Geoffrey Forster

My brother Geoffrey (on right) was 7 and I was 8 when we were sent to Russell Hill School at Purley in 1948 and we stayed on in the VI Form after the move to Ballards. Geoff left Russell School in 1959 and had a successful career in banking with Lloyds and retired as regional corporate manager for Oxford. We grew up in Stockport, Manchester, but he met and married Fay King after our parents retired to Exmouth in Devon. They lived at Uffington in the Vale of the White Horse and had a son David and a daughter Sarah, both now married with families of their own. 

Banking was Geoff's working life but boating on the Thames at Oxford became his passion. He took his boat to Calais and followed the waterways to the South of France where for four years he spent several months each year. As a boy at School he was told he could make a career as a singer and in recent years when ill health brought an end to boating he became an enthusiastic member of the Welsh Choir in Oxford. From 2014 he was a Governor of Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. Geoffrey was 76 when he died suddenly and without pain on Tuesday 21 November from pneumonia after he developed a cancer of the throat. His funeral will take place in Uffington on Tuesday 12th December.

Bill Forster