Dr. Cyril Latimer

Dr Cyril Latimer was, for many years, the driving force behind the SUCC Veterans. He has written this book. The Preface is featured here. 

James Rodgers

Preface

In my eighty-fifth year, I have decided to gather and print some autobiographical material together with my mostly non-academic, published and unpublished Bits and Pieces under an appropriately pretentious title.  The slender volume will not be for sale but will be given to some friends and family.  Copies may also be available on request. The bits and pieces are Invited Speeches as well as Eulogies, Obituaries and invited pieces written for the Sydney University Cricket Club (SUCC) Foundation Newsletters, Contributions to Newspapers such as The Belfast Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald and TON TALK:  The Newsletter of the Royal Navy TON Class Association and the RANSA Newsletter that I edited for some years. Rather than being arranged chronologically, the Bits and Pieces are organised under main and sub-headings that depict the major and minor phases, obsessions and confessions of my life: Belfast, The University of Sydney, Cricket, Sailing, Family, Ornithology and Irish “History”.

This book is not intended to be one that, once you pick it up, you cannot put it down, and the fond hope is that it will not be a book that, once you put it down, you cannot pick it up.  We have all read and not read such books. The work, having no obvious theme or continuity, is more of the “Coffee Table” variety, to be dipped into rather than read section after section.  Interspersed throughout the book are some of my favourite short poems, sometimes with commentary and context where appropriate and sometimes not.  I emphasise the shortness of these poems and songs – I do love “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Lady of Shalott”, but not here.