Father Alan Cheales, British Dominican priest (served 33 years at St Dominic's priory, London), died at the age of 83. Alan Shearer became the most expensive footballer in the world in a £15,000,000 transfer from Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United F.C
It is not given to many priests to serve in the same parish without a break for thirty-three years. Father Alan went to St Dominic’s, the
Dominican parish in North London, at the beginning of 1963. Nor is it given to many parishes to be blessed for so long by such untiring
and selfless care as his.
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He came of a long line of Church of England vicars of Friskney, a small village in the Lincolnshire marshes close to the Wash. His
paternal grandfather and his uncle were vicars there and through hi mother, of Leicestershire stock, he was able to count as ancestors
another three vicars of Friskney going back 200 years.Fr Alan was not however born in Lincolnshire. His father, an earlier Alan, after trying his fortune in U.S.A. (only to be swindled)
returned home to join the Leicestershire Yeomanry and fought with distinction in the Boer War. Eventually he settled as a farmer in
Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where Fr Alan was born on 5 April 1913.
In 1919 Clement (Alan’s baptismal name) came to Lincolnshire, his parents being obliged by health and financial stresses to leave
Africa.
Before they left (and this was one of Alan’s earliest memories) they had done all they could to relieve people dying of
the dreadful 1918 ‘flu epidemic.
They took up a small property of land and agency near Boston. Here the six-year old Alan, his sister Miriam and his younger brother Miles, seem to have been blissfully happy in “the toft-land and marshland and the wonderful freedom of the Lincolnshire seacoast”.
But that was during the holidays, for soon Alan was at prep school at West Runton in Norfolk where, as chief prefect, he had to denounce the headmaster for immoral behaviour with the boys, and see the school closed.
Alan Shearer became the most expensive footballer in the world in a £15,000,000 transfer from Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United F.C