Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

GEOFFREY TOWNSEND BENNETT (1946), a much-loved husband, father,
grandfather and teacher, died on 27 July 2006 in Oxford, not far away from
the village of Eynsham where he was born on 5 February 1928. While
attending the Dragon School in Oxford, Geoffrey won a scholarship to
Winchester College. He was intellectually gifted and excelled easily in school.
His mind was, however, not only capable of solving the analytic problems
presented to him by his teachers, but his intelligence also had many more
practical manifestations. An attempt at Winchester to rear hens as a way to
overcome wartime privations failed, but he did manage to become an adept
cook using meagre rations of dried eggs.
From Winchester Geoffrey moved on to King’s where he studied
Engineering. Both his father and brother were engineers, and it was a
profession that suited Geoffrey’s mind, juggling both analytic and practical
problems at the same time. His friends remember him as a quiet and
thoughtful young man with a great sense of humour. Geoffrey entertained
his fellow students with a piano he had installed in his room, and they were
also treated to his imaginative cooking during a period when just about
everything was still rationed.
Geoffrey left the august surroundings of Cambridge after graduation and
changed them for the sewers and Underground stations of London. He had
taken up work as a consulting engineer, but soon found the work not
challenging enough. Geoffrey continued in this post until 1962.
A year before he decided to quit he married Myra Low, a Girtonian who had
been his contemporary at Cambridge. As he was now setting out for a new
married life he returned to Oxford where he found work at the Oxfordshire
County Council, where his own father had been the County Surveyor. A few
years later, in 1965, Geoffrey moved on to become a teacher at Oxford
Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes, a position that suited his didactic and
engaged character perfectly. He was much loved and appreciated by his fellow
colleagues and his students in the Department of Architecture, where he was
a Lecturer.
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OBITUARIES