Election of Officers and Hon ORs

OBITUARIES - JOHN KENDRICK TAPLIN (B’33)

J.E. Lindley was in Brook House from September 1944 until July 1948. He had turned 80 only two months before his death – it had been his great ambition to make 80. He had a massive heart attack 34 years ago, then later-on a bypass. He had done well. He also had Parkinsons disease for the last 7 years.

He took such a great interest in Repton all his life, despite the fact that we lived in South Africa from 1958. In the early days he was a participant in a small group of active ORs in Cape Town. We paid many visits to England over the years, and twice managed to be there for events. His children have been told many times of the fun he had there and in particular his cricketing days – of which he was very proud.

We visited and stayed with two of his old chums some years ago, and still exchange Christmas cards with Chris Drouet (B’44) and his wife. Anthony Lawson (B’44) was Godfather to our elder daughter. The regular postal arrivals of the Repton Magazine were always a great delight. He was astonished when one of the many gap years we hosted long ago was Lucinda Tosh (A’79), and when he asked where she had been at school she replied “Repton” . The news that girls were also there astonished him, but he was delighted. The news of progress had taken a quite a while to filter through to darkest Africa! We met many ORs of all ages over the years which we much enjoyed. I even met up with a school friend from my long ago Benenden days – she was married to an OR and we met at a Gaudy some time ago.

Sue Lindley (Mrs J.E.Lindley)

John Taplin died in Tourrettes, Provence on 23 July 2011 aged 91 JKT was born in Bristol in 1919. His father was a brewer in Yarmouth. From an early age he learnt about trades in the brewery and about the horses which drew the drays. He was educated at Repton and from there attended Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester. He then studied accountancy and Tamil in London prior to sailing from Liverpool in 1938 to be an Assistant Manager on a tea plantation in Ceylon.

Prior to WW2 he joined the Ceylon Mounted Infantry, a territorial self-defence regiment. Upon outbreak of war he volunteered and was sent with his unit to Cairo and attached to the British army in Egypt. He saw action in the Western desert and attended an officers' course in Cairo.

When Japan entered the war in 1941 John was transferred to India as part of the Indian Army and was attached to 2/2 Punjab Regiment, part of 25 Indian Division. After time on the North West Frontier digging trenches against a possible Russian invasion and learning Pushtu, John married Bee Anley née Faulkiner, an Australian painter. Later he took part in the counter-offensive against the Japanese in Burma with a Tamil speaking unit in which he was fluent.

When hostilities ended in 1945 and with political changes taking place in Ceylon John and Bee decided to go to Australia but they had to wait a year for a ship. John, who had a good speaking voice, was employed during that time by All India Radio as a news reader. When they eventually reached Melbourne they started a company making furniture and doing interior decorating. John and Bee divorced in the mid ‘50s. In 1956 John went to the then Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides(now Vanuatu) to visit French friends and decided to stay for a while. At first he was employed by the Condominium Treasury. Later he worked for Burns Philp, the major trading company in the islands, as supercargo on the Manutai and ran a store on Tongoa Island in the Shepherd Group for several years. Later he ran a plantation on Maewo. He took over management of Sulua plantation on Emae in 1968. He also owned a trading vessel, the Tui Cakau which carried copra, fuel and general cargo throughout the islands and New Caledonia. John remarried in 1968 Ruth Gowing and they had a son John. Disaster struck in 1972 when a hurricane devastated Emae late in the season and destroyed the plantation house and most of the coconut trees.

An era was at an end and John and Ruth went to live in Port Vila where John managed the BESA club, built a house in Mele and ran a concrete plant. John was a fluent Bislama(local pidgin) speaker and was invited to interpret for the newly elected Representative Assembly before independence in which English, Bislama and French were used. His career there was short-lived as he had a tendency to say what he thought the elected representatives should be saying rather than what they were actually saying with which he frequently disagreed.

In 1982 John returned to Australia where he lived first in Tweed Heads, Queensland and then in Bega, NSW. John met his first wife Bee again in 1986, her husband having recently died. They decided to get together again and to go to live in Provence where Bee had spent some of her life painting. Ruth went to visit them there a number of times. Bee and Ruth died within three weeks of each other in 2010. John was buried at the village of Seillans in the Var on 31 July 2011.