Robin Lamb (YG 1961)
23 November 2025
Old Scholars will be saddened to hear of the death of Robin (Larry) Lamb who was at Friends' School from 1954 to 1961. Dennis Procter Hutchinson (YG 1961) has written and collected the following testimonies of Robin's life.Robin Lamb died on the morning of 31st October with his family around him. He had been admitted to hospital some weeks earlier.Robin was born in 1943, his sister Ruth in 1944 and Alison in 1948 and was brought up in Maldon, Essex from the age of three or four years old where his parents, a bit later, ran a YHA hostel which gave sailing courses from 1957. He went to school there and as an Essex Scholar joined FSSW as a boarder. Robin spent two years at Loughborough when the options there were apparently either sport or carpentry ( thanks Dave Wicks.) I knew about the sport but not about the carpentry. Actually Robin studied electrical engineering at Loughborough. On leaving Loughborough he started work as a GPO engineer then moved to English Electric in research and development.Robin joined FSSW in September 1954. I was at school with Robin thus my involvement with others of his contemporaries in some words below about his life. He and I had two common interests swimming and sailing. Robin asked one summer if I would like to join a week’s sailing at his parents’ youth hostel which I very happily accepted. There followed many seasons of sailing for a week or more on the Blackwater estuary. We and our course members really learnt to sail. We had a few blue Board of Trade life jackets which we never wore. There was no rescue launch in attendance and our dinghies, The Bert, The Daddy and the like, carried cast iron ballast and would sink if not treated properly. Robin introduced me to sailing and thus three generations of our family for which we are hugely grateful. One night of the week we would all sail down the estuary to Bradwell where we would stay the night at the hostel there. We were always hungry, however, Mrs Lamb gave precedence to instructors for seconds at dinner, a dizzy height I achieved in my second year.Back at school, Robin was involved in arranging the swimming match fixtures against other local schools and being of the swimming club we could use the pool early Sunday mornings, our special privilege. Robin had the stamina and upper body strength that I lacked. We were not always able to field a full team for the events offered so one time we had no one for the backstroke event. Robin negotiated the presence of our secret weapon, a tiny little girl (Judy Watson?), and of course the all boys Bishops Stortford College agreed with a smirk. She must have had an outboard motor somewhere and destroyed her opposition.Robin was one of the most exceptional athletes of our time at FSSW; less spectacular than the dry land athletes but possessing a perfect front crawl and an amazing final burst of extra speed despite his asthma. Swimming took him to Loughborough, and John Ashby (YG 1961) visited with the Leeds swimming team where they were comprehensively beaten in every event by Robin and his fellow paddlers. Later Robin was a member of the Leicestershire water polo team. Swimmers Robin Lamb and Marijke Morris made a big splash at Wokingham's Carnival Pool by racing to victory in the centre's Carnival Swimming challenge' contest. The pool, in Wellington Road, set a challenge for all its members to swim 21 miles - the width of the English Channel - in the shortest amount of time. The distance amounted to 1,460 lengths of the swimming pool and Mr Lamb of Barkham, swam the distance in 18 days averaging 96 lengths of the pool a day.His sporting accomplishments included competing in the 440yds (now 400m) freestyle in the British National Swimming Championships (1962 but possibly 1961) he played Water Polo for Clacton in the early 1970s, he was a rower / lifeguard for the Walton Pier to Clacton Pier swimming race in the early 1970s, a race which was often used as a training ground for Channel swimmers. On June 14th 1975, Robin, Helen, Nicky, Sharon & David moved to Eindhoven in the Netherlands where Robin worked for Phillips International as a technical author. They all returned to the UK in Feb 1978 and eventually settled in Wokingham and Robin eventually retiring in 2008 when he and Helen set about their sailing adventure.Robin gave an interview to Sail-World about his life in Greece for Sail World Cruising (https://www.sailworldcruising.com/news/230493) who have said that they are happy for their work to be used and some of which you will find below. Speaking of his parent’s school in Maldon he said they were just emerging from the post-war austerity years, and certainly the sailing school was done on a budget. Their first dinghy was Landgirl, which was a clinker-built gaff-rigged fourteen footer with little freeboard so the water could come in green if you heeled it too much, there was a motley mix of mainly traditionally built dinghies. One had seen service in the local oyster fisheries (“The Daddy” of sweet remembrance), was about twenty feet long and had pig iron ballast. A bit of a contrast to today's craft. Robin was passionate about jazz and the offspring saw to it that he got to get to Ronnie Scott’s club for his fix from time to time. They had developed a love of Greece over the years, and since the early 80s had visited the country at least once a year to backpack around the islands of the Aegean and Ionian Seas. Robin retired in 2008 and they set off that year to look for a suitable boat, “Sundowner”. They lived aboard for about six months each year from 2008 to 2019. Cruising the Ionian is charming. He was intending to sell Sundowner at the tenth year, but the family rose up at the idea (very frightening), and told him to hold off while everyone came out for a last trip.Then Robin wrote a book, “Sundowner”, which starts with the idea of buying a boat in Greece being mooted in a sleepy little Greek taverna. The book goes on to recount some of their experiences of the next ten years - the trials and tribulations, the ups and downs, and yet the sheer joy that a new journey in life can bring.Ship guests – John Ashby’s thoughts“Robin and Helen spent the whole of each summer pootling around the ‘inland sea’ between Levkas, Meganisi, Ithica, Cephalonia, and Mitikas on the Greek mainland. Helen and various sons and daughters would join him for a week or so. I joined him for a week in the summer of 2012. Every port greeted us with Robin’s crazy locals and fellow proper yachts people (as opposed to the flotilla newbies and the super-rich posers). One of the best weeks of my life, with the unforgettable sound-track of Robin announcing that it was beer-a-clock. Never was someone more in his element than Robin on his yacht.”Sadly his beloved Helen died last year leaving Robin with one surviving sister, seven children, numerous grandchildren and great children. As the late Queen famously said, recollections vary, however if calculations are correct he had 28 grandchildren and possibly 18 great grandchildren the number has risen slightly recently, so there may be more great grandchildren! (Numerous? One sunny day sitting in our garden Robin and Adrian got out all their fingers and toes to get counting: 30 plus I believe). Robin was a family man in the best possible sense and he will be terribly missed by his closest and the rest of us.D P Hutchinson et al!