Chronicle 687

47 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

and were conscious of the school’s founding Christian purpose. Both were polymaths of learning and the arts. Both stood back from the tradition of muscularity and manliness and gave confidence to pupils who sought fulfilment outside it. Both made a speciality of the stage. From the outset Oxley began to replace the school’s safe and dated repertory with excursions into the avant-garde. Over the decades he would produce countless plays and musicals, ranging from Aristophanes to Brecht, from medieval mystery plays to the Victorian music-hall entertainments that he and his casts performed in care homes. Developing an abiding interest in the history of art and architecture, he took pupils who were often unaccustomed to leaving the school premises on weekend expeditions to historic houses, churches and galleries. There were more ambitious excursions in the holidays. Adventurous visits abroad included one in 1968 which found him and a party of boys in a campsite outside Prague when the Russians invaded. Later he took his House to Belgium for half term. If there was a founding influence in the development of academic and artistic life in the School over the past half-century or so, it was he. Wit and a playful tone of iconoclasm were his pedagogic style. Yet he was never a dissident figure. His irreverence was harnessed by firm principles, and by a Christian faith, which made him no less a stabilising figure than an enlivening force. One reason he was able to make so large a mark on the School was that, even while encouraging fresh thinking, he possessed qualities – amiability, integrity, trustworthiness, responsibility, conviviality, a gift for teamwork – that fitted well with the traditional characteristics of the Common Room. He was an indefatigable and outstandingly successful Housemaster who pioneered pastoral methods and communal enterprises that are vividly recalled by countless pupils and parents. He was a strong influence in the life of the Chapel, where he was a powerful preacher. And behind everything he did there lay the historical perspective on the School’s purpose and character which informs his book. Traditionally the post of Second Master had carried few administrative burdens. Under the bureaucratic pressures of the later twentieth century its responsibilities expanded beyond recognition, so much so that it was not long before his retirement that a new post, Sub-Warden, was created,

into which he moved. He did not care for the title, which reflected a trend towards formal hierarchical demarcation in educational institutions, but it gave a truer indication of his role. Over his fourteen years as the School’s number two, whole areas of the community’s life came under his direction. Study skills; school rules; the School’s safety and security; all manner of regulations and rota and liaison activities; the guidance of new staff; the production of guiding documents; preparations for the array of school inspections; these are only some of the ever-enlarging duties which he performed with cheerful efficiency and through which he shaped policies and practices. The authority and respect he commanded from the Common Room, from the Governors, and from two very different Wardens gave the School an invaluable thread of continuous purpose and aspiration. With Christie in particular, with whom, especially as a bibliophile, he found common interests, he formed a close working bond. Like Cowell he did not become Warden. In both cases there was a moment when that might have happened, in Cowell’s case in 1904, in Oxley’s in 1988, though by

Oxley’s time an appointment from within the School would have been surprising. Instead the stature acquired by both men, which gave such authority to their initiatives and judgements, was a creative force among the teaching staff rather than from above it. Perhaps that was the right outcome. Neither man had an appetite for the financial planning and management that are essential to a head’s role. Neither had a taste for personal supremacy. Besides, Oxley, a firm believer in the independence of the School, would not have enjoyed the challenge that has fallen on all heads of adjusting to the state’s inroads on educational autonomy and to the intrusion of the artificial modern vocabulary of educational discussion. The extensive administrative commitments of the later part of his career never overlaid his creative instincts. He was at the centre of the School’s intellectual and cultural life up to his retirement. ‘It is barely too much to say,’ he writes in his last chapter, ‘that over the past half-century St Edward’s has reinvented itself.’ His readers should know, what he would never claim and may not even realise, how largely that achievement is his own.