century: Alan’s
brother, Private
Walter Murray
Austin, died of enteric fever in South
Africa during the Boer War; a nephew,
Lieutenant William Piercy Harragin died in
Dar-es-Salam on 1 November 1918 and
another nephew, Lieutenant Ambrose
Theodore Wentworth Austin, was killed in
action on D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Last summer the school archives had a visit from an Israeli PhD student who was
interested in looking at the School’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century textbooks for
evidence of how pupils used to study. His eagle eye spotted the following scribbled
comment written in 1788 on the front cover of a copy of Moses and Aaron (1655):
“a jaber (sic) of nonsense written by a man who knows no thing about his subject”– the
author of the book being a one time
headmaster of Abingdon, Thomas
Godwyn. Ten years earlier another boy
had been busy embellishing his maths
copybook with a face in a calligraphic
flourish. Nearly 200 years later a boy
studying Caesar’s Gallic War Book VI
clearly had his mind on another war.
The year was 1941 and the margins of
the book are liberally scattered with his
doodles of battleships and aeroplanes.
Boys will be Boys
Mistaken Identity
We would like to apologise to Cllr Mike Badcock
who we mistakenly identified as Cllr Paul Harrison in
the September edition of Abingdon News.
Austin House