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I remember Jeremy McNeil as a bit of a misfit at Lancing. Rough-edged, rebellious and bolshie, with a jarring Newfoundland accent - his father was Canadian, his mother English - he was more at home on the sports field than in the classroom, where his teachers despaired of his scholastic aptitude or, rather, lack of it. When he left early with few O-Levels, I assumed he would make little of the rest of his life and I would never hear from him again. How wrong I was.
Fast forward 60 years and, out of the blue, I received an email from Jeremy, prompted by an article in The Quad. He was, I discovered, professor emeritus of chemical entomology at a major Canadian university, an internationally renowned research scientist, a leading authority on the Monarch butterfly and, to cap it all, president of the Royal Society of Canada and holder of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest honours, for services to education.
Out of that initial contact grew a warm virtual friendship with regular email exchanges and video calls during Covid lockdown, during which we talked of many things. One of my first questions was what had happened for him to have changed so dramatically. His prep school teachers, he explained, had told him he was thick, so he had believed them. Only after leaving Lancing and being tutored for A-levels did he discover that his teachers were wrong and why learning mattered.
After a few menial jobs in Britain he returned to Canada, graduating from university with an honours degree in zoology before obtaining a PhD in entomology at a college in the US. There followed faculty positions at Laval University in Quebec, where he lectured in French, and at Western University in Ontario, where he continued to work until shortly before his death in July. His many students remember him as an inspiring teacher with an infectious passion for entomology, his particular field of expertise. Approachable, modest and good-humoured, he was known to them affectionately as the Bug Man, and was rarely seen without one of his collection of more than 500 insect-related T-shirts. All of which belied his undeniable status as a Grand Old Man.
When he and I re-established contact in 2021, he already had cancer; his death resulted from complications which compromised his immune system. He bore his afflictions with characteristic courage, describing their progress with clinical detachment and without a trace of self-pity. And right up to the end, he continued to teach and research and kept up a furious pace of international travel. Last year alone, destinations included Argentina, Japan, Malaysia and India, where his expertise and wisdom were in much demand, all the more so because of growing global concern about the impact of climate change on the natural world.
He talked several times of coming to Britain and perhaps of us visiting Lancing together. Sadly, it was not to be: one loss among many others from the death of a remarkable man.
Guy de Jonquières (Sanderson's 1958-1963)