Chronicle 687

45 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

In a school which still placed its athletes on pedestals, he made it fashionable to be a success in the classroom and the exam hall. This was another huge legacy. Malcolm’s brilliant teaching also touched a much wider audience through his lectures to many different groups, particularly in Leeds. In retirement, drawing on his experience with countless school trips which he devised and ran, his life had a second act with many years of ACE tours with Frances Neville as his indispensable partner. He was increasingly drawn to the history of art and architecture and his teaching in these subjects was equally charismatic. There are people here today whose passionate interest in these things was ignited by Malcolm. His reading and learning were prodigious, but rather like Sherlock Holmes’ deliberate ignorance of the Copernican System, Malcolm’s landscape of interest was clearly and increasingly delineated. I know we all do this, but for a man who spent so much time reading, he was not much tempted, even in history, to stray. He had little interest in ancient Greece and Rome. Archaeology bored him, as did ethnography. His work on the history of this School took him into the twentieth century, a period which otherwise he was not drawn to. The history of the world outside Europe held little appeal. He taught Economics and some Politics, but it was the historical dimensions of those subjects which attracted him. When needs be, he would cover these grounds with skill, but his heart really was not in it. And his scientific ignorance was a matter of some pride to him. To be so wilfully ignorant of human biology was a notable characteristic for such an Olympic-standard hypochondriac. But what he loved, he loved deeply and to share it was his heart’s desire. I still have a postcard he wrote to me from the concourse of King’s Cross Station. He was on his way home from seeing The History Boys by Alan Bennett and was immensely moved by it and by the watchword of its hero, Hector: ‘Pass it on, boys. Just pass it on.’ A brilliant teacher…and a wonderful man. He greatly honoured his parents as evinced by his desire to attach their names to his

generous legacy to this School. An only child, he cherished his lovely mother Rose, who was widowed so suddenly. His religious faith was important. Three of his closest friends – David Conner, David Wippell and Andrew Wright – are priests. He preferred traditional forms of worship, which connected him to the Christian past as well as to God. He was physically incompetent, except as a driver. Until very recently he was proud of his skill behind the wheel. He may have left Yorkshire, but Yorkshire never left him. Even after six years back in Oxford, the marked contrast in prices between Morrisons in Leeds and M&S in Summertown still rankled. He loved to cook, until his later years when the oven became another bookcase. When entertaining, his dinners were extravagant, though the fashion for ‘cuisine minceur’ passed him by. He loved the legacy of the music halls, the songs and the comedians. He took me once to the Batley Variety Club and we watched Ken Dodd completely mesmerise a huge audience of well-oiled miners and their wives for nearly four hours. ‘What a performance! What power!’ Malc purred and I thought I saw a glimpse of the kicks he got in the classroom. Malcolm took great pride in his former pupils’ success in many walks of life, but he was especially proud to have taught those such as Blair Worden, Simon Ditchfield, Tim Schroder and Anthony Payne, all of whom achieved a level of scholastic distinction in their fields which I fear Malcolm suspected that he himself might not have attained had he made that choice. He was a modest man, much given to self-deprecation. He himself was the subject of some of his best jokes and we loved him for it. But I fear that there may have been some regret there. I just hope he knew (I think he did) what a dazzling star he was in the firmament which he chose to inhabit. Rather wonderfully misremembering Empson at Malcolm’s bedside, Rupert Walters told him: ‘Malcolm, I can’t work out where you stop and I begin.’ I can’t express my own feelings better than that. God bless you, Malcolm. And, on behalf of so many of us, thank you for all our beginnings.

Already I feel the line between talking about Malcolm and talking about myself becoming blurred. While Malcolm’s influence on so many individual pupils is truly extraordinary, his greatness as a schoolmaster extends to his many roles in the wider life of the School – as a producer of plays for example. The introduction into the School’s very traditional drama diet of productions of Brecht and Stoppard came as a not entirely welcome surprise to some colleagues and Malcolm, along with Simon Taylor, was a driving force in creating a culture of performance courage and excellence which persists to this day. The two of them also provided opportunities for Malcolm to scratch his itch to ‘épater les bourgeois’. Simon’s production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus , in which the play’s notorious nudity was decorously conveyed by body stockings, still produced outraged parental phone calls. ‘This play has won every drama award in the West End and on Broadway’, Malcolm told one disgusted parent. ‘Well, it didn’t go down very well in Henley’ – a reply which delighted him. There is not time today to describe the breadth of Malcolm’s other huge influences – on the introduction of girls to the School, on Segar’s House, which he ran for over a decade, and then on the whole width of the School as deputy first to John Phillips and then to David Christie, to both of whom he was a completely trusted partner as well as a great friend. At the start I distinguished between Malcolm’s greatness as a schoolmaster and his brilliance as a teacher. Inevitably the two were intertwined. Malcolm and John Todd refused to teach History as an O Level, in the belief that they would have to spend at least a term unteaching it before embarking on the real thing at A Level. I remember so much from my early Oxley lessons. Instructions on ‘How to be a mediaeval king’, which started with ‘Wear your crown a lot’, or his characterisation of the Hundred Years’ War as a series of boisterous rugby tours. In fact, the entertainment was always at the service of the insights, and I also recall the underlying seriousness and the uncompromising demand for hard work.