FROM TONBRIDGE TO THE CLOTH

FERGUS BUTLER-GALLIE

Former pupil Fergus Butler-Gallie (PS 05-10) returned to the School in 2022 in the role of Assistant Chaplain. He teaches in the Divinity Department and sometimes finds enough hours in the day to fit in some rugby coaching too. Fergus is also a published author. Here he reflects on the lasting impact of his Tonbridge education.

The train was somewhere between Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk when I learned the value of my time at Tonbridge. An arm-wrestling match with members of the Russian Armed Services had gone south. It provided me with enough Russian to strike up a conversation with them, enough History to know the areas of shared heritage between our two nations and enough misplaced confidence to believe that a conversation about Peter III’s change of sides in the Seven Years War would somehow help. It also provided me with the friendship of the great hulking second row from the First XV that year, who wasn’t a bad person to have onside in such an event.

It was, in fact, just after I had left the School and was travelling across Russia with five other ‘Old Tonbridgians’. Despite the memorability of the episode in the Siberian dining car, more generally the trip crystallised what had become clear over the previous five years – in the classroom, games field, boarding house and chapel. Namely that Tonbridge didn’t so much give me an education in ‘what’– although even eight years later, in the midst of post graduate study, I was recalling and utilising knowledge I had learned courtesy of the superlative Mr Dobson.

Rather, Tonbridge equipped me with the ‘how’: how to talk to anybody in a room, how to react to a crisis, how to be part of a team. More crucially, perhaps, it had taught me how to think and how to be, both in modes authentic to who I was and to the founding values of the School.

The School motto is ‘Deus Dat Incrementum’–‘God Giveth the Increase’. So it turned out to be. Tonbridge gave me an increase in myriad small ways – whether it was through fierce debates over something totally anodyne over supper in house, reading Austen or Swift in those long summer afternoons or, perhaps above all else, the almost imperceptible atmosphere of steady inspiration exuded by the members of the Common Room who taught me. An increase in what? Well, knowledge I am sure; decency, I hope; but above all, a sense of how and who it was I wanted to be.

Surprisingly, perhaps, for someone who had often spent chapel fidgeting, I was led, after a degree in History and Czech/Slovak at Oxford and postgraduate study in Theology at Cambridge, to ordination in the Church of England. The central ethos of Holy Orders is to decrease in self, but to enable the increase of others: of grace, beauty and truth and above all of the love of Christ. That had been modelled for me; subtly, cleverly, and often with a smile, by Fathers Beaumont and Peters at Tonbridge. For that I remain deeply grateful.

Even more surprisingly, given my resolutely unstellar career in the English Department, it also led to a career in writing things. It has been enormous fun to write for national newspapers, global magazines and produce three books to date; but no matter what the next commission Penguin throw my way might be, I don’t think I shall ever top publication in both Viz and Waitrose Magazine. Tonbridge undoubtedly taught me a lesson which has been as crucial in navigating the sometimes cut-throat world of publishing as it has been in discerning the path of priesthood: Tonbridgians are excellent, in my experience, in working out what not to take too seriously.

Most surprisingly of all, I have returned to Tonbridge. As I take in the vista of the School from The Head and The Fifty on my walk to work every morning, I often think back to my time studying my A-levels and recall the wise Lancastrian intonations of John Taylor, in the top of the Classics tower, reminding us of the necessary circularity of so much Greek and Roman myth.

What makes myth interesting is not where it is fantastical but where, despite its fantasy, it remains true. The circular patterns of a life is one such truth. So it is I find myself back in this endlessly compelling place, teaching and, still, learning alongside a new generation of Tonbridgians. One of the other truths of myth is that learning is no finite process: I am still learning how to be in this place. How to increase. Deus Dat Incrementum indeed.