JONATHAN SMITH INTERVIEWED BY DAVID WALSH
J
onathan Smith spent most of his teaching career at Tonbridge, from his appointment by Michael McCrum in 1967 until his retirement in 2002. He was at different times Head of English, Head of Humanities, master-in-charge of the Junior Head and producer of many memorable school plays. At the same time, mainly in the holidays and then in retirement, he was also writing novels, radio plays and a best seller about teaching called ‘The Learning Game’. Jonathan’s influence on the academic, cultural and intellectual sides of Tonbridge has been immense and I went in October 2020 to interview him for the school archives. This is an edited version of that interview. Jonathan, you came from a family of teachers and, after school at Christ College, Brecon and then reading English at St. John’s, Cambridge, you followed the family vocation. The first school at which you taught was Loretto in Scotland and then you came to Tonbridge. Why Tonbridge? This is a bit of a mystery because Michael McCrum, who appointed me always claimed that I wrote and asked him if he had a job, out of the blue when there wasn’t a job going, that I actually wrote an unsolicited letter to him saying can I come and teach at Tonbridge. He swore this was true. Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I would have done. And I don’t know why Tonbridge. So how would you characterize Tonbridge in the late 60s? Well of course it was a very interesting and challenging time. (That’s a cliche for “bloody difficult time”) because there was a lot of
rumbling social discontent, a lot of stroppiness around. In a way I found it all incredibly exciting and when I look back on my years at Tonbridge, the early years, the late 60s and the early 70s, they were packed with interesting people. I remember Chapel was quite a lively affair. People gave some very radical talks. I felt very challenged by it. Michael McCrum asked me to share the Upper Sixth with him (we had just created a new form called the Upper Sixth) He took one of them, and I took the other, and that was across the curriculum. They were just clever boys. I had fifteen and he had fifteen. I suppose they were Oxbridge types. And I said to him, well, I don’t know what to do. I was terrified. And he said, oh I’m doing Milton and Dante. What are you doing? To somebody coming from a small Scottish school, Tonbridge seemed substantial. I loved the balance between academic life and sporting life. I’ve never been one of those people who thought Tonbridge is all about sport, although I’ve enjoyed the cricket, the rugby and everything. What happened in the classroom mattered to me much more than anything else. And also plays were hugely important. So to be honest, I found a school that I didn’t want to leave. How do you assess Michael McCrum and his impact on the school? Well, the first thing to say about all the headmasters I worked with, is that they were very clever men. McCrum, Ogilvie, Everett, Hammond, every one of them. No one in the Common Room could run rings around them, although being very clever is not the only or necessarily the most important thing in a headmaster. It certainly helps,
particularly in a school which is quite critical. Lots of academic schools are pretty sharp and critical. Michael McCrum – well, he stood above the Common Room here. He had such a brilliant career and was going to go on to become Headmaster of Eton and Master of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge. I mean, that’s a pretty distinguished career in any language. He set the standards very high. He had a great presence around the place. I was quite scared of him to start with no bad thing maybe. After he retired, we got to know each other much better. I became very fond of him. When he was headmaster, I was slightly in awe of him really. And yet, when it came to his leaving event where we put on a series of sketches for him, a sort of farewell review written by Barry Orchard and myself, I played him. So I was actually Michael McCrum which some people said was the closest I ever got to being a headmaster. I remember him sitting there in the front row during some pretty lively sketches smiling at me and I thought, well, you know he’s pretty good. He’s taking all this on the chin. People who know much more about the school’s history than I do reckon that he changed the school radically, making it a better-known school. Certainly his reputation was one of a very demanding, very clever, very driven man. These were difficult times in terms of the pupil body, difficult boys, quite a lot of kicking against authority? Absolutely. I think there is one thing Tonbridge does that I like a great deal. I think it holds steady. In some ways it’s a very conservative school with a strong core of central people who
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