The obituary notice of Sir Jeremy CHANCE

German connection
I am truly saddened to hear of Jeremy's death, which occurred eight months ago unbeknownst to Eckhard and me. Both Jeremy and his late wife Tiggy were tremendous supporters of the Arts. Criccieth Festival owes its very existence and their early success and tireless effort. They were also Patrons of The Chapel of Art and the International Potters Path. Jeremy was a talented amateur artist himself. Like my father, he served with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during WWII. His memories of undercover naval reconnaissance in a one-man submarine into enemy-held France were sadly not published. During our thirty plus years of friendship, we discovered a very strange set of coincidences. It transpired Jeremy's father served on Sir Neville Henderson's staff in Germany prior to World War II, so Jeremy was briefly sent to boarding school in Hindelang, Bavaria where he was struck by appendicitis and duly taken to a local sanatorium where a Prof. Dr. Gerl performed an emergency operation. In the summer of 1976, I met and befriended a German couple from Marburg on Criccieth beach and many years later I visited them in Vorder Hindelang in a house neighbouring Jeremy's old school. Here they introduced me to Anni Gerl, who was the daughter-in-law of the late Prof. Dr. Gerl. When Anni visited us in Criccieth in 1995, Jeremy was delighted to tell his story of the "neatest appendix scar even seen in Britain". A couple of years after that a medical history researcher contacted me about Professor Gerl, so I was able to introduce Jeremy. Such a small world -- so klein ist die Welt.