SUMMER 2012 ISSUE No. 150 - Shrewsbury School

F IFTY-FOUR YEARS ON . . .
It is over fifty-four years since I first came to teach at Shrewsbury
and I am often asked how much it has changed. I usually answer
that in some ways it has changed out of all recognition and in other
ways not at all. Shrewsbury has its own distinctive ethos, composed
of its landscape, its people and its structures: and the interplay
between the actors on that landscape and the ethos which they first
inherit and then transmit is a subject of intense fascination to me. In
the letter, well-known in Salopian circles, which Malcolm White, who
had joined the Common Room in 1910, wrote four days before he
was killed on the Western Front in 1916, to his colleague and
contemporary Evelyn Southwell, he was comforted by the reflection
that Shrewsbury is immortal. I sometimes think that the river which
flows past our school, always moving but always essentially the
same, provides a powerful image of that abiding ethos, of that
ethical continuum in which we all play our part.
There have been significant changes on our incomparable Site,
which Neville Cardus described as ‘the most beautiful playing fields
in the world’; but its essential characteristics of space and surprise,
which Laurence Le Quesne identified in a previous edition (No.100),
have happily, if somewhat precariously, been preserved. The
arrangement of our buildings round a central ‘village green’ is an
essential element in the Salopian ethos: and though there has been
much building in the last fifty years - the Lyle Building, Kingsland
Hall, the Craft Centre, the Science Building, the Gym, the Swimming
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School News
Dr David Gee (DHG), who after a number of failed attempts, will make another attempt to retire
this summer, reflects on the changes he has seen at Shrewsbury over the last half century.
Sixth Form trip to Moscow, May 1961
Pool, the Cricket Centre and three new boarding houses, The
Grove, Mary Sidney Hall and Emma Darwin Hall, being the most
notable examples - the Site retains its extraordinary beauty and its
compelling magic.
Of course, the people come and go; and here, too, there have
been important changes in number, provenance and function. In
1958 there were forty-five members of the Common Room, all male
and all Oxbridge graduates. The first female member of the
permanent staff was appointed in 1979. Now there are over a
hundred full-time colleagues, one fifth of them female, drawn from a
wide variety of Universities. Then it was generally assumed that,
although ambition might lure a few away, most colleagues would
stay for life. Now there is much greater mobility: there have been
more than sixty new members of the Common Room in the last ten
years. Then internal promotions, especially to Housemasterships,
were generally based on seniority of appointment to the staff; and
the average age of Housemasters was nearer 50 than 40.
Colleagues addressed each other by their surnames. Senior
colleagues would not hesitate to rebuke, or even report their juniors
for some misdemeanour or solecism. When, as a young ‘brusher’,
(Salopian slang for ‘master’), I donned a woolly ski-hat, with a bobble
on top, for coaching on the river on a freezing February afternoon,
the Senior Master, usually amiable and genial to his juniors, growled,
as he passed me on his bicycle, ‘Take that thing off!’ I did!