Captain, Rifle Brigade
Born: November 10th 1911
Died: December 8th 1945
Age at Death: 34
Died of wounds.
House Prefect 1929
School Prefect 1930
John was born on 10 November 1911 in Satara, India, to James Fellowes, a colonel in the Indian Army, and his wife Nora (née Moore). By 1920 the family was back in England, living in Steyning, near Brighton, and in 1925 John started at the College, where he eventually became a school prefect. In July 1930 he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read mathematics.
After leaving Cambridge, Fellowes took the unusual step for an Old Brightonian of becoming a pirate: specifically, a radio pirate with Radio Normandie, transmitting jazz into the United Kingdom from the safety of a ship off the coast of France.
In 1940 Fellowes joined the Rifle Brigade. He was severely wounded during the Western Desert Campaign at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942, when his jeep was blown up by a mine, destroying one leg and mangling the other. Worse still, sand entered his lungs during the incident, worsening his pre-existing silicosis, a disease that can be brought on by inhaling desert sand. Fellowes was invalided home, where he made a partial recovery and returned to duties away from the front line. In 1943 he became the liaison officer to ‘The Way Ahead’, a wartime propaganda film starring David Niven. However, his health worsened again and he died in 1945 of silicosis at his family’s cottage in Steyning.
To mark Remembrance in 2023, two Brighton College families visited the St. Wulfran Churchyard in Ovingdean, and placed flowers on John’s grave.
