Dr Gordon Perry, ex-science teacher at Kirkby Stephen Grammar School, died on June 23 after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
Gordon’s school pupils — now all adults and possibly grandparents — would have known his most famous nicknames as Spock from Star Trek, Flash because of his love for chemistry experiments that caused quite a stir in class … or even, as in the old song Gordon is a Moron, which he suffered with a wry smirk, but in silence.
Gordon had a great sense of English humour.
In the days before Ofsted and this politically correct world in which we now live, Gordon was also known for having pocketfuls of sweets which he gladly passed out to his classes like confetti.
As a Morris dancer, he also set up after-school classes voluntarily to teach dance — folk tradition, folklore and music which at first was considered somewhat “odd” by his pupils, but they all came anyway.
Gordon watched his “kids” grow up throughout the years and he took much pride in being a small part of moulding them into future adults.
School grades and reports were stored in his quantum-like memory and regaled back to former pupils when the opportunity arose in jest and partially to get his own back for his moronic nickname.
Gordon took his PHD at Lancaster University. At the age of 76, he gained a BA in geology, specialising in volcanology.
He was a keen mountaineer, fell walker, astronomer, ornithologist, eco-warrior, tree-hugger, festival goer, concertina, harmonica and saxophone player, singer, and dancer.
Science in all its facets and genres was his bedrock — he was, quite simply, a true and now very rare English boffin, who even during his last days in hospital had the nurses and his wife reading research papers to him in bed.
Someone once summed him up as “caring, idiosyncratic in habit, unforgettable despite all his foibles and widely loved by generations of youngsters” — not a bad eulogy, some might say.
Sadly, Gordon never had children of his own, but in James Hilton’s novel, made into a Hollywood Blockbuster of its time, Goodbye Mr Chips — about a schoolmaster’s career up to the First World War — on Chips’ deathbed he overhears his colleagues talking about him.
He responds: “I thought you said it was a pity, a pity I never had any children. But you’re wrong. I have! Thousands of them, thousands of them …”
This, too, was how Gordon felt about his “kids” at Kirkby Stephen Grammar School and into their adulthood.
As a scientist, he never believed in any religion, but he did believe that his body would return to the universe as zillions of atoms — space is, and always will be, the final frontier.
Gordon leaves a currently exhausted carer and bereft wife, Jen, who will remain at their home, which he loved, in North Stainmore.
No donations are requested — but as an ardent tree-hugger and with his deep concern over climate change on future generations in mind, Gordon would want nothing more than a whip or sapling tree planted in a back garden or somewhere in Cumbria as a form of remembrance and to help save the planet.
