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DIALOGUE Issue #5 2020
Peter White in the Music School
A LIFE IN MUSIC 36 YEARS AT THE RGS By Peter White, Director of Music 1984 to 2020
What had attracted you to the RGS when you joined the school in 1984? I was working at a very prestigious boarding school in Yorkshire, and although I loved the countryside, I wasn’t very happy there. I think I was missing both the South and a rather more urban existence. The school was also a large Benedictine monastery and, it has to be said, a bit of a strange place; the fact that I wasn’t catholic didn’t help. Having been a pupil at a big boarding school myself, I was sure that that was the sort of school I wanted to work in but I saw the ad for the RGS post and thought, with the arrogance of youth, well I could slum it there for a couple of years before progressing to another big public school. I came down on a sunny October day for the interview and it really was love at first sight.
What was so appealing? The tangible sense of energy and purpose of a school that had only just opted out of the state sector really grabbed me. It seemed a happy school too, and compared with the institution I was working in, filled with relatively normal people. The business-like approach of a day school, something I had never experienced before, was refreshing. Long, slow paced boarding school days were replaced with busier but much shorter days, and of course, weekends were my own again. In many ways, my own childhood and education at King’s Canterbury and Oxford had been rooted in centuries old tradition and the relative freshness of the RGS was instantly attractive. I suspect I’d always been a bit of an iconoclastic and I’m not a great believer in tradition for tradition’s sake.
