Sid White MBE, former Bedford College staff member and Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway, sadly passed away on 1 February 2020, aged 92.
Born in London in 1927 as one of five brothers and sisters, Sid joined the Royal Navy aged 16 for his National Service, serving on the aircraft carrier HMS Rajah as an Airframe Mechanic in the Fleet Air Arms. After the war he worked for the scientific instrument firm, Palmers, before joining Bedford College in 1952, as a Science Technician. He built up and ran the Science Faculty Workshop for some forty years, prior to and following the merger with Royal Holloway.
When Sid joined Bedford College, the Faculty provision for covering the equipment needs for the whole College consisted of just one carpenter. Sid was put in charge of the workshop and it steadily grew to cover a wide range of instrument and equipment construction and repair. It also incorporated a joint faculty vehicle pool, to make provision for the rapidly expanding transport demands of staff and students in four field-based sciences.
Sid’s range of work had equipped him uniquely for the extraordinary range of jobs which confronted him and his staff. His years as an airframe mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm gave him a training in the assembly of metal frameworks on which lives depended. His training as an instrument maker in those days involved taking an individual piece of equipment right through its production, and that of all its constituent parts, giving him a degree of versatility which was needed to tackle the growing range and sophistication of scientific instruments.
The vehicle pool started its life as a single van – inevitably a Bedford! But it grew to a versatile group of vehicles covering the needs of field work ranging from Iceland to North Africa. The late Professor Bill Chaloner once said of Sid’s work, “It was a great boon to arrive in Regent’s Park early on a Sunday morning, for a day’s field work with a student party, and to know with total certainty that there would be fuel in the tank, a functional spare wheel, and that the vehicle would actually be there, and not in a colleague’s driveway on the other side of town! I have worked in other universities where it was not thus, and you appreciate the difference.”
Sid would play tennis every lunchtime in the Regent’s Park tennis courts and was doing just this on his birthday in July 1982 when the IRA bombed the bandstand where the Royal Green Jackets were giving a concert. He was one of the first on the scene, helping to tend to and comfort the injured soldiers, and his photograph made the front page of many national newspapers.
When Bedford College and Royal Holloway College merged in 1985, Sid moved to work at the campus in Egham, and he and his wife Valerie, who also worked there for a while, would travel to work by car together. With the larger and more scattered departments of the merged College, the vehicle pool had to be abandoned, but Sid’s services to the College in the central workshop continued untiringly.
In December 1990 – the year he retired – Sid was awarded an MBE by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for Services to Science, with Valerie, and his daughters, Jane and Sally, all in the audience. In 1992 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway, which was very special to the family as his daughter Sally and later his granddaughter Nicola both studied there.
Sid spent a very happy retirement putting his DIY skills to good use and tending to the allotment he had for more than 30 years, only giving it up at the age of 90 when it became too much to manage. He loved spending time with his grandchildren and helped to teach four of them to drive. In his later years Sid and Valerie were never apart, sharing a love of gardening, jigsaws, and most importantly, each other. He also loved to walk to the newsagents every morning to collect his paper and complete the crossword.
Shortly after Sid’s 90th birthday he began to slow down and was eventually diagnosed with dementia.
Despite his condition, Sid always recognised Royal Holloway in photographs as a place that held happy memories for him.
His final months were mostly spent sitting in his favourite chair, often sleeping but always listening, with a smile on his face.
