Portrait of Geoffrey Perry

Portrait of Geoffrey Perry, painted by Ieuan Layton-Matthews (Art Master at Kettering Grammar School 1966-74), 2014

This painting portrays Geoffrey Perry (1927-2000) and was made by one of his colleagues, Ieuan Layton Matthews who was Art Master at Kettering Grammar School between 1966 and 1974.

Perry was an English physics teacher. He taught at the Kettering Grammar School in Northamptonshire, some 70 miles north of London, and is remembered particularly for his award-winning contributions to the art of satellite tracking. With colleague Derek Slater, Head of Chemistry and an amateur radio operator, he set up the school's Satellite Tracking Unit which in 1966 drew intense media attention with its announcing (having tracked Cosmos 112) the existence of a previously unknown Soviet launch site at Plesetsk in northern Russia.

Perry and Slater's satellite studies were notable for their being incorporated into the former's physics lessons, the students helping operate the equipment and gather the empirical data. Perry had started on this teacher/pupil collaboration when thinking about new ways of explaining the Doppler Effect to his classes. Rather than play recordings of passing train whistles or police car sirens he chose instead those of satellite transmissions following his listening to a play back of Sputnik at an education conference in 1957. The satellite tracking was conducted with ordinary shortwave radio equipment, using the Doppler effect to successfully analyse the satellites’ orbits, leading to a number of ground-breaking discoveries. Such was the effectiveness of their operation that they broke many Soviet mission news stories to the West, and, owing to this publicity, were cited in evidence in the US Senate – which was unable to draw on classified information accessible to the US security services.

In this posthumous portrait painted in 2014, Layton-Matthews presents his former colleague in a traditional three-quarter profile bust. Perry turns his sharp gaze towards the viewer, giving the painting a sense of immediacy and capturing the sitter’s personality and acuity. Painted in loose brushstrokes, the tonal background is inscribed with words recalling Perry’s, Slater’s and their pupils’ extraordinary work and discoveries about the Soviet space programme (such as ‘Plesetsk’, ‘Cosmos 112’ and ‘Doppler effect’).