John Davison, a tribute

 

One of the Winchelsea Literary Society's most popular and regular speakers was John Davison, whose memorial service, delayed because of the pandemic lockdown, took place at Berkhamsted School recently. Thanks to Jonty Driver for providing this tribute, delivered at the memorial service:

John Anthony Davison, JAD, was a first-class example of the all-round schoolmaster. His father had taught for many years at Brighton College (where John himself was at school), ending his days there as Second Master, and in a sense JAD was born a schoolmaster. He didn’t think the extras were extra; they were part of the vocation. He was for years Master in charge of Athletics and Cross Country (proximity to Ashridge Common was a great advantage for those who loved long-distance running). He coached rugby. Henproduced plays. He set up, supervised and encouraged various societies. He was first housemaster of the day-house, Greene’s, and then for fifteen years housemaster of School House. John knew the boys in his house from the inside out; he knew their strengths and he knew their weaknesses. His end-of-term reports on them were kind, clever and funny, and his UCCA (later UCAS) references were insightful and truthful. In their turn, the boys in his house knew where they stood with him: he was strict, but he was straight – he always did what he said he was going to do. It’s small wonder so many boys became immensely fond of him, and regularly came back to see him; the turnout of ex-pupils to JAD’s funeral was evidence.

He was also a very good teacher; early on in his career he taught Latin occasionally, but his main subject was English, and for John that meant English Literature. He had been well-taught himself at school and at Oxford; he was properly proud of having been at Wadham. He loved reading and had a good memory, and he could communicate his enthusiasms: Shakespeare, the “metaphysical” poets like Donne and especially George Herbert, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, Kipling, and the great English novelists, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, and the moderns too. Some teachers of Literature stop reading when they begin teaching; John never did.

JAD was one of those fortunate souls whose discipline seems somehow innate. It derives in part from self-discipline, but there is also an assumption that pupils will do as you tell them to do: “or else...” and you don’t really have to spell out what “or else” is. It may seem obvious, but a teacher who cannot get his class to sit down and shut up is unlikely to get much work out of them. JAD had an especial dislike of those electronic watches which make a “beep beep” sound. “Here, take it off,” he would say. “Give it to me”, and out of the window of his classroom it would fly, usually to land safely on the lawn below; so boys soon learned to switch their noisy watches off, unless of course they wanted to bereminded that JAD had a considerable temper - which he did. He was very good with the less clever of his pupils, but he didn’t tolerate fools.

After retiring, John returned to live permanently in Sussex; he was very much a Sussex man, having been born at Fragbarrow, Ditchling Common, in 1937, within sight of the South Downs. He bought a cottage in Rackham, within sight and walking distance of those same downs, and he lived there until his death. However, really he didn’t retire from teaching, nor indeed from looking after other people. He had a term successfully teaching at Eton, subbing for an absentee. For years he worked tirelessly for the CAB (Citizens‘Advice Bureau), though latterly political correctness got in the way of his commitment. He was a volunteer for the Samaritans, though I never found out much about this side of his life, as it was something he couldn’t discuss with outsiders. He ran a Literature class for the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) until the local overlords of that worthy organisation decided Literature wasn’t part of its true purposes; so John’s class asked if he would please go on teaching them Shakespeare even though it wasn’t official; and of course he did. He was for years one of the office-holders of the Society of Schoolmasters, looking after members of the profession who had fallen on hard times. He was a regular speaker at the Winchelsea Literary Society, talking about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Byron, Tennyson et al, so popular there that every time he spoke on any writer he would immediately be asked if he would take on another subject the next year. John was a good writer too. One piece of evidence is the poem, “Hope”, included in the order of service; it could have been written only by someone who had absorbed the poems of George Herbert into his deepest imagination. There is also the evidence of John’s great endeavour of his retirement years: a brilliant history of Berkhamsted School, written with the help of Peter Williamson, sometime Chairman of Governors.

John was profoundly a Christian, not in any doctrinaire sense, but because it was part of his nature, part of his upbringing and his culture. The Book of Common Prayer, the English Hymnal, and the version of the bible inspired by King James were ingrained in his imagination. At school he was a stalwart of Chapel, singing in the choir, reading the lessons, turning up for services. After his retirement, he became churchwarden of the little church in the grounds of the local “great house”. Even promisingly pleasurable invitations which interfered with his duties as a churchwarden were courteously but firmly turned down. Although he never married (he told me once, only half-joking, that he was “terrified of women”) he was close friends with a number of women, and was as devoted to his extended family of aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins, as they were to him. The big festivals were always spent en famille.

In what has turned out to be quite a long life, I have come across a good many schoolmasters, schoolmistresses and teachers. John Anthony Davison was one of the greatest schoolmasters and finest teachers I was ever lucky enough to know. I was his boss for six years, but we became friends and allies then, and thereafter Ann and I went on being friends with him for thirty years. We count ourselves exceptionally fortunte to have known him.

C.J. (“Jonty”) Driver

Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983-9

Here's a poem written by Jonty, that eloquently sums up the impression we all carry with us of "JAD":

THE SCHOOLMASTER

Like a stork, someone said, watching him run.

Exactly so: the feet placed precisely,

The long thin legs, the stoop, the beaky nose,

A tendency to flap his arms out wide,

A watchful concentration fixed ahead

To make quite sure that nothing moved at all

Which should not move.

! ! ! ! The world was better once.

Things of course are never what they seem to be,

But what they seemed was easier to bear

In our fathers’ time, and when the monarchs

Truly ruled. Unruly’s now the word –

Elizabethan cadence, but he thinks

They may have had it right, all right.

! ! ! ! ! Dear friend.

They may not always like you much, right now;

But you’re the one they’ll come to show their wives –

The boys I mean – and whom they’ll think of, when

(Old men and full of tales) they want to tell

Just how it was, way back in the old days:

Like a stork he looked, with his long thin legs

And a huge beaky nose, and a temper.

You knew exactly where you stood with him –

He never said a thing you could not trust.

The world was better in those older days.

C.J.(Jonty) Driver

(first published in SO FAR, Selected Poems 1960-2004)

Finally, here is one of John's poems:

HOPE

by J.A.Davison

August death, we hail

Your kindly power:

We know our flesh will fail

And time devour

The house of clay at last;

Our life is lease

Not freehold, and must cease;

The die is cast.

Indeed, and from the first

Our end is sure;

But this curse, though your worst,

Will not endure.

The bodyʼs yours to claim;

The spirit draws

Its substance from a name

More real than yours.

We move through you, we hope,

From good to better:

You burn the envelope;

We keep the letter.

The Go-Between by L P Hartley reviewed by Gillian Southgate

 

 

This novel was the March book-circle choice, and I recommend it absolutely. It deals with lost innocence, and shows how a young life of hope, expectation and ideals can be scarred by the duplicity of adults. Leo, the boy invited to Brandham Hall in Norfolk by a schoolfriend, experiences at the age of 13 a trauma that causes him to have a nervous breakdown, and undermines his trust in the grown-up world to such an extent that he is rendered impotent, in all senses, in later life. Leo is made so real in his young naivety and hero-worship of the adults he views as gods, that the reader is drawn into his mind and feelings; thus we identify with him, wanting him not to be hurt. The novel is set in 1900, a year that carried for Leo all the promise of hope and expectation of good in the coming 20^th century, but it could have been set in this one, or the one before.  Trust can be dashed in any century, and at any time, at the hands of indifference or misuse, and the story of betrayal is timeless. It might have been handled in a florid way, as modern novels tend to do, but the book doesn’t deal in sensationalism; it respects the reader by treating the narrative with sensitivity and in elegant style.

 

Vulnerable as he is away from home, and full of pre-pubescent tangled feelings, Leo finds himself a messenger, carrying love letters between a tenant farmer and a young woman called Marian Maudsley. She is the daughter of another tenant, a successful city businessman who is renting Brandham Hall from the 9^th Viscount Trimingham, whose family own the estates that it sits on. Maudsley’s wife is engineering a marriage between the Viscount, Hugh, and her beautiful daughter, for social advantage. Marian knows she must marry Hugh, and also knows him to be a good and honourable man, but she wants, at least in the sexual sense, to have Ted, the farmer. It is easy to criticise Marian, but she is in fact another commodity to her family, something to be traded on at a profit, that of social advancement. Hartley is too fine a novelist to make any character in this novel either good, or especially bad; he shows human nature as it is, in all its stages of conflicting emotions, complex needs, and ruthlessness. Leo is blatantly used by Marian and Ted for their own ends, in the looming shadow of Marian’s impending engagement and marriage. At the end of the novel, they are discovered in flagrante by Mrs. Maudsley and Leo. Mrs. Maudsley’s screams of shock, anger and the realisation that this might affect her daughter’s prospects, terrify Leo as he watches the act of love for the first time, on the ground right in front of him. From that moment, he is destroyed. Not only Leo,  but Ted himself is destroyed, who knowing he will lose the woman he loves and the lands he is farming, takes up his gun and shoots himself. Marian marries Hugh, and he brings up Ted’s child, but Marion deals with life after her marriage by fabricating the delusion that her relationship with Ted was pure and right. Empty, broken Leo can only see the legacy of her selfishness in the shape of her grandson, afraid himself to marry, wanting to love but being unable to. He is constrained by the knowledge of the family history, and his own fear of devastating hurt that may blight his life. He feels cursed, and the older Marian exhorts the older Leo to go and persuade him to get married, which Leo, her servant to the end, undertakes to do  This final errand occurs many years after World War I has taken the lives of her brothers and of Hugh himself; a conflict which cursed the 20^th century, resulting in a second world war, the use of an atomic bomb, and arguably, the destruction of psychological health.

 

The novel abounds with symbolism, class issues (very real in the plot) and is finely, thoughtfully structured, in the very best story-telling tradition that Hartley was heir to. It absolutely lacks, as it should, the novelist’s own ego, slapdash writing, wonky plotting and the preoccupation with cliff-edge titillation that characterises so many modern novels. It has autobiographical elements of the life of Hartley himself, but it is not an autobiography first and foremost. It testifies to his natural gifts as a writer. He won in recognition of these gifts one of the highest prizes awarded to a work of literature, the Heineman Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 1954.  You may have seen the film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and atmospheric music by Michel LeGrand. It's excellent, faithful to the text, but nothing in it moves the reader as much as the experience of reading the novel; it really does deserve close consideration.

Robert Birley, mainly in South Africa by C J (Jonty) Driver, 44pp; available from Author (see below)

It is always a pleasure to review anything written by Jonty Driver.  His latest literary offering is a personal memoir of Robert Birley, a distinguished educationalist and ex-Headmaster of Eton who died 40 years ago this year and whose achievements will be sadly unknown to a younger generation.

Jonty writes movingly of how Robert Birley first befriended him and helped him to escape from inevitable victimisation in apartheid South Africa. One of Jonty’s charms as a writer is his readiness to share his vulnerabilities with his readers and at this moment in his life he was a deeply troubled young man.  Robert Birley became an important catalyst in his rescue.  The memoir continues as a fascinating narrative of their developing friendship.  A vivid portrait of a great and a good man emerges from these pages,  a man who deserves to be remembered.

Robert Birley’s achievements were massive. Jonty focuses strongly on  one of his lesser talents. He was a brilliant facilitator, acting as a go-between linking the right people at the right moment to solve or retrieve a situation. At the end of the memoir, Jonty defends the "old boy network" which Robert Birley used so skilfully to help so many people, “of course it shouldn’t be necessary but there is nothing virtuous in everyone getting the same equally bad treatment so if I have an opportunity to make things easier for an individual I do so without compunction", wise and humane words which could apply to Jonty himself. I can say that with conviction because our Winchelsea Literary Society has benefitted so richly from Jonty’s own old boy network.

Perhaps Robert Birley’s greatest claim to fame is his role in re-building the German educational system after 1945, a task which earned him the honorary title, "Headmaster of Germany”. It is tempting to speculate on how different the world might be if he had been given the comparable commission of de-toxifying Soviet education after the death of Stalin in 1953. The young Vladimir Putin might have turned out very differently 

Howard Norton

To obtain a copy, contact Jonty by e-mailing him* with your physical address; in return he can ask you either for a cheque or for a payment of £7-00 into his account by BACS.

*jontydriver@hotmail.com 

Winchelsea ; Alex Preston's talk about his recently published novel; 18 March 2022

 

Residents of Winchelsea reassured by their social isolation in a historic hermitage might have been discomfited to find themselves exposed through the transient probing of the searchlight of Andy Warhol’s 15-minute celebrity. In the space of a week, the redoubtable Clare Balding and her historical-context delivery man rambled across from Winchelsea Beach to the citadel and laid bare our antient town’s idiosyncrasies to those massed ranks of Middle England who constitute the Radio 4 audience.  Barely had the Ramblers retreated to the archival sanctuary of BBC Sounds than Alex Preston found himself warily confronting the combined forces of the town’s Literary and Museum Societies in the New Hall where he had been invited to introduce his fourth and most recent novel, Winchelsea, to the assembled citizenry.   

Despite a critical following wind from the favourable reviews by publications ranging from The Economist to The Hastings Independent Paper, our speaker attributed his unease to a previous chastening experience where he was castigated by an audience member for the engineering solecism of placing a crankshaft in the engine of the 1930s Italian saloon car, a Fiat Ardita, in which two of the characters in his third novel were fleeing Florence.  Alex anxiously scanned the audience trying to divine the identity of the audience member possibly tasked with the relentless fact checking of his talk, on behalf of whichever jurat currently curates Winchelsea’s arcana.  Potential readers were assured of his respect when he declared that he favoured Virginia Woolf’s approach of treating the reader as an educated amateur.  Since sense of place was the key factor for author and audience, Preston’s listeners were interested in his list of associations with Winchelsea beginning with a visit as a two-year-old.  He told of the personally eventful odyssey which had created his romantically contorted Winchelsea; a night there drenched in bright moonlight, a storm out at sea witnessed from the town and the sense of its subterranean world of cellars and tunnels culminating in rubbing shoulders with the shade of his latest fictional heroine during a Cellar Tour.  His Muse also drew inspiration from the area’s past literary luminaries – Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane and Henry James, including the last’s fascination with Thackeray’s unfinished Rye/Winchelsea saga Denis Duval.  Lest all this seems excessively ethereal, he also bonded with the locale through wild swimming at Pett Level. 

  The author then treated us to a reading from the book where the town, its surroundings and the prevailing weather were described in lyrical prose.  The plot lines of the novel were explored in some detail; the vibrant smuggling industry of the 1740s and the modus operandi of the rival Hawkhurst and Mayfield gangs, the Jacobite leanings of some of the characters, genuflections before the modern cultural iconostasis in the ambiguous sexuality of the heroine  and the racially inclusive dramatis personae and a  crescendo building to a climactic Armageddon where revenge is dispensed in measures sufficient to leave even the Count of Monte Cristo sated.  It was entirely understandable that an audience, assailed for the last 2 years by myriad microbes whose battle standards bore devices drawn exclusively from the Greek alphabet, should fail to mount the required immune response and succumb en masse to the virus of literary narcissism, charging forward to purchase the essence of Winchelsea captured in this eponymous novel.  Sadly, Clare Balding missed Alex Preston’s talk but had she and her companion rambled on to Rye and sought to slake their thirst at the first hostelry they would have learnt from the board over the entrance to the Ship Inn of the resilience of smuggling as a local industry in the mixture of despair and exasperation permeating Lord Pembroke’s 1781 quotation displayed there “Will Washington take America or smugglers England first?”  and might perhaps have been minded to summon sympathetic sentiments for the crew of Rye’s Revenue Cutter, Amelia, tasked with sailing into a steady, if sometimes only metaphorical, headwind in their unavailing struggle against the integral part of the local economy that was smuggling. 

William Doherty