ERIC TUCKER, Headmaster of Rockport, Holywood, Co Down, from 1945 to 1974, died peacefully in hospital on November 26th, aged 88. His close connection with Rockport began in 1914 when he was not yet six years old and his parents, recalled to India on the outbreak of war, left him in the safe hands of Mr and Mrs Bing.
He left Rockport in 1922 with a major scholarship to Tonbridge, where he captained the Cricket XI and played for the Lords Schools. He then went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford to read Classics, and after graduating he returned to Rockport in 1931 on the teaching staff.
In 1936 he married Dora Elder, the sister of an Oxford friend, and so began a happy partnership which was to last just over 60 years. Two years later Mr Bing, beginning to contemplate retirement, took Eric into partnership, and he became a member of the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools. Any idea of a gradual handing over of the reins was shattered in the following year by the outbreak of war. Eric was commissioned in the Royal Corps of Signals Mr Bing carried on running the school. After war service which took him to France, Persia and Iraq, Eric returned to take over the school.
For 29 years he and Dora ran Rockport, despite all the difficulties of the postwar era. At the end of the 1960s a charitable trust was set up to relieve him of the financial burden, a board of governors was appointed, and the 1970s saw numbers increasing in the school, renewed building activity and a more buoyant view of the future. In 1974 Eric and Dora handed it over to John and Rose Agg Large and were able to start a very active retirement in the house which he had built in 1936, but had only lived in for a few years.
Eric was a splendid schoolmaster, a fine scholar and teacher a firm and fair disciplinarian He was also an enthusiastic and successful games coach. Perhaps his sense of humour was one of his outstanding characteristics, always very close to the surface, but apt to take strangers by surprise because his face, in repose, was thoughtful, his expression slightly melancholy. He was a very private person, a family man, a devoted husband and father. The closeness of the family bond has been very apparent in this, their diamond jubilee year.
He was a loyal, unostentatious supporter of his church, Holy Trinity, Glencraig, where he was a worshipper for most of his 88 years, where he read the Lessons, served as church warden, glebe warden, synodsman and was a member of the select vestry for many years. He was a very active Freemason, president of the local branch of the Royal British Legion, a member of the Royal Signals Association and a long serving and popular member of the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools, of which he was a council member from 1951 to 1953. He frequently crossed to England to attend their conferences and refresher courses and was a regular attender of the meetings of the association's Irish branch until last year.
Rockport, in 1914, welcomed Eric and gave him a happy home from home in his boyhood. In manhood he worked untiringly to repay that debt of gratitude to the full. At the end of his long and full life, he must have taken pleasure and pride in the fact that the school, which was not much older than he when he joined it, is now flourishing on the threshold of its' 91st year.