Roderick Braithwaite (1932-2026) - an appreciation of a life

The death of Roderick Braithwaite is not only a sad loss to his family and close friends but also to the whole Mill Hill School community, not least the Old Millhillians Club. He was a life-long supporter of the School and the Club and was one of our most distinguished alumni as an historian and author.

He entered Mill Hill School as one of the first Bursary holders under the Middlesex Scheme in 1945 and was a member of Winterstoke House, becoming a monitor and Head of House, before reading Modern Languages on a scholarship to  Queens’ College, Cambridge. A career in industry followed and culminated in his role as Chief Executive of Charles Barker Human Resources. In addition Roddy served as a non-executive director in the public sector for 20 years, but he is best known to Old Millhillians as a professional historian.

Author of a total of seven books, in 2007 Roddy published the history of the School, titled “Strikingly live…..”,The History of the Mill Hill School Foundation, celebrating 200 years since the founding of the School by Samuel Favell and Dr John Pye Smith as a non-conformist, non-denominational establishment. This beautifully crafted and forensically detailed book is only the second history of Mill Hill School to be published after Norman Brett-James wrote The History of Mill Hill School in 1909. As Roddy himself writes, his book was “the work of ten year’s continuous research” and it sought to create “a record accessible to all the sections of the wider Mill Hill community.” It will be a very long time before anyone attempts the same task that Roddy so comprehensively fulfilled.

My first meeting with Roddy was in late 2015 when I was President of the Old Millhillians Club and he asked to meet me to discuss another subject within his historian focus, namely Peter Collinson. He explained that, in conjunction with the Mill Hill Preservation Society (MHPS), he was keen that Collinson’s achievements as an amateur botanist and enthusiastic horticulturalist should be commemorated within the School’s estate by the creation of a Heritage Garden and he asked me to take this idea forward and make it a reality. Thanks to an expert and determined working party which included Roddy, and to the support of the Foundation, the OM Club and the MHPS, the Mill Hill Peter Collinson Heritage Garden, planted with 53 of the 181 species of trees, shrubs and flowers introduced to Britain by Collinson during the first half of the 18th century, opened in June 2018. The Garden continues to prosper in its location at the west end of the main school building, overlooked from the Crick Room which celebrates another of Mill Hill’s distinguished alumni.

Along with Roddy’s 2007 book on Mill Hill School, the Peter Collinson Heritage Garden provides a lasting legacy of Roddy’s affection and determination of purpose to the Mill Hill School Foundation. This was recognised by the OM Club awarding him The President’s Badge for services to the Club in 2018 which he received with his typical modesty. His interest and awareness of the Foundation and the Club continued even as his health failed in recent years. My last correspondence with Roddy in 2024 revealed that his humour, his keen eye for detail and his affection for all things Mill Hill had not waned. With his passing the Mill Hill community and, more importantly, his family must say farewell to a charming, gifted and, above all, loyal man who made truly significant contributions to the wider community and, perhaps in particular, to all things MIllhillian.

Dr Russell Cowan