Richard Sotnick RIP

Richard Sotnick
OP 1953
1935-2025

With our thanks to John Sweetman (OP 1953) and Richard's wife, Ruth

Richard joined the Junior School in September 1945, the Senior School the following year. There he became, progressively, a house prefect, school prefect and Latter House Captain. He gained his 1st XV colours 1952-3, The Portmuthian recording ‘he has a very good eye for an opening, is a fast runner and a good tackler’, captained the 2nd XI cricket side in 1952 and appeared in school plays 1950-3.

Active in the Debating Society, Richard won an overwhelming victory as the Conservative candidate in the 1951 Mock General Election. He credited his English master, Tony Snelling, with honing his debating skills. Richard played chess for the School and became a platoon commander in the Army Section of the CCF. A keen cricketer, when Hampshire CCC played at Burnaby Road, a couple of hundred yards away, Richard joined the sprint through the School gates at 12.30 to see the last hour’s play before the lunch interval. Years later, he recalled ‘the majestic off-drives of Peter May and the cultured batting of Neville Rogers’, the Hampshire opener.

He left PGS in April 1953 to pursue a legal career, which after qualification led him to National Service in the Directorate of Legal Services (RAF), though not before a month-long escapade with fellow OPs, A.J. George and M.J. Bucknall, during the summer of 1954. Before the advent of MoTs, they undertook a perilous tour of France, Switzerland and northern Italy in a 1938 Hillman Tourer, which lacked a reverse gear. ‘If we passed a road which had been on our route, Mike and I got out to push the car back to enable Tony to turn onto the correct one … We had little money and so we often slept under the stars’.

In 1967, he was elected to Portsmouth City Council for St Jude’s Ward, advancing to Conservative Leader of the Council (1974-78) and Lord Mayor of Portsmouth (1978-79). Richard was Chairman of the Portsmouth Cultural Festival and a director and trustee of the Mary Rose Trust, 1979-87. In 1985, he became an Honorary Alderman of the City. Throughout these years, much of his leisure time was spent ‘sailing with the family (his wife Ruth and daughters Juliet, Lisa and Karen) on the Solent … (and) on more fruitful weekends to Cherbourg’. In later life, he and Ruth were keen travellers, sailing in Greece, Turkey and The Caribbean.

After leaving PGS, Richard retained close links with the School, initially playing for the Old Portmuthian rugby and cricket sides. In 1970, he joined the Board of Governors and argued vehemently against a move from the High Street to Barton’s Wood, Havant, because this would sever historic association with Portsmouth Cathedral. Ultimately the move failed to materialise. For many years, he attended the annual OP reunion dinners at Christ Church College Oxford organised by J.M. Smart and at which the former headmaster, D.D. Lindsay, was a regular guest.

In 1970, Richard succeeded his father as senior partner of the family law firm, which served Portsmouth, Fareham and Southampton. After retirement in 1984, he and Ruth moved to north London, where Richard remained energetically involved in a wide range of interests. Together with Sir Yehudi Menuhin (later Lord Menuhin), Richard founded the Portsmouth International String Quartet Competition in 1978 – now known as The Wigmore Hall Competition – which led to his being awarded the prestigious Walter Wilson Cobbett Gold Medal by the Worshipful Company of Musicians. He also received an Honorary Fellowship from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Portsmouth University.

Richard became, too, an author. He learnt German to research the relevant archives and associated sources for The Coburg Conspiracy, which chronicled the efforts of Queen Victoria’s uncle to marry members of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family into European royal houses. The Gods Divided entailed archival research, too, and countless interviews in France concerning the crash of a Lancaster bomber in Normandy in June 1944. The focal point involved the Germans burying the wireless operator in a ditch, rather than a formal grave, because he wore a Jewish emblem round his neck. Thirdly, Retribution, ‘a fast-paced thriller’ about the English legal system, drew on his professional experiences.

After he and Ruth settled in Herzliya, Israel, Richard continued to pursue a rich cultural and social life involving music and academic activities, especially the study of biographies like Andrew Roberts, George III. In a distinguished, national and international career, Richard did not forget the friends he made eighty years previously at the School of which he had such vivid memories and expressed lasting gratitude for a sound education.