John Creagh Ryle 1915-2000

Born 30 August 1915; died 19 December 2000

Address by John R. Ryle • 29 December 2000 • Shrewsbury • Readings by Anne Robertson and Caroline Walmsley • Posted 2016 • 1,792 words

John Creagh Ryle was born on August 30, 1915, in the early years of the First World War. He was his parents’ first-born son, the sixth generation on his father’s side to bear the name John Ryle.

His father, John Alfred Ryle, was a pioneer of social medicine, a professor first at Oxford and then at Cambridge. His mother, Miriam Scully, was a student of artesanal weaving from South Africa, with roots on her father’s side in Ireland, in Tipperary.

Miriam Scully held strong anti-establishment views. Although she spent all her adult life in Britain, her children were made aware that they were something more than English. And in 1933, when he was eighteen, John Ryle took the name Creagh by deed poll in honour of his Irish ancestors, becoming John Creagh Ryle.

His childhood, though, was an English rural idyll. With his two brothers and two sisters, he spent most of his early years in a farmhouse in a vale in the Sussex Downs. This was a time when the Downs were wild and largely uncultivated, when country life in these parts of southern England still had a pre-industrial air. In later life he would evoke with pleasure the memory of bright-painted horse-drawn wagons at harvest time, the blacksmith’s forge, and the carpenter’s workshop where he and his brother Martin were apprenticed by their father to learn the woodworker’s craft.

All his life he loved to work with his hands, to design and make things, to dig the earth. He loved to sail. And he loved, above all, to walk in the hills. As a boy he discovered, with his father, an unexcavated archaeological site on the Downs above their home. This marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with antiquity. Love of the mountains was to take him to the high peaks of the Alps; love of the past led him to explore ruins in Wales and Scotland and, later, to study ancient history, the Welsh language, and the Gaelic of his Irish ancestors.

Marriage of John C. Ryle and Victoria Melody Jackson at Chelsea Registry Office 1943: From left: Margaret Ryle; Rowland Jackson, Margery Jackson, John Creagh Ryle; Melody Ryle; John Gask; John Alfred Ryle; Miriam Ryle; Nan Strode

The Second World War

In Sussex too, as a boy, he learned to sail. He and his brother Martin bought a sloop to explore the anchorages of the Solent. And during his student years, reading Greats (that is, Latin and Greek), then Medicine, first at Oxford University and subsequently at Guy’s Hospital, he discovered mountaineering.

He became a leading member of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club, and of the Alpine Club, making ascents of the Matterhorn and other Swiss peaks. He was one of an outstanding generation of Alpinists, climbing with the most distinguished of his contemporaries, David Cox, Michael Lowe, Desmond Graham, John Gask and others, several of whom became lifelong friends. These men—some still living, some now departed—are here in spirit with us today.

He completed his medical training in London as a houseman at St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Bart’s, as it was known, then and now. Then, in 1939, the war came. From 1940 to 1943 he was surgeon-lieutenant on a series of minesweepers in the Eastern Mediterranean. In his diary he described one of these vessels as “a dirty little box, cluttered up everywhere, with gear coated in coal dust”. The ship’s complement, he recalled later, included a dog, which he was called on to treat, and a pet chameleon.

The work of mine clearance was tedious and dangerous, involving days and nights clearing the approaches to harbours on the North African coast—Alexandria, Tobruk and Benghazi—often under aerial attack from the Luftwaffe. He earned commendations for his war service, but after the war ended he seldom spoke of it. His thesis for Doctor of Medicine at Oxford, which he wrote in 1944, was based on his experience as a medical officer in combat. The subject was the medical aspects of fear.

In person he struck most people as a fearless person—both physically, as a climber and a combatant, and morally, in his personal and professional life. As a wartime medical officer he had needed to be, in order to deal with the fears of others. There was a price to be paid for this strength of character. Skeptical by temperament and indifferent to social distinction, after the war he became disillusioned with political ideology, leery of worldly power. He could be sardonic about human nature and prone to anger over its failings.

Reading by Anne Robertson

from “Sea Fever” by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a
whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

But the war also saw the most auspicious and significant event of his life: his marriage to Melody Jackson, a physiotherapist who worked with him at Barts. Their marriage was long and happy, as we, their children—Anne, Caroline and myself—well know. Our parents were married for fifty-seven years, over fifty of them here in Shrewsbury. Here they planned and built the house we lived in, where our mother still lives, a house situated—with characteristic forethought and precision—equidistant from the four schools where we were educated, which we walked to each day.

Our father spent the rest of his working life as a general practitioner in the National Health Service in Shrewsbury. He was also the Medical Officer for Shrewsbury School, and for the Post Office. As a family doctor his approach was commonsensical. Early to bed, early to rise, was likely to be his advice. Fresh air and exercise. And, not infrequently, It’ll get worse before it gets better.

John C. Ryle’s war service medals

Some of his patients found him forbidding. They learned, though, that he was a shrewd and diligent physician, with reserves of patience and compassion for those who were truly suffering, either physically or mentally, and that he was not as unbending as he might appear. He was known to prescribe, for stressed or anxious patients, a glass of whisky and soda, a remedy he also favoured for himself. And he was also known—and envied—for his black MG sports car, a rare sight on the roads in the early post-war years.

Walking, sailing, dry-stone walling

Beyond his work as a doctor, and equally, if not more important to him, was his role in communicating to others the healing power of nature. This began with us, his own children. Generations of young people, including some here today, were introduced by him to sailing, rock climbing and hill walking—sometimes before they knew it. I went up Yr Wyddfa—Snowdon to the English—at the age of two, in my father’s rucksack.

Later he led us, roped-up, across the wind-blown knife-edge ridge of Crib-goch, on the Snowdon Horseshoe, with its dizzying views of other Welsh three-thousanders, views we learned to love as he did. We climbed Snowdon every year, in every kind of weather. We climbed it, I recorded once, on Spring days when the mountains were islands in lakes of cloud, a landscape from the Ice Age. And in Autumn when the quartz in the crags near the summit glinted like the first snowfall. We climbed it by moonlight on midsummer’s eve, when the spirits of Celtic Britain were abroad. We climbed it so often that it felt like home.

Reading by Caroline Walmsley
from Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

Mist—soft, woolly and intensely white—lay across the far plain in drifts, filled the valley, and stood about the distant hills almost to their summits. The tops of Hunter’s Spinney, God’s Little Mountain, and the hill behind Undern stood out darkly green. The long rose-briars, set with pale coral buds, looked elvish against the wintry scene…

The radiant woods were full of pale colour; small patens of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with boundless vitality….

Wood-pigeons spoke in their deep voices from the dark pines, a language older than the oldest script of man. Cuckoos shouted in the wind-riven larches, green beyond imagining, at the back of the chapel. A blackbird meditated aloud in high rhapsody, very leisured, but very tireless. In and out of the yellow broom coverts wood-larks played, made their small flights, sang their small songs. Bright orange wild bees and black bumble-bees floated in through the open windows….

Down by the stream stood tall water-plantains, triune of cup, above the ooze; and small rough-leaved forget-me-nots eyed their reflections with complaisance. The birds were bathing bullfinches, smooth-coated and well-found; slim willow-wrens; thrushes, ermine-breasted; lusty blackbirds with beaks of crude yellow. They made neat little tracks over the soft mud, drank, bathed, preened, and made other neat little tracks….

She came to a place where the white water crossed the road in a glittering shallow ford. Here she stayed, leaning on the wooden bridge, hearing small pebbles grinding on one another; smelling the scent that is better than all (except the scent of air on a barren mountain, or of snow)—the scent of running water.

To walk or sail with our father was an education in the ways of the wild. You were sure to learn, if you wanted to, the name of a species of bird or tree, or a distant mountain range, or the origin of glacial moraines, or hanging valleys. Or the rhythm of the tides, or the phases of the moon, or a survival skill that one day might save your life. He practised a high art of walking. Those who walked with him learned how to be at ease in a landscape, how to put themselves in the care of the hills.

Long before ecology became a household word, our house was filled with books on natural history and the environment. John Ryle was a true conservationist, giving more than he took, not standing in anyone’s light. He liked things neat—shipshape and Bristol fashion—in the way of sailors and climbers everywhere. And when he walked, he walked at high speed, as many here will testify.

He could be demanding: if he was digging a ditch or building a dry stone wall, it would get dug or built, rain or shine. And if you were his assistant you’d get wet and cold along with him. Yet he and Melody allowed us, their children, to lead our own lives. They gave us the moral compass we needed, then left us to chart our own passage in the world. It was the pleasure of our father’s later life to see the family tradition of natural history and environmental activism renewed in the careers of his children and his grandchildren and his in-laws.

In the care of the hills

After his retirement he and our mother pursued with still greater dedication the interests they had come to share, in botany and zoology, in mountain walking, in forestry and in gardening. The woodlands they planted at Ritton Farm, at the western end of the Stiperstones, near the Welsh border, and the garden they created over the years at their house in Kingsland—which many of you know well—are a testament to the life they spent together, and the love between them. Both the woodlands and the garden are signs of our father’s aspiration to leave the world a better place. And a neater and tidier one.

Like his father and his grandfather before him, John Ryle was an agnostic. He subscribed to no organized religion. What he believed in was the power and beauty of nature, that whole of which we are a part. As a student of history, he also favoured traditional forms of life, and established rituals. He understood the importance of religious belief in the lives of others. And he recognized the Christian inspiration of much of the music and the literature that he most enjoyed, particularly the works of the classical composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We honour him here today, non-believers and believers, in the spirit of these traditions, giving thanks for his life, the life that he lived with such dignity and integrity. He was a man who loved and respected his family and his friends, and who was loved and respected by them in return. He loved the mountains and the sea, the bird’s cry and the breath of the wind. And he has returned to nature now, to become one with it again, back in the care of the hills.

Order of Service

memorials-jcr-service1

memorials-jcr-service2