Philip W. Midwinter (61-65) died on 26th December 2023 as reported to the College by his wife of 52 years Alison. He was aged 75 and, with Alison, had two children Jeremy and Pippa. 

At the Nautical College Philip was in Harbinger Division and won the Maitland Cup in 1965. Along with at least 18 other OPs in the 1965-68 period, he joined the P&O shipping line after the NCP.

Philip came from a local family that for several generations had owned a fruit farm near Wallingford. At some point in the early 1970s he left the sea and moved ashore to run the business. By the early 1990s “we felt we had got to the end of the road with our business and we didn’t want to make it any bigger,” he told the Wallingford Herald newspaper. So he sold up and moved north.

The 1993 issue of The Pangbournian recorded that in 1991 he had purchased a guest house called Low Jock Scar and six acres near Kendal in Cumbria, a 20-minute drive from Lake Windermere. He and Alison were running the guesthouse at the time with no staff but still felt that they had a better quality of life than previously. Limited expansion was to follow.

The next that is heard from Philip was a letter to the OP Society in 2003. “We’ve been up here for 12 years now and our Country Guesthouse business is going very well and we survived the (2001) foot-and-mouth crisis. The fruit farm years seem a long time ago, but it is obvious we made the right decision since 50 per cent of the apple acreage has gone in those 12 years.”

Eventually the Midwinters sold up and moved south to the Crawley area in West Sussex. Here Philip became a volunteer at Crawley Open House for the homeless. Contributions on the website Much Loved after his death described him as “a special man,” stating that “he was always wanting to help others. He is missed by many.”