Last Word

David Abulafia (1963-67) Praeceptoribus Paulinis

When I wrote my most recent book,

The Boundless Sea: A Human History

of the Oceans for Penguin, I knew that I had to dedicate it to those who taught me so well at St Paul’s. They taught me to enjoy writing and to love history. Soon after the book appeared I was invited to tell the Friends of the British Library about it, and someone asked a question about the mysterious list of initials in the dedication: Praeceptoribus Paulinis PNB CED TEBH AHM JRMS PFT necnon INRD – that is to say Dr P N Brooks, Colin Davies, Tom Howarth, Hugh Mead, J R M Smith and Peter Thomson, adding also someone who taught me French, not history, Norman Davies.

Each had a very different style of teaching. High Master Howarth’s Special Subject on the French Revolution was delivered as a superbly constructed course of lectures, punctuated by an occasional sardonic witticism. Colin Davies introduced me to the Middle Ages. Hugh Mead, who still flourishes, was a model of scholarly patience, even when we expressed dislike for economic history – nonetheless I became a sort of economic historian. J R M Smith’s ancient history lessons were at least as good as anything I witnessed in Cambridge (with exceptions for OP Michael Crawford (1952-57) and the illustrious Moses Finley). Peter Thomson’s unstoppable energy motivated all of us. Fewer will remember Norman Davies, but he is now Poland’s most distinguished historian. A series of essays by those who have known him throughout his career was published to mark his seventieth birthday. Here is part of what I wrote in that book:

“It is September, 1963. A massive Gothic building constructed in red terracotta brick rises behind a screen of trees planted to soften its vivid colours. Its claim to antiquity is only in part a pretence, for, though built in 1884, this is the home of one of England’s great and ancient schools, St Paul’s, founded in 1509 by the eminent Renaissance scholar John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, for the teaching of Greek and Latin.

A small new boy of thirteen (viz: myself) discovers that he has been assigned to the top French set. He will soon realise that this is a tribute not to his accomplishments in French but to the quality of teaching by his French mistress at his previous school. She was herself French, but omitted one crucial aspect of language teaching: the language was taught as a dead language; there was no attempt to make conversation; outlandish pronunciation was tolerated. At St Paul’s, I discover that my French master (the word ‘teacher’ being regarded in those days as somewhat vulgar) is Mr I N R Davies. Being a new master, he is forced to peregrinate from room to room, unlike the older established members of staff, who have their own form-room with their own desk and bookshelves and blackboard. Mr Davies sees us in a pokey room full of beams, half-way up the broad flights of stairs that lead to the dining hall above our heads – clearly one of the worst rooms in the School.

Mr Davies arrives – a neat young man – and he opens his mouth. We are dumbfounded. He speaks to us in French. He tells us he will be teaching us by the méthode directe. We are to be taught entirely in French. We will, it is true, have to translate passages from French to English and vice-versa. But words of English rarely pass Mr Davies’ lips. Once in a while, when all other attempts at explanation have failed, he pronounces a word or two in English. His English voice is much deeper and we detect an accent (maybe Lancashire?). A French boy, named Smith (1962-67), is sitting behind me and asks me whether Mr Davies is actually French. Who else but a Frenchman would know how to pronounce properly the name of the poet Joachim du Bellay? After all, if Smith can be French, so can Davies. We conclude that he does not really speak English, though we accept he can read it well enough to correct our work.

Later, rumours will circulate that he was educated at Oxford, and that he is a very capable historian. We will hear of his attempts to establish a soccer team, against the express wishes of his colleagues (at St Paul’s ‘football’ is rugby football and it is accepted that young gentlemen should play nothing else). He will only stay for two years. Soon we will be speaking French in the new-fangled ‘Language Laboratory’ deep in the basement. But we will owe to Norman Davies a sense that languages are living tools.”

One of our daughters lives in Barons Court, so my wife and I have stayed a couple of times at the St Paul’s Hotel at 153 Hammersmith Road, which occupies all that is left of the old buildings, and where the owner lays welcome emphasis on the history of the School. In my day it was a boarding house and off-limits to those who did not board, having been built as the High Master’s house; I think of it as a sort of archaeological site that gives frustrating clues to the lost glory of a much bigger structure that has now been swept away. A PhD thesis by Lisa Freedman about the move to Hammersmith, which you can find on the web, explains what was in the mind of Dr Walker and the Mercers when the School moved from its much smaller building in the City. The aim was not to mimic the eight other ‘Public Schools’ that had been identified by the Clarendon Commission in the 1860’s, among which only St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’ were day schools. The aim was, rather, to create something distinctive, a school that owed as much to the highly academic German Gymnasium schools as it did to the character-building public schools promoted by Dr Arnold at Rugby. Although, sadly, Walker’s name has disappeared from the School library, St Paul’s remains as much a monument to his foresight as to that of Dean Colet. 