Univ Record 2017

From 1993-6 he was Assistant Bishop of St. Asaph, and from 1996 until his retirement
in 2001 he was Bishop of St. Davids. He retired to Llandaff, where he continued to serve
as an honorary assistant bishop. He leaves a wife, Gwyneth, and two daughters.
The Archbishop of Wales, Dr. Barry Morgan, said of Huw “I was deeply saddened
to hear of Bishop Huw’s death. He served the church excellently as a theological teacher,
priest, dean and bishop and was at the forefront of ecumenical affairs in the province. In
retirement he helped out as an honorary assistant bishop in Llandaff and my debt to him
is considerable. He was a lucid teacher and a very clear preacher. As he had been trained
in philosophy and theology he had a very clear, systematic mind and that always came
through in everything he said.”
DAVID EDWARD ANTHONY MORTON (Ardingly) died on 10 April 2017 aged
81. Tony Morton spent his early childhood in India, where he developed a lifelong
fascination for butterflies, before being educated in England, and doing national service
in Hong Kong. Having read Modern Languages at Univ, he became a schoolmaster.
He was first an Assistant Master at King’s School, Bruton, Somerset, from 1959-64,
and at Aiglon College in Switzerland in 1964-5, before becoming a Master at Radley
in 1965. In 1968, however, Tony moved with his family to Australia to teach Modern
Languages at Melbourne Grammar School on a two-year exchange, and, lured by the
weather and the salary, they then decided to remain there until his retirement in 1996. A
gifted teacher, he is fondly remembered by former pupils and colleagues for his kindness,
humour and enthusiasm, and perfect English manners.
At MGS Tony was Head of Department from 1974-80, and a housemaster from 1980-
95. At various times he ran the school’s cadet corps and coached the 1st XI Hockey Team,
and was also a keen marksman, fast bowler, and squash player. In addition, he was a keen
actor and singer, taking especial pleasure in performing English Art song and German
Lieder, in particular Winterreise, and regularly taking part in concerts and productions of
plays and musicals both inside and outside the school. Throughout his life, however, there
remained his love of butterflies. He built up two
major collections, the first of which was presented
to the Victoria Museum in 1982, and the second to
a museum in Florida in 2015. He even discovered a
new Australian species which is named after him.
He is survived by his wife Jenny, whom he had
met in India in his boyhood, his children Jonathan
and Rebecca, and his two grandsons Sebastian and
Zac Marshall. [We are very grateful to Jenny Morton
for her help in preparing this obituary.]
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JONATHAN LANDON SHARPE (Sutton Valence) died on 23 April 2017 aged 79. He read
Law at Univ, getting a First, and trained as a solicitor. From the mid-1960s he lived first in
Monaco, and then in France. In 1972 he was working in the Directorate of Legal Affairs for
the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and then in 1984 he was appointed Head of Division
in the European Court of Human Rights. From 1994-8 he was Deputy Director of the
Administrative Council of Europe, and then in 1998 he became Deputy Secretary of the
International Commission on Civil Status.
ELWYN LAVERNE SIMONS (Rice University and Princeton) died on 6 March 2016 aged
85. Born in Kansas, he came to Univ as a Marshall Scholar, and received a D. Phil. in
Human Anatomy in 1959. After two years spent at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1961
Simons was appointed Assistant Curator at the Peabody
Museum at Yale, and rose to become Professor of
Vertebrate Palaeontology in the department of Geology
and Geophysics there. In 1977, however, he moved to
Duke University, North Carolina, to become Director of
the Primate Center and Duke Professor of Evolutionary
Anthropology, where he remained until his retirement in
2011.
Elwyn Simons’ chief research interest was the
palaeontology of early primates, and he is widely
regarded as the founder of this discipline: he wrote
or co-authored over 300 books and research articles.
For half a century he led fossil-hunting expeditions all
over the world, but he most regularly visited Egypt,
where he spent four decades uncovering the remains of
previously unknown animals in the desert, in particular
several skulls of Aegyptopithecus, a 30-million-year-old ancestor of humans, monkeys and
apes. He was an expert on sub-fossil lemurs from Madagascar.
Simons was occasionally accompanied on his field trips by his wife Friderun, a
scientist and author in her own right. She recalls many years of “vehicles getting stuck in
sand or mud, or running out of gas on the highway; sleeping in tents in magical places
and seeing more stars than one ever imagined existed; hearing the desert fox calling or
the lemurs quarrel in the middle of the night.”
In addition to his work in palaeontology, Simons was also a major figure in primate
conservation, particularly the endangered lemurs of Madagascar and he turned the Duke
Primate Center, now known as the Duke Lemur Center, into a major centre for the
breeding of lemurs. He oversaw the first births in captivity of several species of lemur,
and also assisted in their reintroduction to the wild. He was recognised for his work by
being appointed a “Knight of the National Order” by the government of Madagascar.
Simons is fondly remembered by many former students: one of them, Pat Holroyd,
said “He was a bit larger than life, and the world is a little less colourful without him in
it.”
Elwyn is survived by his wife Friderun Ankel Simons, and his three children David
Brenton, Cornelia and Verne. [We are very grateful to Dr. Ankel Simons for her help in
preparing this tribute.]
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