The Trusty Servant 141, June 2026 | Page 13

No. 141

The Trusty Servant

Rob Wyke 1954- 2026( CoRo, 85-15; HoDo I, 90-01; 2M, 01-15)

A full obituary will appear in the next edition of The Trusty Servant. Lucia Quinault( CoRo, 99-) writes:

Rob. What charm he had. And how he must have relied on it when bringing pupils back from his theatre trips in the wee small hours. I arrived at Winchester too late to be in Rob’ s department when he was Head of English, but in the early days of my department he mounted a tremendous expedition to see( what else?) Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford. In my memory we took the whole of V Bk, after their exams were over, but perhaps it was only an enormous coachload. It was Sinead Cusack as Cleopatra, and some television actor whom I didn’ t know as Antony, and we rattled uproariously through the lanes of Warwickshire and can’ t possibly have got back before 1.00am.

As housedon of Hopper’ s his own Shakespeare productions were legendary. I remember his saying that their chief purpose was to keep a group of particularly naughty boys( Will Fysh, Jack Churchill, Ed Foster( all I, 97-02), take a bow) under his eye after Preces. I witnessed his rehearsal method one evening in 2000 or 2001, when he had invited me into Hopper’ s to see how a boarding house worked. The boys assembled in the hall of the private side, and Rob faced them, holding a text from which he never looked up, but corrected them in every false word or quantity. The results of this unusual technique were some of the clearest, most gripping Shakespeare plays I’ ve seen.

But Shakespeare was by no means his only area of expertise. When the pressures of being Second Man prevented him from running the GCSE coursework by his preferred method – pupil by pupil labouring under his eye at the dining-room table – he took over VI Bk Div, and pursued a course consisting exclusively of his favourite texts and operas: Chapman’ s Homer was in it, and The Country Wife, and, of course, The Rape of the Lock. I still have an RJW test on the Pope, with all the instructions written in heroic couplets. There was even a chaotic Div exam one summer, set by Rob, who appeared to be blissfully unaware that we had not, in fact, all spent our time hanging out in the 18 th century( though, sharing his preference for it, I usually had). And the voice in which I read Chaucer aloud is still my best attempt to imitate his.

Rob was a brilliant cook, of course, but he also understood to the full the power of food shared in company. His immense generosity meant that there were far too many of these occasions to mention individually, but for me, two stand out. The first was when I was a very new and relatively young Head of English in 2002: he proposed that he and I should host a dinner together for the department( whom Wendy Cope had christened the Wild Things, from the Sendak children’ s book Where the Wild Things Are) to herald what he declared was to be a new age of peace and prosperity. And the other was in the aftermath of the terrible death of Giles Norman( I, 97-02, died September‘ 02), when he gathered his Hopperites again under his roof, to give them space to eat, talk and remember together- which is what we can do now to remember him.

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