Robert Mundy

1948-2018

Robert came to CLS in 1960, into Narbo Taylor’s N2A.

Having spent time on crutches in childhood he was not best cut out to be a sportsman, but he swam and rowed regularly in the Beaufoy Rowing Club from LRC at Putney. He became a Prefect and was active in school internal politics as well as organising talks from various Westminster politicians at the school. He went up to St Catherine’s College Cambridge in 1967 from Joe Hunt’s History Sixth to read Economics, switched and graduated in English.

Always at the vanguard of developments in popular culture, he was an aficionado of Blues Music in the early sixties, when The Marquee and other clubs were hosting the first wave of the British R&B revival on the back of discovering the original American artists. As one example, he was playing Rufus Thomas’s original “Walking the Dog” in 1964, well before
The Rolling Stones recorded it in homage.

Film was his other passion. After Cambridge, where he was a founder of his college’s film society, started a new film magazine, made various short films and ran the University Film Society (CFS), he left the UK for Hollywood. Starting at The American Film Institute with a brief to record the memories of the older generation of movie directors and actors, he interviewed and made television programmes featuring, among a very long list, Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, Lee Marvin, Peter Bogdanovitch and Don Siegel. He worked as a writer for nearly 40 years for many of the major studios. The famous names he dropped were people he had really known.

On his return to England Robert indulged his passion for the game of bridge. He became a regular at the Acol Club in West Hampstead. His style was one of old-world bonhomie and courtesy. On more than one occasion he won the club’s ‘player of the month’ accolade.

Robert suffered a stroke and died in hospital on November 6 2018.  His cutting wit and dry humour will be missed by all who knew him.