Sport - Rugby School

Obituary
2009/10
Michael Mavor: Head Master
Michael Mavor, Head Master, was born on January 29, 1947. He
died on December 8, 2009, aged 62
Michael Mavor was one of the most successful reforming
headmasters of his era. He led three good schools and left them
all in significantly better condition than when he took them
on, raising their academic standards, fitting them for the 21st
century, and ensuring that they responded to the demands of
modern society.
His most significant achievement, in the view of Sir Eric Anderson,
former Head Master Provost of Eton, “was to transform Rugby,
the most manly of boys’ schools, into a strikingly successful coeducational
school. What I liked about him was his quiet modesty
and the way in which, through all the trials and tribulations of
administration, he remained a real schoolmaster. No one ever
doubted that his pupils and his colleagues mattered most to
him.”
At Gordonstoun, where the Duke of York and the Earl of Wessex
were among his pupils, he became headmaster at the age of
only 31 — two years younger than Dr Arnold when he took over
Rugby. The appointment was described by one of the governors
as “the best we ever made”. He worked with the legacy of
practical idealism laid down by Gordonstoun’s founder, Kurt
Hahn, while greatly improving the academic culture of the school
and enhancing its tradition of service to the community.
The most unstuffy of heads, he once astonished the pupils at
Rugby by skateboarding down the aisle of the school chapel,
and while at Loretto Academy he demonstrated the need for pinpoint
accuracy (and his own sporting skills) by driving a golf ball
straight down the centre of the chapel. He regularly turned out in
rugby kit to help with coaching, directed school plays, played the
bagpipes, and learnt to become an expert salmon fisherman.
spent the remainder of the war in the notorious Changi prisoner
of war camp, where his weight dropped to 6½ stone; at one
point his life was saved by an Australian doctor who removed his
appendix without anaesthetic. When he emerged from the camp,
he was still suffering from the ravages of amoebic dysentery.
Nevertheless, within two years he was back in post in Malaya,
where Michael Mavor and his elder brother Ian spent their early
years, before the family returned to Edinburgh in 1951. Mavor
regarded his father as a role model all his life, quoting their
favourite philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, who said he had inherited
“from the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty
and a manly character”.
As governor of 14 schools in all, he became a significant influence
on the development of the public school system in Britain, insisting
that, as well as raising academic standards, they must have a true
vision of their role within the wider education context, staying
closely in touch with modern developments and involving as
broad a section of society as possible.
• • • • •
At school, Mavor was a glittering pupil, but not always a
predictable one. He ran away from Loretto “Nippers” — the
preparatory school — because he said that he was bored. An
imaginative headmaster promoted him to be head boy. He went
on to become Head of School at Loretto itself, was captain of
cricket, hockey and golf, played in the first team at rugby and
tennis, edited the school magazine, and was pipe-major of the
school band.
Michael Barclay Mavor was born in 1947 in Malaya, where his
father, William Ferrier Mavor, and his mother, Sheena Barclay,
had begun their married life. Ferrier Mavor had been posted
there by the British and Commonwealth Office. When war broke
out he joined the Intelligence Corps, and was captured when
Singapore was surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942. He
At St John’s College, Cambridge, he was Trevelyan Scholar and
Exhibitioner in English; he also played rugby for the university,
but he narrowly missed his Blue. It was at Cambridge, too, that
he met his future wife, Elizabeth. From Cambridge he went to
the United States, where he was Woodrow Wilson Fellow at
Northwestern University, Illinois, from 1969 to 1972.