Deaths

JAN DOMINIK POLONIECKI (H63) 26th May 1946 – 19th December 2016 was the elder son of Bernard Poloniecki, who had escaped the German invasion of L’wow, Poland, in 1939 to fly bombers for the RAF, and Barbara Jill Hammersley, one of five daughters of the industrialist and MP, Samuel Hammersley.

While first at Junior House and later at St Hugh’s, Jan’s nights at Ampleforth were spent an exhilarating bike ride away at the Polish House in Oswaldkirk, under the watchful but familial eyes of Colonel and Mrs Dudzinski.

It was while completing a PhD in Statistics at Sussex University that he met his wife Lucy (Hollis) who was reading Mathematics.  Their happy marriage lasted 41 years.  Inheriting her parents’ gift, their daughter, Anna, read Mathematics at Bristol University.

Family, faith and scholarship were the predominant ingredients of Jan’s life; closely followed by his love of skiing.  The latter taking him not only to mountain resorts, but also, regardless of the season, on regular trips to artificial snow domes near his home in London.

No slave to authority, political correctness, or conventional wisdom, Jan regarded the pursuit of the facts and the truth to be supra omnia.  This maxim may have curtailed an early spell in the private sector, when, finding himself travelling in the lift with the newly appointed, and conspicuously overpaid chief executive, he calculated, and pointed out, how much the short trip had cost the shareholders.

His unshakeable principles were to guide him to a hugely productive and influential career in the public health area, where he worked for 28 years at St George’s Medical School and Hospital in Tooting as a Medical Statistician.

When he arrived at SGH in 1988, mortality data was virtually non-existent in hospitals, so little work could be done in establishing whether patient mortality for a particular hospital was exceptional or statistically normal.  The mortality monitoring he established in 2002 and the statistical technique, which he developed, known as CRAM (cumulative risk adjusted mortality), are in nationwide use to this day.

Over the course of his career, Jan published 228 papers on statistical methods, databases, computing, ethics and law.  He became a Governor of SGH in 2014 and was due to retire the week following his death, the timing of which prevented him receiving an Emeritus Reader award.

Freedom of speech was a subject close to Jan’s heart.  Disappointed by the response of the Western press, and at obvious risk to himself, he insisted on pinning the supposedly offending front page of Charlie Hebdo to the wall of his office.  Later he commissioned a T-shirt on which was written ‘Deus magnus est’ together with its Arabic equivalent.  These acts of courage brought him many unexpected supporters from a wide range of religious backgrounds and helped establish the man his mathematical colleagues referred to admiringly as ‘the influential outlier.’

In both the Year of Faith (2012/3) and the Year of Mercy (2015/16) together with Patrick Carroll (E63), Jan travelled to Rome and Loreto.  It amused him somewhat that in so doing, he had apparently obtained sufficient indulgences to free both himself and his parents from their limboic shackles.  As his father had lived to the age of 100 and his mother until 93, he had little thought that his need might have come so swiftly. 

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Rest in eternal peace.