Valete

Miss Tereza Hercigová

Tereza joined us at the start of this academic year as part of the HMC teacher exchange from the Czech Republic. She threw herself into the life of the school from the beginning: her main responsibilities were teaching ICT as part of the RLR programme but her mathematical skills were soon recognised and she was happy to teach lessons in the Maths Department here and also help out in St Olave’s. Her enthusiasm for the subject shines through in her lessons and she loves the challenge of explaining unfamiliar topics to children of all ages. Around school she has been a constant presence in the co-curricular programme: as a keen runner she has helped with the cross-country options all year and ran her fi rst half-marathon in March. She has been a regular at staff swimming sessions in the early mornings, put orienteering back on the map in St Peter’s(!) and has accompanied DofE Bronze and Gold expeditions. I believe she will even take the experience of sleeping in an old shower-block on Strensall Common back to the Czech Republic with her. Keen to experience as much of the country as possible during her time here Tereza and her fi ancé Tomas have travelled widely during the school holidays to Ireland and Scotland. She probably needed to get as far away from school as possible to try and get over the shock of appearing in the staff contribution to the House Sing! Although Tereza does not have fi xed plans when she gets back home she does of course have one very important event to plan: her wedding in October. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we have all enjoyed working with Tereza as she has cheerfully fi tted in with all the eccentricities of both St Peter’s and Yorkshire and we wish her well for the future.

Mrs Jane Dawson

Mr Johannes Hoffman

Johannes Hoffman grew up in the south of Germany, in Bavaria, where he went to school and was fi rst introduced to English. He gained degrees in English Literature, Philosophy, German, and German as a Foreign Language, which led him to teach German to students in South Africa before moving to England, and to St Peter’s, where for the past year he has been helping our pupils to learn the language from a native speaker.

Johannes is passionate about sport, enjoying a variety from skydiving to tennis, paragliding and football. He is well-travelled, and has had many adventures – even getting his only pair of shoes stolen in Spain, and having to make his way home to Germany barefoot!

There are many pupils that have benefi tted from Johannes’ knowledge and skill with languages, and I am sure there will continue to be more in years to come.

Bethan Bradley (V)

Mrs Maggie Smales

The Drama Department was thrilled to welcome Mrs Smales to the teaching team this year. Having been born in South Africa and then moving to England, where she attended eight different schools all over the country, she completed her degree in Drama at Bretton Hall College, the same College as Miss Lindley, the current Head of the Drama Department. Since then Mrs Smales has been teaching for most of her career as well as becoming a wife and mother in her family life.

During this academic year, Mrs Smales has contributed to the school productions as a co-director for As You Like It, The Wardrobe and London Below, as well as designing and then creating many fantastic costumes from scratch. Sewing is one of Mrs Smales’ skills and hobbies: she even made it to the interview stages for the BBC2 show The Great British Sewing Bee. The department is very grateful for the talent and all the hard work she put into making these costumes, some of which are on display in the Drama studio.

Singing is another hobby for Mrs Smales and she sings in two choirs. She also took the opportunity to direct Githa Sowerby’s play The Stepmother in March at the York Theatre Royal and she said it was a joy to work on.

Mrs Smales’ experience shows in the classroom as she is a very patient teacher and always endeavours to make her pupils laugh. Punctuality and enthusiasm are some of the qualities appreciated by the other members of the department.

Smales by name. Smiles by nature!

Peter Gray (V)

Maggie’s 39-year teaching career included spells at Joseph Rowntree and Huntington schools, and we were delighted that she chose to spend her final year before retirement at St Peter’s. Maggie has not just been the best colleague we could have asked for, but a wonderful, delightfully funny, supportive, warm and creative close friend. We’re going to miss our friend, so it with real sadness that we say ‘goodbye’ to Maggie, but that is us being selfish because we want to keep her, and now she can spend more time with her family and being a Grandma and relaxing and enjoying not having a September-to-July diary (and not having to get through the York traffic in a morning!). The last line of Alice was ‘I’m not ready to grow up just yet’, and I think this might be fitting to say as Maggie starts her retirement.

Miss Helen Lindley

Mr Oliver Couttie

Ollie arrived at school five years ago as an external hockey coach. It soon became apparent what a talent he had in this area and after finishing his degree was employed as our full-time graduate hockey coach. Ollie is an outstanding coach both technically and tactically: he is rarely flustered and has a keen eye for the game and an excellent rapport with the players. Ollie has the balance just right between hard work and enjoyment in his sessions; he also has a good sense of humour, but a rather unconventional laugh.

Ollie understood the ethos of the school, playing for enjoyment with character and commitment, and passed this on to the players. He coached both boys’ and girls’ hockey to success. It is because of his hard work that hockey has developed to a level where we have county champions, northern champions and national finalists. Ollie recognised that he was enjoying the teaching environment and that he would like it to become his career, so whilst at school he took his GTP and qualified as a teacher.

Ollie will be sadly missed by St Peter’s hockey: Cundall Manor’s gain is definitely our loss.

Mr Mike Johnston

Miss Kat Barker

If you walk past Miss Barker’s classroom, and the door is open, you quickly get a sense that there is something special happening. Attention is firmly focused on the front of the classroom, and there is a real desire to learn from this inspirational teacher.

As well as our own pupils, Miss Barker has taught young people from schools across York, as part of the ISSP programme. For the last three years she has enabled them to achieve outstanding results at GCSE, and more importantly to develop a love of Latin and Classics. Her commitment to the ISSP is just one of her many achievements during her time in York.

Miss Barker was the founder and driving force of the York Classics Association, organising lectures and cavalry charges (not at the same time). She was instrumental in the department’s trip to Pompeii in 2013, a bass trombone player in the Swing Band, and a part of so many musical events during her four years.

She’s been a dedicated rowing coach to the Third and Fourth Form, and an invaluable support on Duke of Edinburgh Gold expeditions.

In her role as Head of Academic Extension at St Peter’s she has introduced some great new initiatives, including the incredibly successful St Peter’s Challenge and St Peter’s Junior Challenge.

After four busy and hugely successful years at St Peter’s, Miss Barker heads off to Hurst in Sussex as Head of Department. Hurst simply knew a good thing when she walked through their door, and they will be all the richer for her joining their staff, as we have been at St Peter’s.

We thank her for brightening this place up with her smile, her generosity and incredible energy. We wish Miss Barker every happiness on her journey south.

Mr Jon Whitehouse

Mrs Lesley Birch

Lesley has been with us since 2007 and, although employed to teach English on a part-time basis, this particular branding is very far from the mark in terms of what she offers a school like St Peter’s. She is a musician, an artist, a thinker and philosopher, an honorary and muchloved member of our own Art Department, a wicked mimic, a reader and writer and the owner of the best dressing-up box this side of Vaudeville. The dressing-up box has reached iconic status with pupils in Lesley’s classes; recently, two members of the Third Form – one dressed as a sheikh and one in a diaphanous golden garment – provoked bitter jealousy and resentment from classes along the corridor on a Saturday morning. The dressing-up box has been a teaching-aid for the poems of Thomas Hardy and has presumably been used in conjunction with explorations of duality in Jekyll and Hyde, where the lycra vest, circa 1980, would perhaps create the desired effect.

Alongside projects such as Sonnet Face – shared with us and pinched gleefully by us at a departmental meeting, Lesley is constantly re-inventing ways of teaching; Sonnet Face starts, of course, with something visual but turns into a sophisticated analysis of sonnet form and Shakespeare’s anti-beauty poem. We know, within the department, that during the last inspection of 2010, it was Lesley’s teaching which was singled out and praised for its variety, creativity and substance.

Lesley’s successes are really very evident amongst us: her beautiful homage to Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight hangs in pride of place in Queen’s, having adorned the school Christmas card. Many of you will know that one of Lesley’s paintings was selected for the Royal Academy summer exhibition last year. Simon Mortimer, in his own inimitable way and from a tent somewhere in Teesdale sums it up:

‘She knows more about art than us – the kids always went to her for info or advice on the Edinburgh trip and of course, her getting into the RA and not us. Cow!’

John Darmody, in a sage reflection of Lesley’s contribution to the Art Department comments: ‘She’s the only one who can keep up with Simon Mortimer drink for drink…’

We have been very lucky to have had such talent amongst us, but it is for the things closer to home that I thank Lesley for now: her championing of the naughty boys and her patience with their various peccadillos; her raucous laughter and sense of fun; her constantly fizzing idea. We’re delighted that you’re going to be able to spend more time creating and not being pinned down to endless 40-minute periods.

You leave, Lesley, with our love and best wishes.

Mrs Jo Lawrence

Mr Bob Shread

Bob was appointed in 1985 to teach Chemistry; for the next 29 years that is exactly what he did. Bob has taught with enthusiasm, quiet authority and a very clear knowledge of his subject and its wider implications in society. All this came as a result of his MSc from York University and his work in industry. Let us just consider the fact that over the past 29 years every medical student, vet and dentist to have come from St Peter’s must have studied Chemistry successfully at A-level. He enjoyed the question-andanswer nature of his subject, ‘interceptions and all’, and also the practical nature of it. As Barry Gill commented: ‘the last of the “bucket chemists” has now left, explosions good enough to bring down ceiling tiles are over and fume-cupboard fires are now a thing of the past!’. Barry should know, as he has been part of a Chemistry Department that included Peter Northfield, Ian Lancaster and Lindsey Stark, who collectively gave over 130 years of service to the school. Barry is now the last man standing, which is good for Bob as he will continue to coach tennis next year and he needs his unpaid Tennis Secretary to keep up the good work.

Bob has run the tennis since his first year at St Peter’s, and in those 29 years he has taken a half-colours, peripheral summer activity and entrenched it as a major full-colours sport, played throughout the year and across all age-groups. The huge success of senior tennis is now mirrored by that of the juniors. During the

final week of this summer term the first pair in the U15s reached the Plate final of the national knockout finals at Eton. This remains the best performance in the history of tennis at the school. Although hugely competitive both on the tennis court, where Bob was a long-time member of the York first team, to rugby – where he coached all sides from the U14s to the Third XV (‘Bob’s Barmy Army’) – he was always a great sportsman and as the famous Notre Dame University football coach, Knute Rockne once observed: ‘one man practising sportsmanship is far better than 50 preaching about it.’

Bob cut his teeth on the pastoral side as Assistant Housemaster to both John Owen-Barnett and Peter Taylor in School House and then Dronfield, where he remained until 2008. Given his mentors, it is no surprise that Bob has over the years been regarded as a wonderfully calm and utterly reliable pastoral colleague, so much so that he was asked to help set up the new day-house, Hope, in 2008.

Throughout all these years Bob has always been a family man: he married Trudi in August 1989, and they celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary this summer. Bob is immensely proud of Dom and Olivia and all they have achieved, and I know he, like us, is hugely grateful for the wonderful support that Trudi has given, enabling him to commit so much time and effort into supporting the pupils at St Peter’s. It is Bob’s desire to properly look after his 93-year-old mother that has led him to retire from teaching, rather than a real desire to hang up his lab coat.

All his colleagues recognise his kindness and his warmth of personality, his cheerful and relaxed attitude and his no-nonsense Yorkshire approach. He has been a most loyal colleague right from his early days in No 7A St Peter’s Grove. We should remember Bob as one of the really top schoolmasters, not just a teacher of his subject, but a real educator in its broadest sense. He is part of that breed of colleagues who never clock-watched, that gave of their time in all areas of school life willingly; from extra chemistry to tennis, from OP fixtures to science conferences, from staff tennis to the good old days of staff sevens fixtures.

Perhaps the following quote from Muhammad Ali can in some way sum Bob up and allow us to say a fond farewell to a family man, an outstanding schoolmaster and a loyal friend:

Friendship … is not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.

Mr Paddy Stephen

Dr Matthew Thomson

Matt has been with us since 2010 but has actually managed to pack so much into his four years that he is now heading off for a well-earned retirement. I know I’m not going to do justice to his many and varied contributions to boarding, DofE, rugby and hockey – to name but a few. Many of you will thank Matt in your own ways, and well-deserved those thanks will be. DofE has certainly taken off in a huge way with Matt’s inspirational PowerPoints (blisters: to pop or not to pop – that is the question) and the introduction of a creative writing module on expedition; last year, we were treated to a DofE remake of The Blair Witch Project – which looked uncannily like the original. The marriage of a creative brain with a body that wants to climb mountains has made him an enviable role-model amongst rather more portly or even just sedentary staff.

Doc T, as he’s become known, started with a baptism of fire in the department by being extravagantly vomited on by Henry Roach at an RSC performance of Romeo and Juliet in his first few weeks. We hastened to assure him that this sort of excessive behaviour was not the norm.

Matt’s compassion and loyalty are evident in many ways; he has been, despite his rather serious exterior, a kind and gentle presence with troubled children. His daily commute to and from Sheffield was devised in order to cope with the start of married life, with the burden of working in two different places resting squarely on his shoulders. Bowling over from breakfast in a jacket that’s actually a converted sleeping bag, he could be found staring at the photocopier, coffee in hand, printing out endless, enviable resources that were detailed to a terrifying degree, often in grid form (more DofE crossover) and by their very presence, silently rebuking anything produced in comic sans with frivolous pictures and Word Art.

Matt has a formidable intellect, is passionate about his teaching and has been an absolute rock in his time with the English Department. His ideas and initiatives have helped shape the last few years and he has generously shared everything regularly with us – we have all benefitted from his presence. Indeed, in his own words: ‘If you’d told me you were retarded when I first arrived, I could have helped more’.

He is, of course, an iron man – in his steadfastness and dedication there was never a truer epithet applied. Thank you, Matt – with love from us all – as you embark upon something a little more exciting than the East Coast Main Line.

Mrs Jo Lawrence