A Portrait of McClure

EVERY HEADMASTER APPOINTED TO MILL HILL OVER THE PAST 100 YEARS HAS HAD TO FOLLOW IN JOHN DAVID Mc CLURE’S SHADOW. NO ONE IMPRINTED THEIR LEGACY ON THE SCHOOL MORE THAN HE. HIS PERSONALITY, HIS FAITH, HIS INTELLECT, AND HIS PUBLIC REPUTATION HAVE NEVER BEEN EQUALLED. THOSE WHO FOLLOWED FULFILLED THEIR DUTY BY SUSTAINING THE SCHOOL AND THE VALUES THAT Mc CLURE LEFT BEHIND.

Halfway through the summer term of 1970, a vacancy arose in the Modern Languages department. A teaching post which I had hoped for in Bordeaux had proved illusory. I applied on the off-chance for the position at Mill Hill. My subsequent visit to the School on a sunny May afternoon when the estate was looking its glorious best, to meet Michael Hart (Head 1967-74) and Michael Brown (Head of Modern Languages and House Master, Ridgeway 1948-75) proved enjoyable. They must have been in agreement because I received a letter of appointment a day or two later. This set out the usual terms and conditions: as an assistant master I was to teach French and German, be a visiting tutor and be accommodated in a nearby house called St Bees, which was then a hostel for the Chaplain and his family and two bachelor masters.

And so, early in September, I arrived with my suitcase for what I thought would be a temporary hiatus before I found something better in France. On the doorstep,

I was welcomed by Bob Armstrong (a massive icehockey pro and teacher from Lakefield, Ontario, on exchange with Reverend Henry Starkey, (Chaplain 1957-80) who helped me to my rooms. These were a small study on the first floor, and a bedroom among the many attics, two of which were occupied by the other master, Tim Jackson, a Chemist and musician whom I had already met by chance at a concert at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Waves of Mahler blazed full volume from his beloved Quad valve amplifier. I already felt very much at home.

The new school year started in the heat of an Indian summer. St Bees was a natural haven surrounded by glorious lawns, mature trees and shrubs overlooking Top Field. The Neoclassical portico seemed to pull me into its embrace. I would not question my good fortune, I decided. My thoughts focused instead on the there and then: getting to know my new colleagues and the boys in my classes and in School House; learning the geography and everyday routines; meeting my head of department’s expectations of preparation and marking. I accepted Mill Hill as a given and I don’t think I was very interested to research its history. About one thing I was however curious – why the name ‘St Bees’? I soon learned that the name harked back to a school in Cumbria where Mill Hill had been happily evacuated in 1939 for the duration of the Second World War. For the moment, that was enough.

What I failed to discover at that point was that the large, detached house had been built in the 1890s as the Headmaster’s private lodging for himself and his family. Their traditional accommodation in School House was urgently required to house the growing roll of boarders. As I pushed open the heavy front door in September 1970, and walked up the wide staircase to my rooms,

I little realised that I was literally following in the footsteps of the legendary Dr McClure who had lived in this same house for more than 20 years.

He must have trodden the same staircase thousands of times. It was my first unwitting physical contact with Mill Hill’s most distinguished headmaster. His shadow was to hover over me for the next 37 years, and indeed for much longer.

With hindsight, I know today that the ghost of the great man was much more evident in the Mill Hill of 1970 than I was aware at the time.

McClure would in fact have had little difficulty in recognising and accepting the School nearly half a century after his death.

The place I grew to know with such affection was not so very different from the institution he had left in 1922. First, much of the estate itself would have been immediately familiar. True, the Science and Art blocks, the Buckland pool, Winterstoke and Burton Bank had been built in those intervening years. Fishing Net and Memorial Field had been levelled and drained. But, otherwise, the physical site had scarcely changed – not just the buildings but also the row of swaying elm trees along Collinson path, the giant cedar of Lebanon in School House garden and the gnarled sweet chestnut outside St Bees were as McClure would have seen them from his sitting room. Mill Hill was still in 1970, just as in 1891, a delightful rural oasis, a London village with its church, war memorial, pond, post office, confectioner’s, butcher’s and a handy public house. The bus struggled up Bittacy Hill and Hammers Lane then, just as carters must have cursed the gradient 50 or more years before. The views over Totteridge were unchanged with sheep and cows grazing in the succession of fields running down into the valley; from behind Rosebank Farm on the Ridgeway there still emanated the pungent odour of a piggery.

As for the School community itself, it was still, under Michael Hart, a smallish, predominantly boarding school for senior boys (albeit 450 compared to McClure’s 320) from varying towns and faiths up and down the country; only a handful came from abroad. They lived their lives in close proximity, in classrooms, in house common rooms and in dormitories without curtains or carpet, places which had scarcely changed over the years. They were taught by masters, mostly traditional Oxbridge types, who brought to the Common Room something of the atmosphere of a college senior combination room including, of course, the ritual sherry taken before lunch. Just as in the recesses of McClure’s masters’ minds there lurked the experience of the Boer War and (later) the Great War, so too in 1970 nearly all Hart’s housemasters and senior staff were still indelibly marked by their active Second World War service. They brought to the School a level of unspoken moral and physical courage that sometimes conflicted with the more aggressively liberal values that emerged in the late 60s and which the much younger Headmaster and his more recent appointments were keen to endorse. McClure would have recognised that tension, I am sure.

The Nonconformist tradition was still strong – the last headmaster-cleric, Dr Whale, had stood down in 1951 but a succession of United Reformed Church chaplains supported the lay headmasters who were appointed thereafter.

McClure might have blanched somewhat at what passed for worship in Chapel each day but he would have perceived the conviction of faith.

As it was in his day, what happened on the games field was still of paramount importance in the lives of both boys and masters. Monitors and prefects ran their houses undisturbed by their housemasters. Fagging continued, re-named ‘house duties’. Colours tests were a traditional part of a new boy’s welcome. Exeats, half and full, were given every three weeks, but otherwise bounds were to be kept by boys at the rare times when they might have a free moment.

Uniform remained formal and boys still coveted the award of their house tie or scarf; boaters and colours blazers were still to be seen on occasion when the cricketers set off for an away match.

None of this would have struck McClure as unusual.

He would have applauded too academic success marked by the number of Oxbridge scholarships gained each year although the mathematics syllabus had definitely changed since his day. There were still no national league tables to worry about in the Seventies and he would have approved of Sixth

Form teaching which encouraged wide-ranging intellectual enquiry rather than the narrow, overly structured curriculum that masquerades as ‘learning’ today.

Gradually in that autumn term of 1970, I found my feet, began to accept the challenge, felt emboldened both by the support I received from my colleagues and by what struck me as the favourable welcome of the boys in my classes. Yes, the bottom Remove French set was a handful, but with time we got to know each other better. I like to think that the young Mr McClure (as he then was) found his way into his new school in similar fashion. He appointed a number of new staff with whom he must have worked hard to build a trusting relationship. His priority however was to bring in more new boys, lots of them; I imagine that he shared both their excitement and anxiety. Many people who knew him spoke of how he ‘understood’ boys, how easily he was able to mould their minds and character.

To attend Mill Hill in whatever guise is to join a fellowship, to be a valued part of a warm, busy and tolerant community.

It was this that so impressed me in my first weeks and months. Masters and boys lived their lives together. I took lunch with colleagues and boys in the Dining Hall where portraits of the Victorian great and the good looked down sternly upon us. I would teach in the Marnham and attend assembly in the Large – at the time I had no knowledge that the Large was once the School Chapel where McClure preached his first sermons. Several times a week I would take my violin to the Music School and join in orchestral rehearsals, hardly bothering to read the Latin plaque that informed that this was McClure’s Music School, a gift to mark the 21st anniversary of his headship. I didn’t know then that McClure was a gifted composer and performer who often enjoyed making music with his boys in those same rooms.

I attended services in the Chapel (more McClure lengthy sermons) and I helped supervise the Winterstoke Library. I would often pass the Fives Courts and watch pairs in action. Regularly one would hear the happy tones of splashing and shouting from the indoor pool (antediluvian, in fact the first ever to be built, it was said). One evening a week, I would be on visiting tutor duty in

School House, reporting to the Housemaster, John Wait, in his study or sitting room (the same rooms McClure and his family had occupied prior to moving to St Bees). Occasionally I would be called to Michael Hart’s study in the Octagon to discuss some matter, only vaguely aware that this room with its beautiful Victorian book-laden cabinets was where all Mill Hill’s headmasters from McClure onwards had sat, thought, and acted. Did I hear then the echoes from the past?

My memories of my earliest days at Mill Hill have inevitably coalesced into a more general impression, one of enjoyment of my new professional life and congenial environment. One moment in my first autumn term however stands out more distinctly in my mind – Remembrance Sunday. Standing with the Mill Hill community (Old Millhillians, parents and local residents were numerous in joining the masters and boys) at the Gate of Honour, listening to the Headmaster read from ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ followed by the Silence and the Last Post, and then processing through the Gate to Chapel left me with a powerful impression of the deep sincerity with which the School wished to remember those 319 of its own who had fed from Mill Hill’s arcadian pastures to lay down their lives for their country in foreign fields. The larger proportion of those 319 recorded were the 194 from the Great War, the first names carved into the Purbeck stone of the Gate which had been dedicated in the presence of the then visibly ailing Sir John McClure in October 1920. Their names were also recorded on the Roll of Honour concealed inside the main lectern in Chapel. McClure’s ashes were to be interred only a few feet away, just behind the traditional Headmaster’s stall.

I have often heard it said that McClure’s early death was hastened by the literal and metaphoric ravages of the Great War upon his heart. Those 194 were ‘his boys’. He had spent hours during the War keeping in touch with many of those serving on the various fronts, doubtless reminding them of happier days and assuring them that they were constantly in everyone’s minds. He had written with his condolences to their parents each time the School was informed of those missing or killed in action. How often must he have stood in Assembly in those four years to announce with increasing sadness the loss of another Millhillian life. Who could not be surprised if McClure despaired as he witnessed the generations of young men he had painstakingly nurtured cut to shreds?

In my years at Mill Hill we were, sadly, sometimes faced as a community with death – occasionally a pupil, or a member of a pupil’s family, sometimes a colleague, or a former colleague, or a notable Old Millhillian. We mourned, paid our respects and remembered. It was fortunately only on one occasion that I experienced something of that relentless grief brought about by war that McClure had had to face over four years. In May 1982, I was shocked to learn that a boy I had taught only a few years previously had been killed in action in Falkland Sound. David Tinker (Murray 1970-75) had also been an occasional boarder in School House where I was a tutor, I had taught him French, and he had been in one of the Rouen exchange groups I had accompanied. He had been a popular, always cheerful Sixth Former, a keen member of the CCF and captain of the Shooting VI. He joined the Navy after university and was serving on HMS Glamorgan when she was hit by an Exocet missile three days before the end of the Falklands War. He and 12 other ratings were killed instantly. Poignantly, he left behind a series of moving poems written about his life at Mill Hill, which his father published. I used to read one or two of the best at each Valedictory Service I took when Headmaster.

I felt that it was a way of passing on his legacy beyond the bare name engraved on the Gate of Honour. I trust McClure would have approved.

Looking back, I am increasingly aware how much we were all – unsuspectingly – in thrall to Dr McClure.

When I became Headmaster and found myself for the first time alone in ‘his’ study, I felt the full weight of responsibility for everyone and everything in the Foundation and I questioned whether I could meet the challenges of my new role.

I think I shared an anticipation and apprehension he would have felt 104 years previously. We were both on trial. McClure was faced with a much more Herculean task, of course, but there were parallels in our careers, particularly that urgent need to renew confidence and ensure that we each led the School into a centennial celebration with pride in the past and genuine optimism for the future. That McClure met those challenges, and famously achieved so much more on a national scale, illuminates for us his visionary greatness. I understand better now the inescapable influence that he stamped on the School, guiding and preparing young people for life, instilling in them the values of tolerance, of moral and physical courage which they receive to this day as their inheritance.

While acknowledging all this, however, for a long time I carried a profound regret: that I could never meet and know at first hand this distinguished servant of Mill Hill. Reading the School histories and the biographies, looking again at the portraits and the photographs – all this helped to bring him closer to me, but not close enough. Clearly, the clock could not be turned back, but in 1995 when I stepped more prominently into his shadow, I wondered how I could discover some more tangible link with the man himself.

It happened, quite by chance, one afternoon in the summer term of 1996. I was in discussion with a colleague in my study when my PA buzzed through to ask if I would have a spare moment to see a visitor who had brought the School a gift. She didn’t normally disturb me, so I thought it must be important. I excused myself and went to meet an elderly lady in the waiting room. She introduced herself as Mary, the daughter of Dudley Tennet (Day Pupil 1913-17). She explained that her father had been at the School many years ago, but that he was now rather frail and wished to donate some of his most precious effects. She handed me a tattered box inside which were four items – a school cap and three rugby colours caps. Recognising them immediately, I thanked her and asked whether her father would be well enough to come back and visit his School. ‘He hoped that you might invite him…,’ she began. We arranged a date. The name Dudley Tennet was unknown to me. I looked him up in the Register. Dudley Tennet was born with the century; he was a McClure boy! I was excited beyond measure at the prospect of meeting him, hearing him talk of his schooldays. Here at last was the living link with Dr McClure that I had been seeking.

Dudley Tennet returned on a fine afternoon, and we sat together on a bench on Top Terrace and chatted for an hour. For a man in his mid-nineties he was remarkably spry and alert. As he looked out over Top Field, the memories came crowding back. He spoke with great affection of his years at the School, although professed himself less than academic. His passion was rugby. When I thanked him for his caps and assured him that they would be well taken care of, he explained how it was that he had caps for three XVs, all from the same year, his last at the School. In his final season he had started in the Thirds, but boys were regularly leaving the School to join up and the higher XVs needed to fill the gaps from the lower teams. With each promotion, he was awarded his colours. His performance with the Firsts in just the last few matches of the season was strong enough for him to be offered the ultimate accolade, 1st XV colours. He told me that he had lived with his parents in Hendon and had attended Mill Hill as one of a handful of day boys but thought he had been treated no differently from the boarders. He remembered taking a horse-drawn carriage to the bottom of Hammers Lane early each morning and then walking up Cinder Path, rain or shine, to join the boarders at breakfast. His most vivid memory was of the time a Zeppelin airship on a bombing raid over London floated slowly over Top Field in flames, eventually to crash in a field just beyond the School. Of course, I asked what he remembered of Dr McClure. He looked anxiously over his shoulder as though to check that his Headmaster had not emerged from his house to eavesdrop (St Bees was close by). Dudley clearly held McClure in great reverence. He said that the Headmaster’s importance made him seem rather distant from the boys, but he felt that everyone knew that he had their interests at heart, that his advice was eagerly sought and that being presented with his 1st XV cap had been a moment never forgotten.

The closer I get to John McClure, the more I sense that some essential part of him lives on, an ever-formative and inspirational part of the human, moral and physical fabric of Mill Hill. But as I write these words to mark the centenary of his passing, I have also to accept that his life and achievement cannot be seen other than within the sharp perspective of history.

Born in 1860, McClure had been a subject of Queen Victoria for over 40 years before she died. In terms of his early upbringing, personality, appearance, outlook, he was more attuned to the ‘stiff upper lip’ of her colonial age than to the relaxed, more evident selfindulgence of the Edwardian period which followed. He would surely have welcomed the return to the more austere era of George V when he stepped forward to receive his knighthood.

1860: Charles Dickens was writing ‘Great Expectations’; the Light Brigade had charged at Balaclava only six years previously; Gladstone replaced Disraeli as Prime Minister when the boy was just eight; Bismarck defeated France in the FrancoPrussian War when he was ten; he became Headmaster at the age of 31, 131 years ago. It’s all history…

And yet… There are some qualities of a favoured institution that transcend the passing years. They are the virtues which link countless generations who have shared the joy and fulfilment of a common experience. Mill Hill has known many faithful and diligent servants. John David McClure was one such. Had he failed in his task, Mill Hill would have disappeared to become a brief footnote in history. But he succeeded – and beyond all expectation. As a result of a lifetime’s devotion to the institution which meant everything to him, he wrote a different page, one which re-positioned the School on the sturdiest of human foundations and ensured the continuity of that essential message Et virtutem et musas.

The Estate: 1870s

The Estate: 2006