Personal news
From Graeme de Graff (22 June 2010)
'Alumni from the 70's will have been sadded to hear of the death of John Carr-Gregg in the plane crash in West Africa on the 21st June 2010. His father, John Snr., who now lives back here in Sydney, was last night still bravely saying that his 'big strong son' would be giving it all he had to get himself out of the jungle. But the news this morning is that all the members of the Board of mining company Sundance Resources, of which John was the Company Secretary, are dead.
His contemporaries in the House will remember John as physically big and certainly a larger-than-life enthusiast for everything which fell within his wide range of interests. He laughed often and he laughed loud. I remember in particular an International Night when he and Philip West (another corporate lawyer) brought the sound sytem into the 21st century ahead of time - and ahead of some of the performers! While his entrepreneuring of a cut-price supply of cassette-tapes spread quickly across the House floors.
John's family connections with International House went right back to the beginning. At our official opening in 1967 the diplomat who represented the United Kingdom was John Carr-Gregg Snr. accompanied by his wife Charlotte. They displayed a far from diplomatically typical interest in this new venture at Sydney University, and became occasional visitors and staunch supporters. I later learned the reason - as young idealists, he from the UK and she from Austria, had met when they worked at the Unitied Nations in New York and they saw the International House Movement as one of the small but important ventures in the post-war search for a basis of peace. John Jnr. and his brother Michael had attended Sydney Grammar when the family was posted in Sydney. After the parents moved on, young John enrolled in Law at Sydney University and came to live in International House.
Alumni extend their deep sympathy to John's widow and their two University student sons, as to his wonderful father John Snr.'