Hockey club co-founder hits 100

A MAN who helped set up Henley Hockey Club has celebrated his 100th birthday.

Dan Seymour was guest of honour at a party at his home in Church Lane, Peppard, which he built with his late wife Sylvia.

The guests included his three children, Susan, Gillian and Richard, and five grandchildren, Elfie, 29, Emilio, 31, Florella, 30, Rosalia, 26, and Lucie, 30, as well as friends and neighbours.

Mr Seymour was presented with a cake made by Hayley’s Cupcakes & Bespoke Bakes, of Gainsborough Crescent, Henley, and guests enjoyed a glass of champagne.

His daughter Gillian Scozzafava said: “He was very keen to cut the cake. He was also given a card by King Charles and Camilla, of which I imagine not many have been handed out yet.

“Lots of his friends from the road were at the celebration as well as their children who were my age when growing up.”

Mrs Scozzafava described her father as “very much a local lad”.

He was born on October 6, 1923 in Little Stoke and attended Stoke Row Primary School.

Mrs Scozzafava said: “One of his first memories is of his headmistress rushing into the school room holding a letter saying that he had got a scholarship for Henley Grammar School. It was a fee-paying school then so he wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise.”

Mr Seymour was nine when he started at the grammar, where he excelled at sports and represented the school at cricket and rugby.

After leaving school in 1939, he worked in the accounts department of Great Western Railway, based first in Paddington and then in Aldermaston. The Second World War was in its second year when on his 18th birthday in 1941, Mr Seymour volunteered at the RAF Office in Reading.

He was immediately sent to Skegness and then on to Lincoln Technical College to become a qualified radio technician.

As one of the top 10 graduates from the course, he was posted to London to work on a secret new technology — radar.

From there, he was seconded to coastal command and then, in 1942, to Scotland to join one of two squadrons working on the development of a “bouncing” bomb.

After short spells at Thorny Island and RAF Chivenor, he set off for Australia via Malta and the Suez Canal, arriving at RAAF Narromine in New South Wales on Christmas Eve 1944.

Mr Seymour returned to the UK in 1946 and worked at Caversham Park listening station, servicing radio equipment. At the London Olympics in 1948, he worked with foreign journalists and commentators demonstrating how to use BBC microphones.

Mr Seymour was a keen hockey player and one of the founding members of Henley Hockey Club, where he met his future wife Sylvia Morris.

In the summer of 1951 along with 20 other members of the club, he helped convert a former Birmingham Corporation bus the group bought for £65 for a trip to the south of France.

They modified it by replacing the seats, adding a rooftop luggage rack and undercarriage water tank and installing a kitchen.

The group departed from Market Place on August 24, 1951 for a two-week trip in the sunshine.

Mrs Scozzafava said: “It took so long for them to get there that they were only there for a few days before they came back.

“People didn’t do that sort of thing back then — my mother was surprised her parents even let her go.”

The group returned with a mascot “Ambre”, a lifesize cardboard cut-out of a woman in a bikini promoting suntan lotion, and were photographed for the Henley Standard.

This is said to be the reason why amber shirts were adopted when the same group formed Henley Hockey Club a few weeks later.

Mrs Scozzafava said: “For both of my parents, the hockey club was their social life. They would go on theatre trips or to the river. My mum had a punt so during the festival they would all climb in and watch the fireworks.”

The couple were married at St Mary’s Church in Henley in 1955 and built their house, Halfacre, while living on a caravan on the site.

Mr Seymour, who worked as an electrical engineer at AERE Harwell, undertook a bricklaying course and would work on the house in the morning before he left for work.

Helped by members of the hockey club, the couple finished the house in 1958. The only work they outsourced was the plastering.

Mrs Scozzafava said: “They dug a swimming pool in the back garden which was a massive magnet for all the children in the lane.

“It was a very special time — everyone helped each other out.”

Mr Seymour became an active member of the Friends of Peppard School, which his children attended, and along with neighbours in Church Lane built a freestanding group study room which is now an office..

He was also a keen supporter of the scouting movement, becoming assistant county commissioner for cubs and then county commissioner for scouts.

Mr Seymour retired from AERE in 1983 to set up his own successful business, Nucleonic Consultants, which he ran for the next 20 years, first from a workshop in Woodley and then from home.