Benedict Cosmo Harry Judd
1st May 1995 – 26th October 2006
Memorial Service Address
Port Regis
Friday 17th November 2006
Benedict was gloriously disorganised in his personal presentation, and it is not inappropriate that today, the day of his Memorial Service, has been designated Odd-Sock Day at Port Regis, with all the children remembering their friend with this tribute to his idiosyncratic style and each donating £1 of their pocket-money to the Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance Service. Hair too was usually in disarray; trousers at half-mast; glasses and boy seldom in the same place; and laces – you have got to be joking! – whilst his cubi in the boarding house had a certain … character!
He was not too unsystematic, however, to show a strong entrepreneurial streak. Gordon and Nadine found £1 and 50-pence pieces peppering his belongings – he had been flogging free Times posters to his mates at £1.50 a go; so much for the “no cash” and “no trading” rule at Port Regis! – whilst at home his piggy bank was bulging with savings, which, he declared, would form the core of a mortgage down-payment on a house he would purchase whilst he studied Architecture at university. Here was a boy with an acute sense of purpose, even if his grasp of house prices was, as yet, a little undeveloped! (I’m told, incidentally, that he also had a racket going flogging T shirts. I’m still looking into that one ….)
Benedict’s approach to learning was also a little unconventional, but he was a boy who really loved reading. Bridgit James e-mailed me from the D forms two years ago to say, “Benedict has just finished “The Wind Singer ” which he enjoyed very much, and he actually told me what a good book it was. He sometimes had to be asked to put it away because we were ready to move on to something else!”
This immersion in the world of the imagination produced the most extraordinary creative writing. His poem “Penguin Father and Son”, with its astonishingly perceptive grasp of the love and trust between a child and its parents, won first prize in the U10 SATIPS National Poetry Competition, and another, “My Owl Cousin”, was published in the Young Writers’ poetry anthology Once Upon a Rhyme and read quite beautifully today by Caspar. This term he wrote an uproariously irreverent celebration of the arch baddies from the Lord of the Rings trilogy entitled Orks : “Green and Mean, Big and Bad, Dirty and Burpy. Good is food, Fighting’s fun, Running’s dumb” it started, and it concluded with the triumphant acclamation “Orks for Ever!”
He loved interesting words and was fascinated by the subtleties of meaning, and he was very much the sort of boy that you remember long after you have taught him. Indeed, Benedict was a very clever boy, with a Verbal IQ which put him in the top 1% of the population, and a Non-Verbal Reasoning score last year which registered 140, right at the top of the scale. He won the Annual Form Progress Prize at the end of his first year, as well as the Chess Prize, and month by month, term by term, we watched with excitement and pleasure as Benedict lengthened his academic stride as he responded, with an ever keener sense of direction, to some fine teaching and a happy boarding environment, in which he found stability and continuity after his previously nomadic schooling as part of an Army family.
Benedict much enjoyed the practical side of Science – rockets and bangs were right up his street! – and alongside this was a real love of Technology. He pottered and tinkered and came up with some fascinating ideas, figuring out most of the designs in his head before any paperwork took place. His last idea was a tank that, instead of firing at you, would offer you a choice of pencil. How very civilised! Naturally, Benedict whizzed through his car project last year in no time at all and went on to making a boat. Not just any old boat, you understand, but one with three motors, one of which drove a fan to propel it in case the others became clogged in the weed of Bob’s Pond. He had huge fun testing it – much to the dismay of the ducks! Benedict was very proud to be included in the Supertechies scholarship group. Part of their lessons involved “ disassembly ”, but, in Benedict’s mind, this was just a posh term for “ demolition ”, and when he carried out one of his enthusiastic examinations of a CD player or an electric drill, the parts didn’t always go back together quite as they were intended! The outcome of all of this experimentation was, of course, valuable learning, and it gave Benedict tremendous experience and confidence. His determination to find out more and work to reach a goal was the very thing that would have given him the opportunity to succeed in his application for a Technology scholarship to his senior school.
This fascination with technology communicated itself to his hobbies: lego; model-making; endless drawings of brilliantly original matchstick men in action, as well as creatures from his imagination and characters from his beloved Warhammer games, which he played for hours with his friends. He would keep everything in case he could put it to good use later: envelopes, pieces of wood, hundreds and hundreds of conkers. Tuck Box tidy-up at the end of term was something very special!!
Outside the classroom and studio, Benedict loved the rough and tumble of a boy’s life in the country. Den building in the woods and mud slinging in Devil’s Gorge. Were those his jeans beneath all the mud? Who knew and who cared? He even won the indoor den-building competition in his boarding house two years in a row! More formally it meant Rugby , and Benedict was a hugely enthusiastic and most promising player, who had been part of a unbeaten Colts team last year. Perhaps it was his Rugby skills that got him so effortlessly past the matrons in the morning as they tried to check on hair, shirt, shoes and the like! Photographs record his dishevelled figure launching itself into rucks, often with a bright orange mouthguard sticking recklessly out of his mouth, or standing reflectively between plays, conspicuous in his 1970s short shorts, gazing into the middle distance with poetry no doubt temporarily erasing the focus of the game. Languishing in the Health Centre one day, despite being too ill to eat or drink, Benedict began to plead with the nurses to be allowed to get up and join his team mates for an away match that afternoon. It was only when his mother intervened and took him home that he finally conceded defeat!
But despite his huge enthusiasm for the hurly burly of his sport and free time, Benedict was a gentle boy, who would very happily abandon the game of knee rugby in the corridor to return to his beloved book at reading time. He gravitated instinctively to other boys who were sensitive and thoughtful as he was. When Hironori arrived in the D forms from Japan with almost no English, Benedict took him under his tender wing and the two established a strong friendship. He was impeccably courteous too – one who would turn to the Librarian as he was leaving with a book under his arm and smile, “I just wanted to say have a good week, Mrs Mead”.
He was also a boy blessed with an intuitive sense of self-awareness, who responded beautifully to any exercise in self-assessment. During his first year, in the E forms, he wrote, “Hello, I’m Benedict. Some people call me Judge! I would describe myself as shy and sporty.” The next few words are in Benedict script but seem to suggest, “I have fun building model aircraft”, and he concludes, “Friendship, loyalty and God are important”. He was 8 years old.
Three years later we detect the same perceptiveness, but, with maturity, has come a deliciously whacky sense of humour:
“What I’m good at : Rugby, Cycling, Being myself and Eating (and, boy, did he love eating!);
What I need to improve : “Cricket, Not losing my glasses, Stop hitting my brother”;
What do you do in Break times? : “I’m not telling”;
Likes : “Bath Rugby Club, U2, Food, Girls”;
Dislikes, “Broccoli – or at least I think that is what he wrote – Arsenal and Chelsea (good boy!) … and Tony Blair (even better boy!)”
His address is put unambiguously and patriotically as “England ”!
The book Benedict was reading as half term approached was Lord Brocktree by Brian Jacques. The story concludes with Snowstripe, the young badger drifting off to sleep.
Snowstripe yawned, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Russano gathered his little son up, still wrapped in his shawl. “Come on, matey, time you were in bed… Your mother and I have often told you and Melanius the law of the Badger Lords. Can you remember what we said?”
As they mounted the stairs, Snowstripe’s eyelids began to droop, but he recited by heart the lessons he had been taught. “Defend the weak, protect both young and old, never desert your friends. Give justice to all, be fearless in battle and always ready to defend the right.”
Benedict’s family and friends, both at school and at home, have surrendered a very special treasure. But, to recall the words of William Wordsworth, we feel a thousand times richer than if we had never possessed it. The Ancient Greeks would console themselves with the notion that he, whom the Gods love, dies young. So too we, I suspect, look for some divine purpose in this grievous loss, but we know that Benedict is now safe with God and that he is looking forward to being reunited with his beloved family and with all of us who held him so close to our hearts. In the meantime he lives on immortal, carried lovingly in the memories of all of us, and we should now all celebrate his life and strive for happiness. Benedict was such a happy boy – he will not be wanting it any other way.