Many older scale modellers will remember John Catlow of the Maidstone MBC who has just died after a short illness. John was very active in the MPBA scale section in the 1970s and, among many other things, lent his professional seafaring knowledge to the development of scale course design.
John's son Richard has written to Paul Freshney and his email is reproduced below. I will post further details of John's funeral when they become available.
Colin
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Dear Paul,
Apologies if this is something of a bolt out of the blue, but I have some sad news for you. My Dad, John Catlow passed away on the 3rd February after a (thankfully) very short illness battling Leukemia.
You may not be aware, but I emigrated to Wellington, New Zealand, two and a half years ago, with partner Heidi and son, Haydn. We are all planning to return in the next week or so to attend to what has to be done and we will pass on the details of the funeral arrangements once they have been decided.
Our distance from the UK makes contact with all of Dad's old model boating friends difficult and if possible it would be very helpful if you could pass on the news to those he knew from his association with the MPBA. We have a few contact details, but not many. He maintained his interest in model boating right to the end, taking an interest in my extremely slow and sporadic progress in building a Modellbau Sievers kit (7 years and counting......) He continued to take Model Boats until the end and was always passing on details of what was going on and what was new to the market in his regular e-mails and telephone calls to me. If you or any of the "old crowd" he knew are able to make the funeral, we would be very grateful and pleased to see you then.
Richard Catlow