Briefings Masters Remembered Frank Parker (Modern Languages Department 1928-65) and Philip Whitting (History Department 1929-63).
Keith Pratt (1951-56) remembers two very different and inspirational Masters. It was September 1954 when I entered the History Eighth to take A Levels in History, French and Latin, and first stood in awe at the reputation of two remarkable men. They were Philip Whitting (PDW) and Frank Parker (FGSP), great friends who shared tutorial premises in shoebox rooms under the Dining Hall and Lecture Theatre stairs and a mutual disregard for Dr James’s (High Master 1946-53) recent successor. In days before élitism came to be frowned on as an attribute of the country’s great schools, they made no secret of what they thought about Mr Gilkes (High Master 1952-63) handing out wine gums to boys watching 1st XV matches on Big Side. Both had their eyes single-mindedly on top academic goals, the winning of Oxbridge awards, in the pursuit of which A Levels were viewed as just a necessary hurdle. In character and teaching methods the two were quite different. Mr Parker revealed little about his personal life. He walked with a limp, but whether it was the result of a childhood illness
or a war wound we never knew. He was an affable, quietly spoken and sensitive man: I recall the calm but empathetic way he told his Lower History 8th form at the start of the 1954 Spring Term that one of our number had died of a long-standing illness during the Christmas holiday. I enjoyed going to lessons with FGSP. He had a great fund of interesting facts and stories, and though he could be side-tracked he never seemed to mind, and was quite happy to hold our interest by interspersing our reading of Molière or Racine with anything from an example of a Wagnerian leitmotif to the correct way to use an ivory toothpick.
Drawing of Philip Whitting by Edward Halliday, 1941
The low door behind Mr Parker’s seat in his classroom opened into the cubby hole under the stairs where Mr Whitting gave us individual tutorials, our first taste of the Oxbridge system of reading essays aloud for critical thought and discussion and a valuable preparation for what was expected to lie in wait for us at university. His whole-class teaching took place in ‘the Whitting Room’, a book-lined H8 room at the top of the left-hand flight of the main stairs where he trained many unsuspecting generations of future OPs for their careers by delivering his own scholarly ‘notes’. First, however, mutual respect had to be established, his likes and dislikes made known. His classroom routine was generally predictable.
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After allowing a few minutes for us to settle behind our desks he would enter through the door at the front of the room and walk, head down, straight to his desk and sit facing the door before beginning to talk. One day a prankster (Martin Forde (1951-56) put up a Daily Express poster on the wall behind Mr Whitting’s desk. In came PDW exactly as usual, sat straight down and the lesson began. The joke had evidently failed. But wait: after ten minutes or so he stopped in midsentence and without turning his head, said icily, “Is that an advertisement from the gutter press that I see behind me? I shall not teach you any more until that notice is removed”. And with that he got up and stomped out. We now knew where we stood with him. But how much and how little did we really know about him: Had he really been banned from using the cane because he had once gone too far with it? Did he actually believe in his argument-stopping claim to reincarnation that gave him the last word on debatable points of Tudor history: “I was Henry VIII so I know”? And we knew that he had been awarded the George Medal, but was it really for catching a bomb as it fell to earth on a parachute? He had been an RAF pilot, but had he flown Churchill secretly across occupied Europe to Yalta for the Conference in 1945? This was one of his exciting claims, but my attempts to prove or disprove it have been inconclusive. He had been on secret service as an RAF pilot in southern Italy and Churchill’s plane was recorded as arriving in Yalta from Malta. Did Whitting help to ferry the British leader across southern Europe on either the penultimate or the final stage of his hazardous journey to the Crimea? I suppose we began to appreciate more about Philip Whitting the man when he relaxed and took some of us Upper 8th formers to Ingatestone Hall
