Geoff Cordey

“Geoff” May 1940 – June 2025: The sudden death of Geoff deprives this village of a good friend and an eminent scientist. He and his first wife Anne moved into Sotwell in 1973, and as is so often the way with village friendships, much began at the gates of Brightwell School, in this instance when two little boys, Julian Cordey and Jason Debney, turned up for their first day of school in May 1974. Geoff seized that moment to start a Saturday morning boys football game, and followed it up with an invitation to join them camping.

 By 1977 his camping initiative had grown to 4 village families and 8 children, which in time became lunchtime drinks for 5 couples, and then long, long, Sunday lunches. After nearly 50 years we continue to meet every 3 months, which for over 40 years has always begun with a Weigh-In, essentially a peer group weight watchers club. Mercifully we have now forgotten why this odd ritual began. Geoff always supervised the scales and declared each result to an eager circle of friends, whilst Tony Lascelles has archived our weights now carefully preserved on a multicoloured scroll beginning to take on biblical proportions.

 Geoff was a wartime baby born in Sheffield as the Battle of Britain filled the skies, sadly losing his mother at a very early age. Curiously, he seemed destined for South Oxfordshire whilst still in school. At Firth Park Grammar School it rapidly became apparent he had a natural gift for mathematics; he once admitted it seemed unfair but he intuitively knew what was being taught. His physics teacher, aware of the opportunities that a nuclear age might offer such a talent, planned a career that by September 1959 saw Geoffrey reading Applied Mathematics at Kings College, London. He stayed on as a post graduate researcher submitting a PhD in Theoretical Physics by July 1964, just five years after leaving school.

 He moved from college to Harwell, and then in 1965 to the newly formed Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, where he spent the rest of his working life becoming part of the multi-national Joint European Torus [JET] team in 1978. A Google search will reveal he published around 200 scientific papers collaborating with other fusion scientists in the USA and Japan. Some 30 years after we became close friends I picked up enough courage to explain I really didn’t have a clue what he did every day after the Culham bus collected him at the Chestnut tree. He thought for a minute and came up with an explanation that went something like this: “Tony you are a geologist and I assume your work is trying to understand what happened millions of years ago. I am concerned with particle physics trying to understand what happens in that millionth of a second when we can persuade atoms to collide. My job is to capture what occurs in that millionth of a second, it’s a bit like making one of your geological maps, but just a bit quicker.”

 We first met at Kings College on our first day at university anticipating our children’s first day at primary school by some fifteen years. 1959/62 was a time of great music and we would meet on Saturday evenings at the Union Jazz Club listening to Lyttleton and Barber, and later Tommy Steele and The Stones. He met his first wife, Anne, at one of those evenings; they married in 1963 and celebrated their Golden Wedding a few weeks before she sadly died in 2013.

 He had a quiet but surprisingly energetic personality. In London he worked as a part-time groundsman at the Wimbledon All England Tennis Club, and also in the Union bar. Here he variously helped organise distribution of The Villager, played his golf at Hadden Hill, and was a stalwart of the village walking club, organising the most recent walk, appropriately along village byways, just days before he died. In retirement he travelled, no bucket list, just a joy in new places and faces, one of whom, Sheila, became his second wife in 2018. But it was bridge that defined the man at play, a pastime that ran throughout his life. He would talk of games with his stepmother, “Aces Mabel”, and in London he played most lunchtimes in the Union bar. He was a long-standing member of the Wallingford Bridge Club, where he will be remembered as a founding member of a foursome that played with villagers such as Fred Hayworth, Joan Everex, and Keith Owen. It still runs regularly. His last game was away with Sheila at a bridge weekend just eight days before his death. I feel sure the Cordey Game will continue under the watching brief of Irene Lascelles, whilst the remaining six of us will continue to meet for Sunday lunches, although perhaps it’s time to retire the shirt of our weight reader extraordinaire.

 Tony Debney