Leslie Ronald Kay

Ronald Kay OBE (4 March 1920 – 17 May 2019) was a British University administrator who was instrumental in establishing the Universities Central Council on Admissions, and who was its chief executive until his retirement in 1985.

Early life and career

Ronald Kay was born in Sheffield. His father Ernest (1895-1973) was a cutler who had left school at 13 to work for the firm of George Wostenholm, where he slowly rose through the ranks to achieve the position of sales manager. His mother May (née Friskney) (1898-1946) was originally from Leicester; she taught piano. Ronald was the elder of two children; his sister Shirley (1928-1986) was nearly nine years younger.

Ronald gained a scholarship to King Edward VII Grammar School, and subsequently an Edgar Allen scholarship to Sheffield University, where he read English.

Graduating in 1941, he was disqualified from active service as a result of poor eyesight, and instead went to London to work for the Ministry of Shipping where his duties included planning of Atlantic convoys. He shared an office at this time with the composer Gerald Finzi. One of his tasks was to arrange an exchange of prisoners of war on board the neutral Swedish passenger liner, the SS Drottningholm, in October 1943. Eight hundred German prisoners of war were assembled in Leith, Scotland, and sailed to Gothenburg in two British ships; meanwhile 4000 Allied prisoners were transported to Gothenburg and embarked on the Drottningholm and other ships, for return to Leith.

After the war, he enrolled with the Control Commission responsible for administering the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany, and was posted to Hannover, where he was billeted in the family home of his future wife, Brigitte Albert. This gave Ronald Kay insights into the potential for improving the admissions system through clerical automation.

As early as 1951, schools were campaigning for change: the fact that every university had different procedures, different forms, and different timetables made life very difficult for applicants and their advisors. Equally, individual universities, having made an offer to a candidate, had very little idea whether the student would actually show up in October, because there was nothing to stop applicants accepting multiple offers. At a national level, there was no accurate data on the number of successful and unsuccessful candidates, which made it difficult to plan the expansion of the sector expected in the 1960s. With the Bach Choir in 1995, he sang in the first performance of John Rutter's Birthday Madrigals. Even in his late 90s, he continued singing regularly with the Heart and Soul Community Choir in Tewkesbury.

After retiring from UCCA, he took a part-time post as music correspondent for the Gloucestershire Echo, of Charlton Park Convent School in Cheltenham, where his two youngest daughters had been pupils. This was at the time when the girls' convent school merged with the nearby boys' Catholic school, Whitefriars, to form the co-educational St Edward's School, Cheltenham; he therefore found himself managing the detailed negotiations surrounding the merger. The school sold some of its land for housing to finance this development; he bought one of the houses and lived there for the last 30 years of his life.

He was a keen cyclist but learned to drive and acquired his first car when already into his sixties, having previously argued that public transport and bicycles, together with liberal use of taxis, was cheaper and more convenient.

His marriage to Brigitte lasted 69 years. They lived at home until the end. Brigitte predeceased him by four months, dying in February 2019. They were survived by their six children (Barbara 1950, Michael 1951, Robert 1953, Richard 1955, Eleanor and Jenny 1959), with twelve grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

He died (of "frailty of old age", according to the death certificate) on 17 May 2019, at home with his family around him.

Titles, honours, and awards

Awarded OBE 1985.