Remembering John Powell Davies

As part of their coverage for Remembrance Day the Colchester Gazette have today published an article about the life of John Powell Davies. 

I am very grateful to Mark Powell Davies and Professor James Raven for writing new tributes for the article, which are published in full below. Mark has also shared a wealth of unpublished photos (some of which appear in the Gazette today) and I'm delighted to include them all here.

Special thanks also goes to Katy Oxton who was kind enough to send me a selection of photos she took at the school in the mid-1980s. They included the only known photo of Mr Powell Davies in the classroom (below). We will be publishing all of Katy's photos very shortly in an upcoming post.

Although I wasn’t taught by Mr Powell Davies (my maths sadly wasn’t good enough to get me into the top set) I remember him well and got to know him a little better later on when I was a volunteer with Colchester Samaritans. John would often come to social events with his wife, Rosemary, who was a long serving volunteer and director of the branch between 1979-1984. I remember John joking on more than one occasion about wanting to become a volunteer! I have very fond memories of Rosemary - she was such a kind and compassionate person and exactly who I would wish to be on the end of the phone for me if I was in need.

(John and Rosemary celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary)

Mark Powell Davies recalls...

I knew my father for some 50 years, so it is very difficult to distill my thoughts in a few words!

He was an imposing man - 6 foot 4 inches tall, broad and with jet black hair and black beard. Many of my friends were initially rather intimidated by him, but slowly got to realise he could be kind, thoughtful and was actually rather shy.

His life was significantly influenced by his early life - his father suffered from 'shell shock' from the first world war, and died young - and his wartime experiences. These undoubtedly had a significant effect on his later life. When I was young he was very reluctant to talk about the war and his time in Colditz, as the memories were clearly too raw. However, with the passage of time he felt more comfortable with telling some of the stories, presenting awards on behalf of The Colditz Society and going into my son's Primary School to let the pupils know what the war was really like.

John's marriage to Rosemary provided a solid rock in his life. The trauma of his wartime experiences led to some difficult times, but Rosemary was always there to provide emotional and practical support.

His career took several turns - actuary, engineer, industrialist - but he really found his calling when he took up teaching Maths in his forties. I had some first hand experience of his enthusiasm for the subject when he taught me for a couple of years at CRGS. Luckily for me my fellow pupils respected him as a teacher and enjoyed his lessons. He always insisted on addressing me as "Powell Davies" in lessons.

He was always keen to develop the curriculum and try new ways of enthusing a class. I'm told that there was some resistance from members of his department at Gilberd who might have preferred to keep teaching the same old thing in the same old way.

When I returned to Colchester in my forties I was forever being asked 'Are you John Powell Davies's son?' by ex-pupils who remembered with affection being taught by him. James Raven is one of many people who John went out of his way to help, leading to successful careers.

He was a keen Rotarian, and was a founding member and the second President of one of Colchester's Rotary clubs, leading many of their activities and fundraising events. He found important friendships in his relationship with fellow members.

After retirement, John and Rosemary moved to Mersea. He had holidayed there as a boy, and had always hankered after living by the sea. He was again involved in local life - the Friends of the Museum, the Probus club etc.

Following Rosemary's untimely death - he was always convinced he was going to die before her! - he moved back to Colchester, and loved the convenience and comfort of living at Balkerne Gardens - although he seemed to me a rather large man in a rather small flat.

John lived a life of many parts - pilot, engineer, family man - but teaching was for him a real calling and central to his life.  He loved mathematics and he loved being able to impart his knowledge and enthusiasm to the pupils he taught.

25th October 2021

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Professor James Raven FBA, Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge recalls...

John Powell Davies managed to interest even innumerates like me in mathematics. This was partly because of his patience and the clarity of his lessons (aided by his infectious enthusiasm for a new model of slide-rule), but much more by his extraordinary presence in the classroom. His authority was certainly helped by his stature. His formidable beard and glasses accompanied a voice which you felt should have been booming but was in fact powerfully quiet and slow-paced. But more than this, even young teenagers recognised that they were being taught by a remarkable man: softly spoken with a powerful frame, but also (long before any of us learned of his wartime experiences) with a sensitivity, even vulnerability, that made him trusted and respected in equal measure.

A further clue for us was his frequent advocacy of transcendental meditation. Few of us, as he knew, had ever heard of it and I do not know how many ever took up his offer of introduction to a local group. This was, of course, years before schools offered the sort of care now embodied in curricula and mindfulness. I recall a parents’ evening when instead of showing any interest in me he attended only to my father, immediately recognising a fellow soul scoured by the past.

And yet there was another unexpected side to John Powell Davies; his devotion to debate and public argument that expressed itself in membership of the local Rotary Club and a lively evening debating society that met regularly in the school library of the Gilberd. If memory serves, I fear (from current perspectives) that it was men only, but he took a teenage me under his wing, persuaded me to lead a debate in the library one evening (and fixed it so that I won), attend a Rotary charity lunch in Jacklins, then the centre of High Street news and social gatherings before it closed, alas, in 1997, and phoned up one evening with an invitation (that I didn’t have the confidence to accept) to join a debating team touring the US.

Looking back, one remembers John Powell Davies with even greater respect and admiration and what a privilege it was to have known him – and yet part of that was how, from your first meeting with him, even when young and inexperienced, he had immediately impressed with his commitment and depth of understanding.

17th October 2021

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John Powell Davies - Obituary Thursday 16th December 2004 (The Times)

Naval pilot who was imprisoned in Colditz and returned from the war to become a gifted mathematics teacher

At the time that John Powell Davies was consigned to the famous German prisoner-of- war camp at Colditz Castle, he was the youngest inmate and, at the rank of midshipman, the most junior.

Colditz was the final camp for persistent escapers. Powell Davies used to aver with modesty that “it was much easier to get into Colditz when I arrived than afterwards”, but although unsuccessful, he did make attempts to escape from other camps, notably from hospital shortly after being captured and while incarcerated in a fort in Poland. There he noticed a sally-port tunnel filled with barbed wire which he and a friend laboriously snipped their way through, only to find an alerted bunch of guards at the other end.

His more than four years in Colditz were pretty depressing — he did his bit in supporting the “escape committee” in various minor ways but was too young and junior to feature as an escaper. He exchanged language lessons with French and Polish officers and became fluent in French, Polish and Russian.

After writing to his girlfriend, Rosemary Plowman, he wrote to anyone he knew asking for food parcels, striking it lucky with a neutral Portuguese friend who sent tins of sardines. His letters to a German family, the sons of which he had tutored before the war, received no replies. Powell Davies heard afterwards that, although the family hadnegotiated as high as Goering, they had been warned off a “Colditz bad boy”. On release he weighed 7st (44kg).

John Powell Davies, despite winning a scholarship to Cambridge to study engineering, was forced to leave school to get a job after the death of his father. A summer tutoring in Germany was followed by training as an actuary, which he heartily disliked. After failing his first-year exams, he answered an advertisement for naval pilots. Qualified for frontline service, yet not 18 years of age, he was appointed to the carrier Glorious whose two escorting destroyers were subsequently sunk under controversial circumstances with the loss of almost all hands.

He was wounded and shot down near Cap Gris Nez but managed to land in shallow water and wade ashore. This happened while “gardening”, the euphemism for minelaying off the French and Belgian coasts. He always considered this operation a waste of time until he learnt that the Germans would send out a standardised message after each attack which helped Bletchley Park codebreakers to solve that day’s signal traffic. He regarded his capture in some ways a second piece of luck as so many of 825 Squadron’s aircrew did not survive the war.

On return to England, he married Rosemary in his naval uniform, the only suit he had. He then took up his Cambridge scholarship, eight years late, to study engineering.

At the age of 35 he found his true metier as a gifted mathematics teacher, first at the Colchester Royal Grammar School and then at the Gilberd School in Colchester where he was head of the mathematics department. His pupils recall him as a teacher of great presence and one to be listened to with care and attention.

In later life he was an active member of the Colditz Society, often known as the Monopoly Club because Waddingtons, the makers of the game, sent escape materials to them hidden inside the boards.

His wife predeceased him; he is survived by three of their four sons.

John Powell Davies, naval aviator, Colditz prisoner and schoolteacher, was born on September 27, 1920. He died on October 3, 2004, aged 84.

(John Powell Davies, left, and Colonel James Yule, prisoners of war at Colditz, at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the board game Monopoly in London, Jan. 27, 1985.)

Photos
I'm extremely grateful to Mark Powell Davies for providing a large number of images of John taken during the war. Not a lot is known about some of the photos but each image is captioned as fully as possible.

(A photo of John while he was a prisoner of war at Stalag 158)

(John Powell Davies is on the far right)

(John, second row from the back and third from the right)

(John, back row, fourth from the right)

(Christmas card sent to Rosemary by John from Colditz)

(John is in the middle)

(John is on the left)

(A portrait of John painted by a fellow inmate at Colditz)