[ Post a Response | The Old Skinners' Message Board ]
Posted by stephen yates on February 17, 2009, 2:21 pm
I was a friend of Nigel Dent who attended Skinners' between 67 and 74. We stayed in touch throughout his college years. He studied Theology at Kings' College London before moving to Oxford to do a doctorate on the existentialist Gabriel Marcel. Whilst he was at Kings' he lost his faith for a time and had planned to go into teaching. He met his wife Philippa at some point in the early 80's and somehow we lost touch after that. When I came online I often googled him: most people turn up one way or another and the fact that he didn't worried me. Another Skinners' pupil recently suggested to me that he had become a prison chaplain - which really surprised me. When I googled 'Fr Nigel Dent' I got a link to a memorial to a late Dr Nigel Dent at a parish in Northamptonshire. I finally plucked up the courage to phone the vicarage there, hoping that this was for another Nigel Dent entirely. This proved not to be the case and a week or so later his widow phoned me and we had a long chat about the missing years. Nigel became a priest shortly after they were married and was a prison chaplain at Wormswood Scrubs for a while before moving to Duston to take on parish work. He was diagnosed with leukemia on his birthday in April 2000. He underwent four out of five rounds of chemotherapy before finally asking that the treatment be stopped. By this time the disease had gone into remission but reappeared in January 2001. Nigel died in April 2001.
My own time at Skinners' was not really a happy one and it was Nigel's compassionate friendship that saw me through the worst of it. He was a friendly, well-liked and easy-going boy as well as a meticulous student (compared with me, at least). Underneath the relaxed and kindly exterior, however, was a profound and sometimes troubled soul as his letters to me occasionally revealed. There is a memorial for him at Duston Parish Church which is an indication of the warmth of feeling that his untimely death generated among his parishioners.
Responses: