Valete Teachers that have been with Wellington for over 10 years
DENISE (COOK) BROWN October 1997
It is only every once in a while, that a real iconoclast joins the Wellington College Common Room, but Denise can justly claim to be a true mould-breaker. She first joined the English Department in October 1997 on a six-week PGCE placement, making such a success of it that she was appointed to teach full time from the start of the new academic year in 1998. From the very beginning her teaching was characterised by a fierce determination to challenge complacent readings and to explore new texts and perspectives. Her classroom was full of passion and fire but was also a place of the highest academic standards and expectations. Woe betide the student who was less than fully prepared! Over the years Denise has been a leading proponent of broadening the English curriculum to include more diverse voices among our set texts, and as one of Wellington’s original IB teachers was responsible for writing the first English A1 programme for Wellington’s authorisation as an IB school in 2008. However, Denise’s influence on Wellington has spread far beyond the classroom. As Wellington’s first single mother – her two boys Felix and Benedict, were just seven and four when she joined and are now proud OWs – it was perhaps inevitable that she was Head of the WCA (the parents association) between 2008 and 2015 and grew that by designing, establishing, and
publishing the programme of lectures, trips and events for parents that now runs out of the Community Office. Despite an inauspicious start (a fire in the Channel Tunnel on the day of departure forced the last-minute cancellation of the first ever parent trip to Paris) Denise organised and ran parent trips to Rome, St Petersburg, Berlin, Marrakesh, Ypres, Normandy and, of course, the Battlefields of Waterloo, finally managing a rerun of Paris Giverny in 2014. Denise more than most is responsible for creating such good and close relationships between the parent body and the school. She has also served for many years on the Common Room committee and was President of the Common Room for three years between 2015 and 2018. Her success in these roles has done much to bring a real sense of inclusivity to the school and to make it a place where parents, pupils, and staff feel valued, involved, and very much a part of things. Perhaps even more importantly, she pioneered the cause of Equity and Inclusion at Wellington, making ‘Welly Diversity’ a visible presence in College from 2012, before taking over the WCPCI in 2017 and developing it into a mainstay of the Global Citizenship programme, devising the weekly Wednesday afternoon ‘Peacebuilders’ course, and leading regular service-learning trips to Rwanda and the Calais refugee camps. Alongside this, as Head of Charities for the last ten years, Denise re-shaped the House/College charities programme to
focus on educational and social justice charities at home and abroad, incorporating events such as World AIDS Day into the College calendar and heading up fundraising events with parents and pupils, leveraging Wellington’s ability to raise significant sums for diverse good causes. One notable event she masterminded was the150th anniversary ball in aid of Hope and Homes for Children, while more recently she organised a gala event that saw the 2018 WCPCI guest lecturer Johnson Beharry VC speak movingly in aid of the JBVC foundation. During her time at Wellington Denise has tutored in the Apsley when it was the only girls’ house at Wellington, the old Hardinge (when it was a boys’ house), was Assistant Housemistress in the Apsley, and then returned to the Hardinge seeing it transform from a boys’ house to a co-ed house and then to its current manifestation as a girls’ house. She has also been an enthusiastic coach of (variously) girls’ squash, athletics, swimming, boys’ football (her JC 3s were a mighty outfit) and now girls’ football, rounders, and rowing. She has also directed several plays: a third form production of Macbeth in 1998, full school productions of Arcadia and Twelfth Night in 2000 and 2001, respectively, and then a combined pupil and Common Room production of The History Boys in 2010. All productions were full of Denise’s trademark qualities of wit, intelligence, and forensic attention to detail. It is no exaggeration to say that Denise’s time at Wellington has seen the school change from an essentially old-fashioned boys’ boarding school to the dynamic, inclusive and innovative co-ed place it is now is. That she has not only embraced every change with enthusiasm but has also been instrumental in facilitating and insisting on so much of that change will arguably be her most important legacy – but for all those she has taught she will simply remain as a quite outstanding and inspirational guide and mentor who will be remembered with gratitude and affection. We thank her for all she has done and wish her well as she moves to her new post as IB Coordinator at The British School of Córdoba, where she will take them forward through their IB authorisation, a role to which she is quite clearly brilliantly suited.
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