The Chronicle January 2020

5 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

On Being a Bursar Stephen Withers Green stood down from the position of Bursar at the end of 2019 after 21 years in the role. After a successful career in business, Stephen has been at the heart of all major developments at St Edward’s for more than two decades, working alongside three Wardens and four Chairs of the Governing Body. Head of Communications, Tracy van der Heiden, caught up with him to talk about his own education, his career and his views of Teddies past, present and future.

Tell us something about your own schooldays. I was a weekly boarder at St Paul’s, a highly selective all-boys’ London day school. So, not a lot in common with St Edward’s. It had a very strong academic ethos. I started my

Paul’s School, and Master of Balliol College, Oxford.' We were told that he regarded these two accomplishments as the most important in his life and that we were expected to aspire to be the elite of the country’s intellectual elite. Did you enjoy school? Did your schooldays shape the person you are today? In the eyes of some, I may seem to have been a successful schoolboy. I was Captain of School, and in the 1st XV and cricket XI. At the end, I was given a place at Cambridge. In terms of shaping me, the education I received has without doubt caused me to overvalue cleverness. There were many things that were not particularly nice about St Paul’s at that time, but one plus was that there was very little kudos in having wealthy parents. Did the fact that St Paul’s was an all- boys’ school have an effect on you? Did it make you awkward with girls? I don’t know. I think schools can take too much of the rap for character faults and social inadequacies. I am riddled with both but I don’t think we can blame St Paul’s for all of them. I have two older sisters, and up to the age of 13 I’d been living at home. And Hammersmith was quite sociable – St Paul’s Girls’ School was just over the river and there was a modicum of fraternisation. How did the local community view pupils at St Paul’s? Well it was an interesting time. We’re talking about the ‘70s, so skinheads and football violence and all that sort of stuff. It wasn’t unusual for local youths to throw stones at us as we walked across Hammersmith

career there as one of the 153 Foundation Scholars (right at the bottom of the list, both alphabetically and in academic ability). The famous Victorian classical scholar, Benjamin Jowett, described himself in his autobiography as: 'Benjamin Jowett, Foundation Scholar, St

Topping out the Reading Room on the top floor of the new Library last summer with Nick Hardy, Director of TSH Architects, and Cooper Lodge HM Fergus Livingstone.