Uppingham staff news
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DR STEPHEN WINKLEY 1944 – 2014 Dr Stephen Winkley, Headmaster of Uppingham from 1991 to 2006, passed away on 3rd April 2014, after a long illness.“Those who know Uppingham will be aware of the impact Stephen had on the School during his 15 years of dedicated service as Headmaster; amongst many significant developments he oversaw the introduction of full co-education to the School in 2001”, commented Richard Harman, Headmaster. “He was an inspirational character and his name will live on as one of Uppingham’s great Headmasters.”
A memorial service was held at the School on 21st September which was a celebration of Stephen’s life and acknowledgement of the contribution he made to the world of education, and in particular to the schools he taught at and led – Uppingham, Cranleigh, Winchester and Rossall. David Gaine (former Classics Master, Housemaster, Director of Studies and Second Master) pays tribute to his friend and former colleague, with additional material from John Tolputt, colleague and friend at Cranleigh School. Stephen Winkley was educated at St. Edward’s School, Oxford, and, after a PhD in Classics at Oxford University, he taught Classics and French at Cranleigh School, and went on to Winchester College, where he was Second Master and ran the scholars’ house, charged with some of the brightest boys in the country. He became Headmaster of Uppingham in 1991, and oversaw an era of change which transformed the School he inherited from his predecessor. I suspect that there is no such thing as ‘A Man for all Seasons’. There are men, and there are seasons, and from time to time there comes the right man for the right season. And there can be no doubt that in the case of Uppingham in 1991, Stephen Winkley was just that man. There was some tut-tutting at his appointment. I had met him many times before in various incarnations on Rugby Group meetings. He was certainly something of a maverick, not only in his dress-sense (the red shoes), but a man larger than life, apt to say and do exactly what he thought. The Headmaster’s secretary, Rosemary Netscher, was told that ‘We would regret it’. How wonderfully wrong they were. But if he ever thought that his early years were going to be easy, he was sadly mistaken. Although all seemed well, dark clouds were on the horizon. Boarding schools faced very real difficulties over this period. It became unfashionable to ‘send children away’, and many schools embraced a mixture of boarding, weekly boarding and day pupils: numbers in the School had fallen to just over 600, and fell still lower. Stephen’s first response was quick and effective. Instead of recruitment remaining in the hands of Housemasters,
everything was centralised by the Registrar’s office, and parents dealt with the Housemasters via the Registry. In addition, parents were for the first time to be shown round the School by Sixth Form Tour Guides, and were also invited to lunch in the Houses to see them at work. The next decision Stephen took – to keep faith with seven-day-aweek boarding – was crucial to the School’s success. He believed in proper boarding; for him it was a way of creating a safe world where people could grow and begin to understand how each other ticked. His vision of Uppingham as ‘the best boarding school in the country’ was his great legacy. There were more brave decisions. His second great victory in terms of the ‘soul’ of the School was the defeat of the Trustees’ proposal to introduce central feeding. It was reckoned that it would save huge amounts of money, and a design for a new building was produced. Stephen was strongly against it, believing that the loss of something almost unique – the ‘family’ of the Houses and their Houseparents – would lose the one feature that most attracted parents, and was and is most cherished by the boys and girls. Stephen then turned his mind to altering the shape of the School. The Hall was closed (1993), much to the chagrin of many, but it was too isolated from the main School. The Lodge was converted into a Sixth Form House for girls (1994), the first stage in what he was anxious to achieve – an increase in the number of girls in
A MAVERICK, AND A GREAT ONE. A GRUMPY OLD BEAR AT TIMES, BUT A LOVABLE ONE. AT UPPINGHAM HE WILL BE ALWAYS REVERED.