Obituaries
Please alert us to the recent death of any other Rhodes Scholar by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.
Lachlan Patrick MacLachlan died peacefully in his sleep on March 20, 2025, four days after his 97th birthday.
He was predeceased by his wife Jocelyn and is survived by his three sons, three grandchildren, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews in Australia, South Africa and England.
Pat was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on March 16, 1928. He studied architecture at the University of Cape Town (B.Arch.) and then in 1951 was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. This transformed his life. He took a respectable gentleman's pass in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (M.A.) at Exeter College while playing rugby at scrum half: for Oxford (including on the University's legendary tour to Japan in 1952), London Scottish, Scotland (capped four times) and the Barbarians. On a blind date in 1954, he met Jocelyn Vulliamy and, after a whirlwind romance, married her and returned home with her to Southern Rhodesia.
From 1954 to 1961, he worked as an architect in what is now Zimbabwe and Malawi and played rugby for Southern Rhodesia, Mashonaland, Nyasaland and the Salisbury Sports Club. In 1961, he and Jocelyn and their two young sons emigrated to Canada for him to take up a teaching position at Shawnigan Lake School (whose headmaster was in his college at Oxford). Pat gave up his career as an architect and the world of his birth and family and friends and where he was a national sporting hero to create a new life for his family in Canada. His children and grandchildren are forever grateful.
At Shawnigan, Pat taught mathematics and draughting, coached the First XV, and he and Jocelyn welcomed a third son. His aptitude for organization and his popularity with the students led to his appointment as Assistant Headmaster and, when two successive headmasters left the school, in 1968 he was thrust into the role of Headmaster on a permanent basis. In those years he continued to play rugby: for B.C., the Crimson Tide, Cowichan and the Ebb Tide.
In 1972, he left Shawnigan Lake School and established a successful business in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia as the admissions representative for secondary schools in Canada, Australia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. He loved his connections with the young people he met. He played a lot of golf and bridge at the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club and for many years from the establishment of the Hong Kong Sevens tournament in 1976 he was one of its announcers.
On retirement and until Jocelyn's death in 2006, he enjoyed very happy years with her on the golf course (shooting his age at 76) and in the house they built in Maple Bay on Vancouver Island. After her death, he moved into Duncan and then to Vancouver, and his last years were spent in the amazingly patient and dedicated care of the wonderful staff at a care home in Vancouver.
Read full obituary here.
We were saddened to learn that Professor Morley Hollenberg passed away peacefully on 15 March, 2025.
Innumerable scientists benefited from Morley’s advice, wisdom, and mentorship. His advice was to “trust your insights and stay true to key principles”: curiosity, honesty, openness and rigor. Until his last day, he upheld these principles and was omnipresent in the front row of almost every seminar asking questions: his curiosity never waned and his support for trainees was unwavering.
A Rhodes Scholar, he obtained his PhD in molecular pharmacology at Oxford in the 1960s. He was devoted to the discipline of pharmacology. He then went to Johns Hopkins for his MD degree and remained there as a postdoctoral fellow working on cholera toxin, peptides and their receptors. A recognized authority on peptide hormones, he joined the faculty at Hopkins in 1974 as an instructor; a year later he was promoted to Assistant Professor. He was then recruited to Calgary as Professor and Head of Pharmacology. Here he was a champion of endocrinology and led the endocrine research group in the 1990s. He was always an active member of the Department of Pharmacology and later the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology.
Morley’s scientific legacy is impressive: more than 400 peer-reviewed papers, dozens of trainees, countless presentations. He was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2003, receiving its highest award, the McLaughlin Medal in 2011. As a scientist, he worked tirelessly to reveal nature’s secrets of the molecular pharmacology of endocrine signaling, the control of inflammation and many other areas. But he wanted to explore aspects of nature beyond that. In the mid-1980s, he studied under the Chinese calligrapher and artist, Master Chin Shek Lam. Morley’s artistic skills were considerable, and he created free-form calligraphy for the visual expression of many of Nature’s secrets.
Morley was a true gentleman, a unique colleague, and the consummate academic. He will be missed, but his legacy will stand the test of time.
Read full obituary here.
We were saddened to hear that Guy St Germain passed away in Montreal at the age of 91.
Awarded the Order of Canada in 1991, Guy was an influential and visionary business leader and philanthropist known for his role in numerous social, artistic, and community projects. He contributed to the fundraising campaign for the Juliette-Lassonde Arts Centre in the early 2000s and co-founded the Denise and Guy St-Germain Family Scholarship, a scholarship for excellence created in 2022 by Collège Brébeuf in Montreal, from where he graduated in 1951.
Read full obituary here.
We were saddened to hear of the death of Langley Keyes, professor emeritus of urban planning and former head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at the age of 86.
Keyes studied at Harvard University for his undergraduate education, earning a bachelor of the arts in History, Magna Cum Laude, in 1960. Upon graduation, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, traveling to Oxford University where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics from 1960 to 1962. Returning from Oxford, Keyes continued his studies, completing a doctorate in city planning in 1967, joining the MIT faculty shortly thereafter. Keyes’ work challenged the conventional thought that communities were the subject of the planning process and recast communities and neighborhoods as agents of change; able to resist, negotiate, and shape the outcome of city planning and development processes.
Keyes served as department head for DUSP from 1974-1978. During his time on the MIT faculty, Keyes was named a Ford Professor. The Ford Professorships are awarded to tenured faculty to recognize their outstanding contributions as leaders and innovators in their field. His scholarship wove together practice, theory, research, and teaching: often occurring in real time as he and students engaged in events shaping the Greater Boston region.
In addition to his work at MIT, Keyes served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Government Land Bank; Special Assistant for Policy Development at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Communities and Development; the Director of the Housing Development for Boston Model Cities Program; and as Associate Director of the Greater Boston Community Development, Inc.
Keyes was predeceased by his older brother Eben Wight Keyes. He is survived by his loving family: his wife Nancy Gray Keyes; his sons Cameron and Justin; daughters-in-law Kris and Maura; and granddaughters Tegan, Tess and Grace, to whom he was known as Papoo.
Read full obituary here.
David L. Boren passed away at the age of 83 in Norman, Oklahoma. Raised in Oklahoma and educated at Yale University, David arrived at Oxford in 1963 to study philosophy, politics, and economics. He later received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma.
David began his political career in the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1967. In 1974, he became one of the youngest governors in the country and served as the 21st governor of Oklahoma from 1975 to 1979. He also served three terms in the United States Senate from 1979 to 1994 and was the longest serving chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
He was widely respected for his ability to work across party lines. His 2008 book A Letter to America argued in favour of his philosophy of bipartisanship. David was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1988. When he retired from the Senate in 1994, he became the last Democrat to represent Oklahoma in the Upper House.
He followed his time in Washington at the University of Oklahoma, where David served as the 13th and second-longest serving president from 1994 to 2018. Years prior, in 1985, he had founded the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, dedicated to recognizing and supporting public school students and teachers. David officially announced his retirement as president of the University of Oklahoma in 2017, and stepped down in June 2018.
We regret to announce the death of Zambia's first Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Wilkinson Kunda, who was an astute Mathematician with the University of Zambia prior to his retirement.
We are deeply saddened by the news of Professor Jean Le Tourneux's passing in Montreal. He arrived at Oxford in 1959 to study Physics.
It is with sadness that we learned of the passing of Mr John Brett Gardener (1930-2025). He died peacefully on 13 February 2025.
In 1948, in his first year at UCT, he was elected as the Diocesan College Rhodes Scholar and took up his place at Magdalen College, Oxford between 1950 and 1951. Sadly, a combination of ill-health and acute homesickness cut short his Oxford studies under CS Lewis and he picked up at UCT again in 1951. There he obtained a BA with distinctions in Classical Culture and English and went on to complete an MA and a BEd before joining the Wynberg staff, where he remained for seven years.
In 1962 he joined the Bishops staff and taught English and Latin there until 1970 when he was appointed Headmaster of Kingswood College, Grahamstown (today, Makhanda.) His Bishops career resumed in 1975, serving as Vice-Principal from 1977 to 1988. At the end of 1988, he succeeded the late John Peake as Principal, becoming the first OD, the first South African and the first grandfather to be appointed to that office. In 1992 he retired but retained a keen, undimmed interest in the school serving on the College Council and numerous of its sub-committees and becoming an honorary Vice-President of the OD Union.
Our condolences go to Sue, his wife, and to his sons James and Andrew, and their families.
We were saddened to learn of the passing of Roger Barrett.
Roger was born in Cape Town and grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), at Plumtree School, where his father was a housemaster and taught science and mathematics, and his mother taught music. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, choosing that subject due to the availability of bursaries in a colony that needed engineers. However, he stayed on for an MSc in Physics and then won a Rhodes Scholarship, becoming the second of three brothers to arrive at Worcester, playing hockey and squash for the college. He was an early user of computers in researching nuclear forces and structure, programming a large machine installed in a house in South Parks Road. In 1961, in Worcester Chapel, he married Barbara, another graduate student in theoretical physics.
In 1963 they moved to New York as post-docs, Roger working with C.S. Wu. After a stint in Berkeley, and wanting to raise a family in the UK, Roger took up a lectureship at Battersea College of Technology, which soon became the new University of Surrey. He was based there for the rest of his career. In addition to his lecturing (notably teaching quantum mechanics to Jim Al-Khalili), Roger’s wide-ranging research included calculating the effect of a nuclear charge distribution on the energy levels of the surrounding particles, using parameters now known as “Barrett radii”.
Beyond academia, Roger was known for his passion for music, both as an accomplished pianist and as a keen singer in local choirs and opera groups. Even in the face of illness, he maintained his humour and gratitude for life, cherishing the years spent with his loved ones.
The Rhodes Trust is deeply grateful that Roger remembered the Trust in his Will.