A good number of friends attended Tony Tomkin's funeral in Eastbourne. The service was conducted by Tim Duff. A few weeks later Len wrote the following:
I first remember meeting Tony at a somewhat improbable cricket match he organised between Newtonians and City Boys in Cambridge in about 1950. If cncketing skill was important I do not recollect it was present, certainly not in teams which had Tony and me in them, but what a party we had afterwards.
I suspect it was on his first cruise with the Club in about 1950 that Tony sailed with Cecil on Amorita and I was mate. The worthy doctor was cabin boy, which is a memory to savour. I remember him at Horning, retrieving a quant, lost over the stern in the traditional way; I suspect by Tony. He balanced it across a dinghy he rowed (more or less), and in a busy waterway he functioned rather as if he was driving a Roman chariot with knives sticking out of the wheel hubs. Still, being Tony, he got the quant back.
I did more offshore sailing in the late 1950s and 1960s, but Tony and I kept in touch in that casual way which is the hallmark of the Club and which has, as its key, the capacity to meet, after sometimes longish intervals, and resume conversation as if one of us had just been out to the bar.
Tony invited me, when he was head of English at Whitgift School Croydon ,to see a production by the School of Hamlet which he put on. I well remember the frisson of shock amongst parents and governors at a speech which, in fairly explicit terms, dealt with the effect of alcohol on sexual capacity. He took a delight in both being true to the text and shocking at the same time; this was splendidly Tony. When Tony was headmaster of St. Clements Dane’s School in London, he invited me to present the prizes and make the usual incredibly boring speech. He was po-faced respectability and seriousness personified . . . save when some mishap occurred in the arrangements which caused that engaging broad smile to break through. Anne and I saw that smile so sadly for the last time and for a fleeting moment when Tony was in hospital in Eastbourne just before he died; a memory which brings all back.
Tony was not of course keen on the use of engines on yachts within the Club, as perhaps others may have noticed. He seemed though to me to put up remarkably well with owners and skippers flouting his authority, and showing that streak of independence which is not entirely unknown in the Club.
Kindness itself, it was Tony who lent our family StelIa in 1972, which led us to buy Ariel in the autumn of that year; so we as a family have particular reason to be grateful to him.
Tony had a brilliant brain which, combined with firm views and an incisive mode of expression, was startling sometimes to those who did not know the kindness which lay beneath and that the smile was not far away. How often do I remember him saying (pardon me) ‘Jesus, Len’, which of course conveyed a modicum of disapproval of something I had said or done.
A somewhat irreverent thought has occurred to me: if angels’ wings are moved by any form of assisted power they had better watch out for disapproval from Tony.
LJB
1999