College London, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, and Oxford University; at the time of his death, he was an Emeritus Research Fellow at Oxford University. Among his other efforts, he was


a past Treasurer of the Society for Neuroscience and was Editor-in- Chief and Founding Editor of the Journal of European Neuroscience. Ray was also a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Born Rainer Walter Guillery


in Greifswald, in north-eastern Germany, his father, Hermann, was a pathologist from a Rhineland Catholic family, and his mother, Eva, was a laboratory technician, from a Russian-Jewish family who had escaped after the Bolshevik revolution.


On both sides he had distinguished scientific forebears: his maternal grandfather was an apothecary, his paternal grandfather an ophthalmologist, and a great-great-uncle on his father’s side was Otto Deiters, a pioneering neuroscientist who gave the first accurate description of nerve cells. Ray’s parents divorced when he was two, and he was brought up with his older sister by their mother, initially in Berlin, where he attended the Rudolf Steiner school. In 1938 the family fled, his mother escaping to London, where she took a job as a housekeeper. After a short spell in Switzerland, looked after by a family friend, Guillery joined his sister at a school in Holland, but they were on holiday in England when the Second World War broke out. Evacuated to Oxford, he was sponsored by Oxford Quakers to attend Sibford School, staying during the school holidays with Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Dr Lee’s professor of anatomy, and his wife Freda, who


28 / The Sibford Rocket


Ray is pictured with former Sibford Head, Michael Goodwin, during a visit to the school in 2011.


was active in the Oxford Refugee Committee. By the end of the war, he said, ‘I was an adolescent who was able to think of himself, proudly, as English.’


Reflecting on his time at Sibford in an interview during the summer of 2011 Ray said: “One of my favourite memories of Sibford was the woodwork lessons with Roland Herbert who was an incredible man. The skills I learnt back then have stayed with me throughout my life. When I lived in


Madison, Wisconsin, I had my own workshop and made many toys for my grandchildren, including a rocking horse. I also made a walnut desk for my eldest grandchild who lives in the UK. I had to make it so that it could be transported flat and put together on the other side of the Atlantic, which was quite a challenge.” In fact, Ray had ambitions to become a carpenter but his mother had other ideas and because at that time Sibford had


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