ESPRIT DE DOORS - THE HEADMASTER’S THIRTEENTH BLOG

I was explaining in our Senior School assembly recently that whereas many countries will only define a civilised environment after analysing moral, intellectual and artistic advancement, the British do it on the spot by watching how a child behaves in the vicinity of a door. Open a door and let others through, and you are a Renaissance youth, beloved of adults and numbered among the blessed. Try to go through a door before an adult, however, and you a reprehensible Visigoth, toppling the towers of empire and determining in three second that visitors will choose another “more civilised” School for their child. Never mind examination results: British Schools are really all about what happens near doors.

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International parents may not know that we have a chain of fitness centres in the UK called David Lloyd. (David was a great British tennis player. That’s not the same as a great German or Russian tennis player, I admit, but David got the ball back over the net sometimes and is subsequently a national treasure. He is now a hugely successful businessman and discerning art collector). In the Bromsgrove branch of David Lloyd there is, understandably, much talk of Bromsgrove School. My gym-based Stasi (when they are not working the School car parks in trenchcoats and walky-talkies) duly keep me informed. This week, for example, I was given a peculiarly (and, I pray, untypically) David Lloyd take on the number of pupils supposedly doing a certain course in the Lower Sixth. It was wrong by a factor of ten. A factor of ten!  When exasperated, the Cherokee Indians famously declared: svgi inageehi giniyaluga. It means Let's go hunt for some wild onions.

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I always thought Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great was the coolest teacher/pupil combo I had ever come across. However, I had the good fortune to sit next to Sir Eric Anderson at a lunch this week. Sir Eric has been Headmaster of three Schools, Provost of Eton and Rector of Lincoln College Oxford. He is an expert on Walter Scott and a hundred things besides. And he has also given Aristotle a run for his money, for in his time, Sir Eric has taught: Prince Charles, Tony Blair and David Cameron. Who knows if right now, in Bromsgrove, a young teacher is inspiring a trio of future Titans.

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Anyway, back to the door thing. For the days immediately following my announcement, I witnessed moments of bewilderment and terror as pupils neared these oblong arbiters of human decency. Even with no adult in sight, Bromsgrovians were scanning the horizon to ensure that by no conceivable means could they be accused of letting a door close on someone. Pupils were hesitating before open doors even when no one was coming the other way, fearing the threshold as one might a portal to the planet Tharg. I saw one pupil hold the door open at lunch only to find hoards of pupils filing through and setting him back a hundred places in the queue. Indeed, had I not relieved him, he’d still be there now. Thinner, but with his skeletal fingers clutching the handle. “After you” has become as common a phrase as “Any chance of some more chips, please?” We are in a golden age –the Athens of Pericles – and it may even last to the end of the week.

THE HEADMASTER’S TWELFTH BLOG – DAISY, DAISY

Long standing readers will recall the summer of torment when I inexplicably rubbed Factor 50 suncream into my eyes rather than adopting social norms and applying it to my skin. Well, I went one better last half term and damaged my ligaments in a curious cycling accident. Curious because the cycle in question was nailed to a gymnasium floor. Let me explain. Dismounting with butch gusto, I forgot to extricate my right foot from the strap. I duly fell into the lady cyclist next to me (my right foot still attached to my own bike). Since this unfortunate lady was listening to her I-Pod and in a state of blissful detachment, the sudden appearance of my head in her lap was unsurprisingly followed by a panic-induced flurry of blows to my face. As I was still strapped in to the next door bike and therefore unable to move, I had no option but to lie there and take the beating like a man.

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I’m not sure I have ever been as proud of the School as I was on Remembrance Sunday, and not simply because of the levels of respect, smartness and discipline on display from our pupils. More because those pupils represented over thirty nations who had spent periods of the twentieth century engaged in the most terrible conflict with one another. After our services, I watched British, Russians, Germans, Chinese, South Africans and a host of other nationalities walk away together into the crisp, bright morning. Sometimes, life really can be obviously and upliftingly symbolic.

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On Wednesday evening, the third annual Bromsgrove Foundation Lecture was held in the Lansdowne Club, off Berkeley Square in London. The superb Dame Julia Cleverdon gave the collective conscience and intellect of a one hundred and fifteen strong invited audience a thorough shaking. Dame Julia (one of the Fifty Most Important Women in Britain according to The Times) has herself a list of achievements as impressive as Smokin’ Joe Frazier’s uppercuts, but readers of a noble vintage will extend serious respect when I tell them that she once worked in .....wait for it ...  Industrial Relations at British Leyland in 1972. While the import of this position may be lost on younger readers, venerable observers will surely acknowledge that Damehood is poor reward for what has to be industry’s equivalent of climbing Mount Everest in leotard and flippers while carrying a Yak.

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I should add that when the gym staff pulled me off the terrified lady and the situation was explained to her, she apologised. Despite feeling and looking like a pizza (puffy and bulbous at the extremities but fine in the middle), I apologised in turn for entering her life so abruptly and without proper introduction. As the staff applied ice to an ankle growing quick as bamboo, I struck up polite conversation with my onetime assailant and discovered that the lady had young children and was thinking about appropriate schooling. Ever the trooper, I suggested, through my tears, that she take a look at Bromsgrove. She said she would. She hasn’t.