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REPORT 21 DECEMBER 2004
"But" I protested, “I’m in Bucharest not
Budapest” .
. .
The other day, heading off for a day with Princess Margaret
in the Royal Archives at Windsor, I bought a Times – tabloids really are more manageable on crowded trains – and found obituaries of two people I had known at different stages of my life. Next day there was another. I don’t want to be morbid but I wanted to write about them. So I did just that and thought I’d sent the words off through the ether to my trusty web-master only to discover that I’d failed to attach the document and the words had vanished for ever. In the same tranche of e-mails picked up after a pre-Christmas dash to see my disabled cousin in North Wales I found that
Country Life had completely lost the piece I had e-mailed about the Star Clipper in the West Indies. Luckily I had a hard copy though not an e-mail version so I retyped it and sent it off. Now I’m reworking my thoughts on the dead. I know it’s a bit of a cliché but there are problems with the wonderful new technology.
Not only did these two pieces vanish but my system seems to be permanently infected with viruses and Symantec who provide my anti-virus protection have taken money for the next year off my credit card and e-mailed me a confirmation of renewal which I have printed out. All the same I get a daily “reminder” telling me that my renewal is overdue and I must sort it immediately. I can’t find any way of communicating with them so have passed it over to Carl my local computer whiz. I’m still waiting for him!
Anyway, back to my dead acquaintances or friends. The first was Ronald Bryden, the theatre critic. I knew Ron a little in Toronto in the seventies when I was an Associate Editor at
Weekend, the colour magazine which went out on Saturdays with the
Globe and Mail and a raft of other papers across Canada.
Ron was famously brilliant as the Observer’s theatre critic but had come back to Toronto where he had been at university. He was an adjunct professor and dramaturge
at the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford, Ontario so naturally I asked him to write for us. He did one or two pieces including a wonderful profile of Maggie Smith and then one day I invited him to lunch, at the magazine’s expense. Before we ordered he said to me very seriously “I don’t know if you want to continue with lunch but I’m afraid I can’t work for you again”. I couldn’t think what he was on about so said that of course we’d go on with lunch and we all loved and admired him and his work and would like to continue the relationship. “I’m sorry”, he said, “But you split one of my infinitives. So I can’t write for you again”. I knew at once what had happened. We had, in an irritating North American tradition, some hopelessly over-zealous editors who were always re-writing perfectly good copy. One of them had over-stepped the mark again. I apologised on their behalf but Bryden was
adamant. We remained on good terms throughout the rest of my time in Canada but he never wrote for us again. The second death in the
Times that day was Tim Hewat, killed in a car crash back in May. Tim had been one of two deputy editors at the
Daily Express in the late sixties. He was a deadly rival of David English and it was assumed that when Derek Marks, the editor, was booted upstairs one of them would get his job. I much preferred Tim who was a noisy abrasive Australian but who always listened if you had an argument and provided you shouted back. English was far smoother but I thought him oleaginous and shifty. In the end hopeless Max Aitken removed Derek Marks as editor but replaced him with a ghastly Glaswegian who sent the paper into an almost terminal spin. English went across the road to the
Mail group with legendary results and Tim Hewat packed his bags and went back to Australia.
My favourite encounter with Tim was in the late spring of 1968. I flew from Dubcek’s short-lived triumph in Prague to Ceausescu’s Romania where General de Gaulle was on a state visit. Arriving at the Plaza Athenee in Bucharest I got to my room to find the phone ringing. When I picked it up I heard Tim Hewat, shouting as usual. “When are you filing on the heart-transplant?” he asked, “I said I had only just arrived and knew nothing about a heart transplant”. He was very angry. “Call yourself a journalist”, he said, “Everyone else in Budapest knows all about it. The guy’s been given the heart from a pig and he’s in the hospital now. We want the story asap.” “Did you say Budapest?” I asked. “Yes” he said, “But” I protested, “I’m in Bucharest not Budapest”. Tim was even angrier, “Don’t split hairs with me”, he said, “Budapest, Bucharest, what does it matter?” Pure Evelyn Waugh.
The third obituary, the following day, was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Early in 1990 I was being auditioned at Buckingham Palace by Robin Janvrin, then the Queen’s Press Secretary, and Brian McGrath, Private Secretary to Prince Philip whose biography I had been asked to write. Robin asked all the questions; Brian just looked and listened.
At last Brian spoke. “If you’re going to do this book”, he said, “You’ll need to speak to Prince Bernhard. When you want to see him don’t approach him direct, come to me and I’ll fix it.”I knew immediately that I had passed some sort of test and Brian did indeed fix the interview and much else besides. But to this day I am still not entirely sure what was going on.
The memory of the Bernhard interview was being lectured on the merits of the WorldWide Fund for Nature which Bernhard had recently handed over to his friend and fellow consort, Prince Philip. I knew that hunters of various kinds believed they were the world’s best conservationists but it was still disconcerting to hear the Prince going on about endangered species when all around us were the stuffed heads of animals that he personally had shot and killed. I know that my sense of hypocrisy was irrational but I still couldn’t help feeling that something was wrong. I still do.
Another death which didn’t make the Times obituary pages was that of my old housemaster at Sherborne School, Peter Boissier. I wrote a piece myself and tried it on the
Independent where the obituaries editor Jamie Fergusson decided against using it, not least because he too was at school at Sherborne and he was apprehensive about allegations that we were playing the Old Boy Network game. I then tried it on the
Telegraph who, slightly to my surprise, reacted promisingly. At the time of writing they haven’t printed it but I live in hope. “Peter B” and I didn’t always see eye to eye. Indeed we hardly EVER saw eye to eye but he was a significant figure in many people’s adolescence. His great gift to me was discovering that there was a closed scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford restricted to people born in Dorset, educated in Dorset and with at least one parent born in the county. I qualified and won the Award much to the irritation of Poole Grammar School who had regarded it as a personal prize for many years.
This is what I wrote. Even if the Telegraph use it they will have to cut it drastically for reasons of space! Obituaries are terrifying in the way they reduce people’s lives to column inches.
Peter Boissier, who died on November 6th, aged 82, was a school-teacher whose importance far outweighed his apparent achievements.
As a distinguished representative of the stiff-upper-lipped, decent, all-rounders who entered the teaching side of private education in the years immediately after World War Two he exercised an enormous influence on successive generations of middle-class schoolboys, preaching and demonstrating moral certainty, ‘character’ and muscular Christianity in an uncompromising style which is now almost unrecognisably out of fashion.
For more than half a century he was the quintessential Mr. Chips.With his laconic unshockability ( a prized attribute), his trademark brothel-creeper suede-boots, duffel-coat and sobranie-reeking pipe, he was an icon of his time and place. In a lifetime of service to Sherborne School “Chaps” or “Peter B” was as closely identified with that ancient foundation as any of his contemporaries including the headmasters he served. For almost forty years he and his wife Jo acted in loco parentis to hundreds of impressionable teenage boys.
Peter Clement Boissier was born in Harrow on….and educated there at the school where his father was headmaster. In 1940, after captaining a spectacularly successful rugby XV as a virtuoso scrum-half he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, leaving after a year to enlist in the Royal Navy. After training at King Alfred (?), he joined the destroyer HMS Grenville as a sub-lieutenant. As a dashing junior officer aboard Jarvis and subsequently HMS ? he was present at the Anzio and Normandy landings and took part in a number of actions in the English Channel while based at Plymouth.
He was a notably enthusiastic, and slightly trigger-happy, marksman in charge of his ship’s Bofors gun and identified by contemporaries and superiors alike as a man of verve and promise.
After the war he returned to Cambridge where he pursued an enjoyable career in which cricket, rugby and other games – on and off the field of play – took pride of place.Academic studies were always kept in what he regarded as a proper perspective and although he was a mathematician by training and in practice it was not for his maths that he will be remembered.
His friends and contemporaries were surprised when instead of opting for the Navy or something similarly high profile he decided on the comparatively unsung and underpaid career of schoolmastering. In 1947 he was signed up by the charismatic Sherborne Headmaster Ross Wallace along with several similarly gifted contemporaries as a junior master.
The following year he married Jo who played a remarkably full part in their successful partnership at the school. After an apprenticeship as house tutor at Lyon House he took over as housemaster in 1961.
This was more of a challenge than it sounds. The house had been built by the legendary Alec Trelawney-Ross out of his own funds and enjoyed such a remarkable degree of independence that it was known as “Ross’ school”. Lyon House boys were strongly discouraged from studying History and English in the sixth form because Ross believed the teachers of those subjects were communists and they had their own gymnasium (“The Sweat House”) so that they could box, fence and do physical jerks without having to mix with the inferior boys in the rest of the school. Ross’ successor and Boissier’s immediate predecessor was the bluff Colonel Hughie Holmes who ran the place as if it were the crack battalion of a particularly tough county regiment.
These were difficult acts to follow but Boissier swiftly imposed his own breezy and unflappable personality on the institution, running it as if he were the commander of a tight ship on an Atlantic convoy.
His style was disciplined but outwardly relaxed and bolstered by an arcane vocabulary which included such inimitable phrases as “Anybody want to turn their bicycle round?”. This translated into “Does anyone need to go to the lavatory?”
Boys occasionally tried to shake the apparently unshakeable. On one notorious occasion a boy was persuaded by his colleagues to go the house-beak’s study and confess to uncontrollable sexual self-abuse. When he did so Boissier’s only reaction was to switch his pipe from one side of the mouth to the other, regard him beadily and say, through clenched teeth, “Well that certainly puts the average Arab into the shade”.
In 1968 School House was disintegrating into a state of anarchy and the headmaster asked Boissier to go in and sort the situation out. He was reluctant to leave Lyon House where many of his boys were the sons of his friends and contemporaries. However he was always a team player and he transferred his allegiance. There was a rocky period of initial hostility but before long his good humour, honesty and common sense – supported as usual by Jo – paid off and the house became almost as successful as Lyon.
On retirement in 1982 he master-minded a first-ever financial appeal on behalf of the School and succeeded in raising a million pounds by dint of indefatigable arm-twisting and long letters in virtually indecipherable handwriting.
In later years the Boissiers moved for a while to the nearby village of Haselbury Bryan where Peter was chairman of the parish council. For his final years they moved back to Sherborne where both battled debilitating illness with wry bravery. Both continued to take a lively interest in the careers of their former pupils and were always generous and entertaining hosts.
He is survived by his wife, Jo, his daughter Wendy and his son Paul.
On my way home by train I had to change at Exeter St. David’s. I was walking along the platform day-dreaming about mortality and memory when a voice called my name. An attractive woman of my sort of age was sitting on a bench smiling. This was very cheering especially as she turned out to be Alison Harvey whom I had known well when I was at Sherborne and she was at the Girls School. She taught me to smoke properly, inhaling deeply and puffing smoke out through my nostrils. It seemed an awfully grown-up thing to do after dark in the gardens opposite the Digby
Hotel.
We had a drink and reminiscence in the station buffet and then her train arrived and we walked out on to the platform. “Give me a kiss”, she said, “I may never see you again”.
And then she was gone.
Poignant end to a poignant period.
Tim Heald
Report Number 21
DECEMBER 2004
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