Michael Graves-Morris
Class of 1960
Michael Graves-Morris (Mac’s, 1954-1960)
The following obituary was provided by Rory Clarke (Mac’s, 1955-1961).
Michael was born in Luton in September 1941. His paternal grandfather was a dentist in Oxford and his father started at Teddies in 1925 just as Henry Ewing Kendall took over the school.
Michael joined the school in 1954 just as Frank Fisher took over as Warden! He had been at Moorlands in Luton, a school, at which he later became a governor, and then a boarder at Aldwickbury in Harpenden. While there he was introduced to music which became a lifelong interest of his, especially the BBC Proms and Gilbert & Sullivan operas.
Michael came to Mac’s just as his father had done. He soon developed a talent for organising things, the most notable of which was the House Play production of R.C.Sherriff’s Journey’s End set in a WW1 dug out. For 2 years he worked out the way in which it could be presented in one of our top floor dormitories. He even devised a method for dimming floodlights using live wires taped to wooden rods separated in a Winchester bottle of electrolyte!
Michael became Head of Mac’s and later Head Boy leaving in the summer of 1960. He joined Vauxhall Motors in the Engineering Dept. simultaneously studying for an HND at Luton College of Technology, where was very active with the student’s union putting on plays, reviews and pantomimes and duly becoming its president.
He had various responsibilities as a production engineer for Vauxhall before moving to their Personnel Department. For 2 years he worked for General Motors as a personnel manager in Tunisia where they were setting up an assembly plant. Michael returned to Head Office in Luton to join the management team negotiating wage settlements. He was a member of the Bedford Branch of the Institute of Personnel Management and served a term as its President.
Michael married Carol in 1969 and they had two daughters Alice and Olivia and latterly two grandsons. As a family they loved the outdoors and spent holidays camping, often in France. When he retired, he and Carol both joined the Milton Keynes U3A branch where Michael joined the walking group for which he later took over the organiser’s role and over several years developed many new routes that the group still use.
Carol wrote to me “Mike had been living in care for 3 years and kept well throughout the pandemic …. He remained his pleasant and well-mannered self to the last, surprising us from time to time with a flash of his old self.”
Michael died peacefully on January 13th and was buried at St Michael’s Church Woburn Sands on February 3rd, 2022.
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