Dr Richard Bower, born 1933, died suddenly on August 2 after a fall in Rye earlier in the week and his funeral will be at St Mary’s at 2pm on September 11.
Since his retirement in 1992 from Booker McConnell PLC, when he travelled the world, initiating projects in over 16 countries as a soil surveyor and land planner with specialist sugar growing experience, Richard had made his home in Rye, where his younger sister’s family lived and worked. He took various voluntary jobs during his retirement including several years as Treasurer for Rye Museum, where he then continued as an enthusiastic guide at the Ypres Tower until his death.
He was a member of St Mary’s Church where he was treasurer to The Friends of St Mary’s for many years, more recently acting as a “Greeter” (to those arriving for services) until the week of his fall. He acted as rent collector for Rye Farmers Market and was a stalwart on various charitable fundraising committees around the town.
A quiet, gentle and unassuming man, many of his local friends will not have realised what an interesting and often exciting working life he had lead. After Sandhurst and ten years army service with secondments to both the Somali Scouts and the Aden Protectorate Levy, he took a BSc at the University College of Wales in Bangor followed by a PhD.
After a two year posting to Sabah with the Overseas Development Agency, he joined Booker McConnell in 1974 as one of their specialist soil experts and travelled from Paraguay to the Philippines and Papua New Guinea to Africa. He spent several years in Indonesian Kalimantan and was later in Iran, working on projects to halt the encroaching desert until the Shah was ousted.
A job in Equatorial Cameroon was curtailed by a bug which involved two or three days walking and crawling, with the help of his workers, to get out of the forest and reach their motorbikes to get back to a doctor.
He helped to make the desert bloom in Oman, made a short trip to Jordan -where he discovered the Secret Police headquarters, though claimed not to have gone inside.
Work in Kenya and Tanzania seemed to go quite smoothly, but a spell in Ethiopia ended when President Menghistu’s regime fell, and his team came out on the ex-president’s flight just in time. He returned later and was then held up by bandits who thankfully decided he was not of value to them just then.
He also returned to Somalia and was saddened to find all the work from an earlier project had been destroyed by rebels. He seemed to have a knack of surviving coups and revolutions wherever he was posted, one of the smallest being in 1979 in Papua New Guinea.
Photo: Biddy Cole