Funeral service of Br. Allen Geppert
The funeral service of Br. Allan Geppert took place on Tuesday November 30th following his passing on November 2. At the service, Br. Tom Cooney delivered the following eulogy for his life-long friend.
The District is mourning the passing of Br. Allen Geppert whose death occurred on Tuesday November 2nd. His funeral will take place on Tuesday November 30th at 10am and you can view the service on Zoom.
I’m grateful for the invitation to say these few words about our Brother, Allen Geppert, as we prepare to lay him to rest. Our lives have been intertwined for the past 70 years, since 1951.
Allen was born 16 years earlier in 1935, in Warsaw, as Jerzy Tadeusz Geppert, the third child in a family living in comfortable circumstances. There were spa treatments for illnesses, and the children had a governess. All that changed when war came in September 1939. The father Tadeusz was cut off in London; he was Director of a Polish Government Dept and was arranging for the transfer of shipping in the event of hostilities. His mother Jadwiga, now alone with the family, had also been doing some volunteer work at a centre receiving emergency field telephone messages.
The account she wrote for Allen in 1956 of what happened next is heart-rending. It is also horrific, given that we now know that both she and her husband lost close relatives in the Nazi extermination camps. Their eldest girl Anna was placed with her grandparents, while for the next 7 months Jadwiga did her best to find refuge and sustenance for Teresa and Jerzy. They lost everything: house, valuables, property. But somehow in April 1940 Jadwiga succeeded to bring her two youngest children down through Poland, across Czechoslovakia, to Vienna (still not safe), then through the Alps into Italy and down to Rome.
Within a month there came the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands , and Jadwiga made urgent preparations to move on. The Nazi encircling attack through the Ardennes left little time, but Jadwiga managed to take the children to St Malo and on to the last ferry to Southampton in early June 1940. A brave, resourceful mother. Jerzy, she wrote, never cried or complained.
With hindsight it was a privilege for me to meet both his mother and his father when I first met Jerzy. It was in London in mid-July 1951, on a station platform, where our families had gathered to bid us farewell on our way to the Brothers’ Novitiate. It would be some years before we saw home again. However, for Allen (the name he now took), it was not his first time away from home. To keep him safe from German bombing, his parents placed him at the tender age of 7 as a boarder in Marden Hill, a large country property in Hertfordshire which housed boarders evacuated from St Joseph’s College, Beulah Hill. Among them was the 8-year old Anton de Roeper, another life-long friend. Marden Hill also housed young French Brothers of the Quimper Province, evacuated from Guernsey at the very time he had escaped from St Malo. Allen always joked that 1941 was when he really joined the Order. Did he also begin to hone his linguistic skills at this early age?
In the changes that followed the end of WW2, both Jerzy and Anton moved to St Peter’s School in Southbourne, which the Brothers took over from the Jesuits. And that is where we join the list printed in the Mass booklet: in 1949 Jerzy moved across from the Boarding department into the Juniorate where he rejoined Anton de Roeper.
Although at different stages of formation, all three of us overlapped in the first half of the 1950s both in Assington Hall and in our teacher-training in Hopwood Hall. On qualifying in 1956, Allen began his teaching life back in St Peter’s and in the Juniorate. Our Br Francis Tyson here, at that time himself a Junior, remembers him from those days as both able and likeable. And after the-then traditional first posting of three years, he was granted a year France to perfect his budding language skills. And perfect them he did: when in Brittany with him in the early 80s, I remember the local Bretons trying to work out from which part of France he must have come. They deduced from somewhere in the south and they were not far out. He had learnt well from the boys in St Etienne, on the upper Loire not too far from Lyon.
On return to England in 1960, he made his Final Profession, his life-long commitment to be a Brother. His skills were then put to good use in the Modern Languages Dept at St John’s College, Southsea, one of the few schools nationally to gain entry to the Direct Grant list in 1958. He was also a firm but genial Housemaster in one of the Boarding Houses. Allen was always happy to be in Southsea.
After a short break in St Peter’s, he returned to Southsea and embarked on a completely new challenge, the introduction of Russian into the school. Within a few years, his Sixth Formers were gaining University entrance in Russian, which made Allen look to his own qualifications. And so in 1976 he went up to Oxford. As part of the course he spent a year at the State University in Kiev, where he happened to be joined by one of his own former students who was studying in Leeds. Stephen Dalziel went on to become Russian expert for the military establishment in Sandhurst for several years, and then the Russian correspondent for the BBC World Service for a further 16. Allen said nothing, but took quiet pride in it, I’m sure.
After Oxford Allen spent a year teaching in Jersey, but the situation was a mismatch. And so he came to London where Russian was still an option among the Modern Languages, and settled in happily as Bursar to our Community. The boys benefited from his teaching skills (he had their loyalty since he always supported the underdog), and the Staff soon came to appreciate his culinary skills – he regularly provided the curry for end-of-term parties in the Staff Common Room.
This renewed contact led me to appreciate that Allen had learnt to cope with loneliness. Whereas the rest of the Brothers had family members living, if not locally, then at reachable distance within the country, Allen lacked that sort of contact with surviving relatives. Anna, his oldest sister, was in Latin America; Andrew, his younger brother, in the United States. The nearest was his sister Teresa in Dublin. It therefore mattered deeply to Allen when his 50th birthday was marked by a visit from Teresa and Peter and their children. As part of his coping, he enjoyed the freedom to ride his motor-bike (a Suzuki 250 complete with a Solidarnosc sticker on the top-box) out into the countryside, to feel the force of the airstream and to take in the vistas. He always wanted to feel free.
But heart trouble surfaced soon after, and by late 1986 Allen required surgery for a triple bypass. We nearly lost him. I remember receiving a phone call from the hospital in the middle of the night to say that a further procedure was underway, and I passed on the worrying news by fax to Teresa in Dublin. We now know how successful the operation was. It led to his life as a translator, 34 years in all, outstripping his 30 years as a teacher.
After convalescence, Allen at first tried to resume his life as a teacher, but it soon became clear that he was not going to regain the stamina needed for school life. Eventually he decided to apply for early retirement on health grounds, and this was received with both sympathy and generosity by our local (Croydon) Education Officers. They arranged the necessary Medical, and then enhanced his pension entitlement by a number of years of reckonable service.
Allen at this point found himself in a very dark place. To begin retirement is difficult enough at any age, but he was only 51. Personally I felt badly about the situation, as I was due to leave London in order to join up with Br Anton de Roeper, now Vice Chancellor in Bethlehem University. But Allen was saved by the bell. A phone call came from Rome, from Br Joseph Hendron newly elected General Councillor (now here in St Helens): the Mother House serving our international Order was desperately in need of translators. Would Allen like to help? He rose to the occasion.
And so began his 16 years in Rome on his new apostolate. The fact that the Pope himself was Polish no doubt eased the transition, and the Iron Curtain itself was beginning to come apart at the seams. In his mundane work, Allen soon discovered that his particular ability was with documents rather than simultaneous translation, and he quickly added Italian to his skill set. Over the years there have come countless translations. These cover at least 4 General Chapters, Institute Circulars, Superiors’ Letters, Cahiers Lasalliens, Institute Histories, and many individual works some of the latter now acknowledging his identity. His particular skill is in enabling the work to be read as if English were the original language. Br Paul Grass, Secretary General for most of the 1990s. writes from Minneapolis:
I admired his expert, dependable, tenacious, direct, and relentless personality as a translator. His perspective on the life of the Brother and the reality of the world combined to signify strength in daily life and over the long haul. In the international atmosphere of 476 Via Aurelia, his humor at table, his ready riposte to anything said or happening in our multicultural, multilingual community that set him on alert status, and his predictable excellence remain with me in memory. God bless Allen!
His abiding concern for the underdog led him to champion the cause of the Eritrean refugees who had been given shelter in the Mother House. Allen would always side with refugees.
Br Anton and I used to see Allen regularly, during our twice-yearly, meetings with funding agencies in the Vatican. My own fond memory of him from those days is twofold, one in Rome and one in Palestine. One evening in Rome, after a full day in offices of Chiese Orientali, we adjourned for dinner to a small family restaurant near the Mother House. There, just inside the door in an individual seat normally reserved for a Vatican official, sat Allen, blissfully enjoying a succulent lobster. No doubt it was well earned, and the happy picture remains with me. Anton invited him to visit us in Bethlehem, somewhere in the early 90s after the 1st Gulf War and before the border check-points went in. He took his own time visiting Jerusalem, 6 miles to the north and across the border, and expressed interest in visiting Hebron, 12 miles or so to the south within the Occupied Territories. His aim was to see the Tombs of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, and Joseph who was brought back from Egypt). The local name is the Haram el Khalil (Shrine of the Friend). Owing to the proximity of hawkish settlers there, Hebron is not always safe and I checked the current situation before we set out together. Allen took his time there, seeing everything, but there was tension in the air by the time we left the Shrine. When we reached the central crossroads, Palestinian teenagers were lobbing stones up at the Israeli sentry-posts above, and tear-gas grenades were already being fired down in reply. At such times we normally trusted in the yellow (i.e. Israeli) number-plates on our minibus and in the dashboard notice saying Bethlehem University in Arabic and English. This time I felt really safe, with mighty Allen alongside me on my right wrapped in an enormous black and white keffiyeh, and I put my foot down and kept going. Allen was gracious about the experience; he thought the Herod the Great’s Haram the most memorable of the buildings he had seen anywhere in the Holy Land.
Both Anton and I subsequently joined Allen in Rome to serve in different capacities. We were thus able to witness Allen enjoying a truly great family gathering/reunion. It was, if I remember aright, in the Jubilee Year 2000, when he celebrated the 40th anniversary of his Final Vows. A really special group: Anna came from Brazil with her son, Teresa with husband Peter from Dublin, and Andrew and wife from the U.S. The first time all four children had been together for many, many years.
Allen returned home to Southsea in 2003 and settled in while continuing his work. He renewed his acquaintance with a former student, Dan Davies, who lived nearby, and made friends with David Dickinson, a fellow vinophile. He thus enjoyed occasional day-trips to Cherbourg with David on wine-buying expeditions. Brothers here will have seen David’s full tribute to Allen available in our Lounge, and so I will quote only its conclusion:
Br Allen was a great friend, and one of the half-a-dozen people I have had the privilege to meet who have had a profound effect on my life.
These firm friendships continued after Allen left Southsea in 2009 to move into the splendid Care facilities at Clayton Court. Allen continued to help Dan with his occasional journeys to Romania with a vanful of charitable supplies. Dan reports on Allen’s gift of communication: way over in furthest Transylvania, after a shared bottle of wine, Allen had so related to a wood-carver who was a deaf-mute that the latter presented him with two large live turkeys in gratitude as they left. Dan reports that they did not make good passengers as they started back, but what worried Dan even more was that their next stop was a buffalo farm…
Allen was well cared for and loved by the staff at Clayton Court. He worked away at his translations, but he still valued his freedom to get out and about. By then, however, his own transport had shrunk to a 50 cc moped. But people came to him as well. Above all, there was a great gathering of family and friends there for his 80th birthday, and this time there were grand-nieces and nephews, the next generation, who came to meet their great uncle. Br Anton, God rest him, still with us at that point.
Illness struck not so long after that, and he began the treatment on his oesophagus which ultimately led to his having to be peg-fed. For the last 3 years this state of dependency was admirably covered by Cheryl Ward and her team who saw to his every need. And that included his psychological needs: it was a thoughtful touch to provide him with a mobility scooter. Allen didn’t usually indulge in reminiscence, but he told me more than once how much he had appreciated riding along the sea-front in Southsea on an outing arranged for him, enjoying the vistas with the wind blowing in his face. At the same time he made every effort to maintain companionship with the Community, joining them at table even though he was only an observer.
When he transferred to St Helens in September, that scooter had pride of place in our front hall and Allen had every intention of exploring our environs. He settled in well and made new friends but within two weeks suffered from a hernia complication which required two spells in hospital. He had years before endured a strangulated hernia, but this time in his weakened state he contracted pneumonia which, in spite of further hospital treatment, inevitably placed too much strain on the heart which had served him so well since the by-pass surgery 35 years ago. Readmitted into hospital overnight, he slipped away peacefully on All Souls Day, and died that afternoon with our Manager Maureen at his side. May he rest in peace.
His monument is all around us, not just in the Libraries, but on the book-shelves in all of our rooms. And above all his translation of our Rule directly affects our lives as Brothers each day.
Until recently Allen had been able to enjoy the good things in life, but he continued to enjoy companionship and he did not reminisce. In St. Paul’s words he always pressed on:
Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil.3:13)
I think he would like to be remembered in terms of St Luke’s gospel telling of our Lord’s mercy in this life and especially at its end, together with His promise of table-fellowship with Him in the life to come. May we all look forward to joining him there in God’s good time. For the present, let us now commend his soul to Our Lord and Saviour.