Obituaries

Rodney Jelfs S46

Rodney originally left his state school aged 14 to become a delivery boy. However, during the 2^nd World War when Canford was in a restricted area, scholarships were offered to local children to attend Canford school as day pupils; Rodney started at Canford with his younger brother when he was 16 after having already worked for 2 years!

When Rodney finished at Canford he completed his national service, which gave him the opportunity to travel and see some of the world. After his National Service he qualified as an Electrical Engineer and moved to Manchester where he met his wife, Shirley. They had 2 children in the early 1970’s, and in the mid-1970s the family moved to Hong Kong where Rodney played a pivotal role in opening the Mass Transit Railway. After 7 years in Hong Kong the family moved to Zimbabwe where Rodney was engaged by The National Railways of Zimbabwe to help electrify the country’s railway, this was a task that he carried out under difficult circumstances, given the nature of the political situation in parts of Southern Africa at the time. This meant he also had a role in maintaining the existing steam locomotive fleet, sometimes under quite novel circumstances, that led him to joke that he was responsible for “Fixing up trains that came back into the depots with bullet holes in them”. Living in Hong Kong in the 1970s and Zimbabwe at this unique time gave the whole family an opportunity to travel and experience places that had not been affected by mass tourism, allowing the family to have many wonderful holidays.

A couple of years after returning to the UK Rodney retired, he was then free to concentrate on his hobby of running model coal fired locomotives. He became an active member of the Gauge One Model Railway Society, travelling all over the country to various events, enjoying many happy hours running his locomotives, and this continued until shortly before he died, aged 94.