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QE contemporaries Chris Shurety and Jerry Golland both received awards in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Chris (OE 1956–1963, pictured left) received an MBE for services to Music, while Jerry (pictured below), who was also at QE from 1956 to 1963, was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to Business and Charity.

Chris, who is Artistic Director of Contemporary Music for All (CoMA), has devoted a large part of his life to enabling as many people as possible to get involved in music-making. Having started to play instruments himself from around the age of 40, he founded the late-starter orchestral movement in 1983 by establishing the East London Late Starters Orchestra.

He set up CoMA in 1993 to enable musicians of all abilities to play an active role in contemporary music. Today it has a national network of instrumental and vocal ensembles, an expanding international programme and a unique music collection comprising hundreds of works of new music.

CoMA Chair Tom Service, a leading BBC Radio 3 presenter who also writes about music for The Guardian, said: “No single figure in contemporary musical life is responsible for commissioning as much and inspiring as much new music and music-making as Chris Shurety. But what’s most important is how he has realised his radical vision of a fu lly open, fully participative musical culture – and how an idea that started with CoMA is now radiating across the whole of musical culture, from schools to professional ensembles. He is one of the essential, inspirational presences in contemporary music, and the most deserving of this recognition!”

Richard ‘Jerry’ Golland, a solicitor who lives in Welwyn Hatfield, helped hundreds of young people during more than a decade with The Prince’s Trust. He continues to work with The Sylvia Adams Charitable Trust, a charity formed with the £5.2m assets of an antique dealer which helps vulnerable children and families affected by illness in the UK and supports development projects in Africa.

Now retired, he spent more than 40 years as a lawyer with a number of firms, having benefited from a QE connection for the vital first step in that successful career. He was also the Hertfordshire Chairman – and, later, East of England Regional Chairman – for the Institute of Directors.

On the announcement of the Birthday Honours last month, Jerry told the Welwyn Hatfield Times: “I am surprised, but tickled pink. It is nice to know that people notice, especially as it is local people who have nominated me.”

READ MORE:

Chris Shurety: A lifelong love of classical music that began at QE

“These OEs get everywhere!” Jerry Golland in his own words

Old Elizabethan Aidan Radnedge is Chief Reporter at Metro, which last month overtook The Sun to become the UK’s biggest weekday newspaper by circulation.

Aidan (OE 1988-1995) reports on major national and international events and has worked as a war correspondent and an international undercover journalist. He has also written books on world football and about the Olympics.

He follows in the footsteps of his father, Keir Radnedge, a noted football journalist who has written for World Soccer magazine for around half-a-century and is the author of 33 books.

“I have very fond memories of QE,” says Aidan, who recalls, in particular, “trips to Germany to appreciate and enrich our understanding of friendly counterparts”.  He won QE prizes and commendations for Music, History and Politics and was a F orm Captain. School records show that he gained some early journalistic experience by working on the Underne House magazine.

After QE, Aidan went to Birmingham University, where he read English.

He happily recalls attending a QE Dinner Debate ten years after leaving School: “Six of us went as a gang and found former classmates surprised to find so many of us were still friends as adults – as we remain: the best of friends, a good gang.”

Aidan is modest about his career – “apologies to QE for squandering such good grounding and potential” – yet his newspaper has a circulation of close to 1.5 million and is also widely read online.  And he routinely writes front-page leads on the biggest news stories of the day, from the death of three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, who drowned while trying to enter Europe with his family in 2015, to last year’s Brexit referendum (pictured).

“In attempts at boasting mode, I would point towards times as a foreign correspondent in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan; working undercover in crisis-ridden Zimbabwe at a time when foreign journalists were officially banned; and to working in earthquake-hit Nepal, famine-ridden Ethiopia and reporting child-soldier stories in Sierra Leone and Cambodia.”

His sports books have been for major publishers, such as Carlton Books and Dorling Kindersley.