PHS 1


“I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

– Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928

Well, I was not sent down for indecent behaviour, but I did become a schoolmaster.


One of the grimmest buildings in Oxford, apart from the Examinations Schools, is the Appointments Committee, more commonly known as the Disappointments Committee. As I came to the end of my fourth and final year, it gradually dawned on me that I would be needing a job or, if I was really lucky, maybe even a career. I did not know what to do. I had worked for Barclays during one or two holidays and during my “gap” year, but I did not have much enthusiasm for banking. The Army? No, I did not like the idea of getting shot or blown up.

After leaving Oxford, I was working temporarily in a Barclays in Winchester, in Jewry Street, and I learned that an old Oxford friend of mine, Thomas Hamilton-Jones, was teaching at Winchester College. Tom suggested that I ought to try my hand at teaching. With the help a job advertisement in The Times Education Supplement, The TES, I found myself teaching English at Perrott Hill School in Somerset. 


By a bitter irony, I also found myself coaching the rugby team. And no, I am not sure that poachers always make the best gamekeepers.


Perrott Hill School was (and still is) housed in a rather splendid Victorian country house. Even though I had absolutely no teaching experience and no qualifications, apart from a rather irrelevant degree in Theology, I found myself teaching English, taking games in the afternoon and doing a lot of boarding school duties. I really cannot imagine why the headmaster, Derek Hoare, gave me the job, but I am rather glad that he did. 

At Oxford, I had been worried about what I was going to do with my life, how I was going to earn a living and where I was going to live. My first year or two at Perrott Hill were hard work and long hours, but at least I had some purpose and focus, with not much time left over for worrying about the future. Best of all, I had stumbled upon one of life's most precious assets: a career that you actually enjoy. When I started my first term at Perrott Hill, I had no idea that my teaching career would take me to the Middle East, Romania, Bulgaria and even China.
    


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