Jeffrey Graham Jeffreys (1893-1977; Vicar 1945-1947)

Jeffrey Graham Jeffreys was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1893, the son of John Edwin and Amy Pauline Jeffreys. Jeffrey attended St Peter’s College, the School of Mines and Adelaide University. He joined the teaching staff at Barker College, Sydney, and then transferred to the Ballarat Church of England Grammar School; he later went to teach at Melbourne Grammar School.

During the First World War, Jeffreys served firstly with the Field Artillery Brigade in the Australian Imperial Force, and latterly with the Australian Flying Corps. He moved to England in 1921 where he took up an appointment at Westminster School, and then took a second degree at Christ Church, Oxford. He married Mary M Blair in Kingston, Surrey, in 1925. After Oxford, he taught for a short time at Radley School, but then left to found his own school at Bryanston in Dorset. Jeffreys left Bryanston in 1932 to move to Surrey where he founded Ottershaw College. He left the school in 1937 and moved to Fulham to undertake pastoral duties and then went to the parish of St Mary the Virgin, Tottenham.

Jeffreys moved to the Vale in 1945 to take over the parishes of Badsey with Aldington and Wickhamford. During the latter part of his tenure, the previous incumbent, Canon Allsebrook, had ceased to perform many of the administrative duties connected with the office (eg maintaining the parish registers, producing a Parish Newsletter), so Jeffreys set about remedying this. However, the climate in the Vale did not agree with Jeffreys’ constitution and he left in 1947 to take up an appointment as assistant curate at the old parish church, Richmond.

For a time in the in the 1950s he was Vicar at Chesterton with Wendlebury in Oxfordshire. Jeffreys retired to Dorset where his wife died in 1969 and he died in 1977, aged 84.