Those who knew Raymond Casey described him as a quiet and reserved but 'highly, highly intelligent' man, who 'knew such a lot about so much'. He was lonely, having lost his beloved wife Nora in a tragic car crash in his 50s and his father in his childhood and subsequently devoted much of his life to charitable work, volunteering with Bromley Mental Health with the experience of knowing what it was like to be in an unstable mental state following the extreme pain of losing a loved one. His painful childhood, time in the war and his wife's untimely death made him a 'very sad man', who showed much more love and kindness than he received. He loved animals immensely, finding great pleasure in the company of his pets and volunteered with Battersea Dogs and a local donkey sanctuary.
Raymond left school at 14 to work in a local shop but was very much interested in fossils and ancient creatures - his early fossil discoveries attracted the attention of professional geologists and he pursued his interest in the area. In 1970 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and became an international authority in palaeontology, producing several ground-breaking papers in the 1970s, some of which on the correlation between fossils in England and those in Russia, tracing back to when the earth was one supercontinent. His research was completely revised previous theories about rock formation during these times and told us what we now know about the varying climates of past geological periods.
Not only was his work pioneering in areas to do with fossils and rock formations, but he was also instrumental to the discovery of North Sea Oil in the late 1960s. This discovery is the result of working with alongside Russian geologists, which he often did. According to his neighbours, he 'was treated like royalty in Russia' and had 'almost diplomatic status', often mingling with very high- ranking officials. When being interviewed, his neighbours told a particularly astonishing anecdote of him visiting Russia for geologist work and the staff attempting to remove him from the hotel he was staying at due to a military parade taking place outside. He refused on the basis that he wanted to watch the parade from his room and due to his high ranking, he could not be forcibly removed and so he was allowed to watch the procession from the window of his hotel room with a heavily armed guard at the door - the guard, who much to Casey's surprise was later revealed to be Putin.
