We still have no definite news of Capt. John Dowson (Royal Berks), who went missing in action exactly a year ago. However, the family has now posted this notice in the ‘In Memoriam’ column of the Times:

We have also received this touching tribute from Mr HC Bradby, his old housemaster at Rugby School:

‘Ingenui vultus puer, ingenuique pudoris.’

“Sometimes the oldest and stalest quotation revives with a new vigour and meaning in the mind, and no one who knew John Dowson could fail to find a new and unexpected freshness in that hackneyed line.

For the quality that most stood out in him was delightful ingeniousness, which sprang from a complete absence of vanity and self-consciousness and a readiness to respond to all that was friendly or beautiful or amazing in the world.

His intellectual abilities were curiously uneven. He was backward at most of the work which is done at schools and he became the ‘doyen’ of the Lower Middles. It was always a toss up in his Latin exercises whether Caesar would mount his horse or the horse mount Caesar, but when Shakespeare’s Caesar went out to his death on the Ides of March, no one could be more keenly alive than John to the situation; for he was a born actor, and was never so much himself as when imitating somebody else.

He was in short no reasoner, but an artist with a real love of beauty: and he showed it in his writing, for he could write with freshness and humour, as the pages of the ‘Draconian’ can testify; in his music too, for he was a most promising cellist, and sang as a boy with admirable taste; more recently he had shown it as well in some models for statuettes, which are remarkable for their suggestiveness and originality.

How far he could have gone as a musician or sculptor no one can say: undoubtedly there was in him a touch of genius struggling all the time for expression, and with more and more success.”

John was one of our most faithful and loving and beloved of Old Boys. It cheered us up to see his fine face and gloriously radiant smile, and indeed few boys have been so much loved by his comrades and masters and all who had dealings with him.

He was indeed ‘A boy of noble appearance and of a noble sense of honour.’