Last Word

Jon Blair (1967-69) shares his Leaver’s Report fifty years on

It is a very strange experience to be confronted with the not exactly flattering impression you gave your teachers as an 18-year-old more than fifty years ago. I didn’t expect to be moved and then angered when I asked the archivist to send me my Leaver’s Report, written in my final weeks at the School by some of those who taught me and claimed to know me. It has been a salutary experience as I read of a boy whom I vaguely recognised but felt I did not know.

But then I also have my very first school report from Parkview Nursery School in Johannesburg, written shortly before my 4th birthday. Miss Roth wrote then that I was “obedient, not aggressive and easily reduced to tears” and significantly that “he has overcome his fear of the slide.”

Miss Roth, I fear, knew me better than my subsequent Pauline masters. Just under 15 years later, in the summer of 1969, they were rather more ambivalent about my contribution to school life, let alone observant of the many insecurities that underpinned the adolescent I was. My only consolation is my certainty that at least some of the less pleasant things of which they wrote were proved over time to be way off beam – or at least I think they were. I have to admit, however, that nothing was quite as unrevealing of my future destiny as what was written in the Leaver’s Report of one Jonathan Miller (194753) of whom a teacher wrote “I like him but I am glad he is leaving”, while Buster Reed (1926-30 and i/c boxing 1947-72), whose main contribution to school life (at least in my day) seemed to be in punishing boys who arrived late to school, and of whom almost none of my own peers had anything good to say, could only write “He has done nothing at all for his Club.” I am sure Sir Jonathan regretted that lack of contribution to Pauline life to the end of his days!

A theme throughout my reports was that I was academically able, but that I consistently showed an unwillingness to put in the hard work required to satisfy Pauline standards. My history teacher says that while my essays “are always interesting, they are often shallow” and that my reading “has been unsystematic.” That’s not my recollection at all, and to this day I remember the extraordinary volume of reading that was required for all three of my chosen A Levels: History, English and Politics with Economics, for all of which I ultimately got pretty reasonable results, certainly good enough to get me into an elite university where I never had to read as much again.

Then there was my housemaster, Philip McGuinness (Modern Languages Department 1951-87), who correctly observed that I “obtained an early reputation as a radical revolutionary within the school, not because of what he did but for the extreme opinions he expressed”. That I was a political refugee from apartheid South Africa and he a pretty conservative Englishman teaching at an elite public school whose opinions had been forged in pre war England, doesn’t get a look-in. Cruelly, and I don’t use the word lightly, he wrote of me for posterity that “emotionally he is unstable and takes the slightest blows of fate harshly in really a very pathetic way”. And then to top it off, although I was “very courteous and possessed natural charm,” I was “going to suffer a great deal in life I’m afraid.” How this all squared with his conclusion that “I like him very much and have admiration and respect for him” is an inconsistency that is simply baffling, though I will admit that I too liked him, and, though we clashed occasionally, I thought both he and his wife were fundamentally kind people, albeit from another planet to that which I inhabited.

The Report alluded to a significant event in my final year at St Paul’s, but unsurprisingly never went into detail, though the oblique comments about my emotional instability and the like were the closest it came to it. As I went into the Upper Eighth in the late summer of 1968, there were student riots against the status quo in France, Germany and elsewhere, huge demonstrations in the US against the Vietnam war, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Prague Spring and the shift of cultural tectonic plates worldwide. All of which remained unremarked upon in the closeted world of St Paul’s, while on a rather more prosaic and local level I took over the editorship of Folio, the magazine written, produced and sold by the pupils of both the Boys’ and Girls’ schools, but subject to censorship by two teachers, and ultimately the High Master himself.

For the centrefold of the December 1968 edition, the end of the first term