page_title: Leslie Ronald Kay
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Leslie Ronald Kay / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Ronald Kay in 2017
context_page_description: Ronald Kay 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.
context_section_description: Ronald Kay's main interest outside work was music. He trained as an Anglican choir-boy, and through his 20s his career aspiration was to be a professional tenor soloist. Despite a number of professional engagements in the Sheffield area, he realised that he would not be able to earn his living this way, and thereafter devoted himself to amateur music-making. In 1944 he sang in the first performance of Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time. When UCCA relocated to Cheltenham he joined the Cheltenham Bach Choir, and remained an active member of the tenor section well into retirement, serving at one time as vice-chairman. 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, writing regular reviews of concerts by both local amateurs and visiting professionals, including coverage of the Cheltenham Music Festival.
  Ronald and Brigitte converted to Roman Catholicism in 1953.
  He was a governor and subsequently chairman of trustees 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.
caption: Ronald Kay in 2015
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