The Salopian no. 166 - Winter 2020-21

SCHOOL NEWS 7
But as well as successes, there will be many unexpected
and unwelcome setbacks, some of them mountains which
will seem too steep to climb, rivers too broad to cross. But
the only way is forward. My wife Ruth and I learned, in the
months following our own son’s death, the truth of Red’s
remark: if you fall down, you pick yourself up and dust
yourself off, or you curl up, wither and, in effect, die.
Secondly, setbacks, mistakes and suffering can all be
harnessed as engines for personal growth. One of the
first letters we received
after Seb’s death was from
one of my authors – I was
a publisher in those days.
He had lost his mother in
a car accident when he
was 19, the same age Seb
was when he died. He
wrote, in a letter I always
have with me, “You won’t
understand this now, but I
firmly believe that there is
no personal tragedy from
which you cannot extract
the material for growth”.
Obviously he was writing
about an extreme event,
but I firmly believe that the
truth holds good for any
kind of failure.
Thirdly, follow your dream. Happiness and fulfilment
do not grow in direct proportion to your bank balance.
Devotees, as I am, of the mesmeringly revolting series
Succession, which follows the fortunes of an American
media mogul and his perpetually warring family, will
understand this. Before I came to Shrewsbury, I worked
in the publishing industry, for the 15 years running up to
my career change as CEO of the company. I arrived here
17 years ago on a fraction of the salary I had previously
been earning, but not a day has gone by when I have
wanted to be back in my previous job. I am not saying
that you should all become teachers, but do not settle
for a job which your heart isn’t in. At this end of your
lives, the future stretches dazzlingly ahead, like a distant
view of a great mountain range, ridge after ridge, with
the gleam of the eternal snows on the horizon. Settling
for less than something that will interest and challenge
you, and, I would add, enable you contribute usefully to
a world desperately in need of your contribution, will,
before you know it, have you at the end of your lives
frustrated and disappointed that you didn’t do what you
really wanted to do.
Two of the best bits of life advice I was ever given were
given me by a director of the first publishing company I
ever worked for. They were, first, that when you feel you
have mastered a job completely and have nothing more to
learn, that is the time to be looking for a fresh challenge;
and following on from this,
that no job is really worth
going for and accepting
unless a small part of you
feels that it is a little beyond
your capabilities. And for
the record, I am retiring
not because I feel I have
mastered the job of being a
housemaster – I don’t think
you can ever master that –
but because it’s the right time
to hand over to a younger
man.
Finally, the experience of
losing a child has taught us
the value of friendship. No
experience sifts out your real
friends more effectively. Polonius, the pompous councillor
in Shakespeare’s Hamlet has the perfect words, “Those
friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,/Grapple them
unto thy soul with hoops of steel”. My two closest friends
are fellow Old Salopians, both godparents to our late son.
Better to have five really close friends, able to see your
faults as well as appreciate your qualities, than 500 or 1000
Facebook friends who will for sure not be there when you
need them, nor you for them.
And so here we are, ready to ‘go to our wide futures’, to
slightly misquote Praise song for my mother, an IGCSE
poem which many of you will have studied; futures outside
the protective walls of Shrewsbury School, a community
whose essential values, of tolerance, kindness and
compassion, seem to me unaltered since I attended it as a
boy; values which if you use them as your guiding lights
throughout the lives stretching ahead of you, will earn you
that contentment and peace of mind without which your
lives cannot truly be happy, and which lie at the heart our
greatest of school mottoes, Intus si recte ne labora.