No . 125
The Trusty Servant
The College Tutorship …
Donald Gillies ( Coll , 58-62 ): Roger Montgomery was a mathematician , and I first got to know him as a Mathematics don . His approach was unusual , since he paid scant attention to what was the official syllabus . For example , he was very fond of projective geometry , and , although there was some of this in the designated course , what we learnt must have gone far beyond this . He would enthuse about the different approaches to the subject , and the elegance of certain theorems : this really gave a feeling for what constituted good mathematics . He became College Tutor in 1960 and so I and the other College mathematicians of my year ( Rollo Davidson and Martin Lawrence ) would climb the stairs to what Tim Giddings says ‘ many hold to be the finest room in the school ’ to receive further mathematical instruction . These sessions revealed another side of Montgomery , who was a man of very broad culture and by no means a narrow mathematician . As well as dealing with our mathematical problems , he would often digress on history and philosophy , art and literature . There was a charming reproduction of an old master hanging on the wall , which he identified as Vermeer ’ s The Cook . A reproduction of the same work now hangs in our kitchen . Vermeer was Proust ’ s favourite painter and this may have influenced Montgomery ’ s choice , since he often enthused about Proust ’ s writings . This led me in my final term to begin reading Swann in Love , though in English translation because I was on the C ladder not the B ladder . Montgomery was , I think , a shy man but for those who got to know him , he was a truly inspiring College Tutor .
John Gunner ( Coll , 58-63 ): Hubert Doggart was known by my contemporaries as ‘ The Cube ’ - our idea , I suppose , of the ultimate in squareness , contrasted with the trendiness that we of course exemplified . Of Roger Montgomery I recall two things . The first was his enthusiastic championing of geometry – an academic pursuit apparently on a plane altogether higher than any others that graced the curriculum . And then there was the affair of the smoke bomb . One evening when he was in charge , he conceived the idea of a really realistic fire-practice . When all were in bed , the device was set off - at the bottom of the stairs outside IVth chamber ( then a clothes-drying room ). Memory of the aftermath is hazy . A contemporary tells me that at least one asthmatic boy spent time in Sick House as a result . I do recall the comments of Arthur Green , then chief College domestic and not a man to mince words , on the time that it took to make the upstairs chambers habitable again . The existence of a reserve bomb was widely rumoured and we amused ourselves with plots to smoke the College Tutor out of his layer by setting it off at the bottom of his staircase , though we were too pusillanimous , or too sensible , to act on them .
Vox senum … Caird Biggar ( H , 46-51 ) takes issue : I remember just enough of my Latin to realise that Vox senum is a super opportunity for an oldie to blow-off about Win Coll as it was in my day . On the whole , I enjoyed my time and grew up a lot . I did the best I could up-tobooks , but really I lived for the games , both team and individual , all of which I was rather good at . With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight , I realised later that many things at Win Coll could have been better .
On entry I got into MP3 , so had to choose my ladder very soon . Ronnie Hamilton , my otherwise wonderful housemaster , persuaded me to enter the B ladder because his div was in SP2 . I kept up my Maths , which was my best subject , but wasted an awful lot of time translating Lettres de madame de Sévigné etc . Can you believe it ? We never had any oral French ! Years later I didn ’ t even know how to order a meal in a French restaurant ! Clearly , I should have been on the ‘ C ladder ’.
In spite of so much time spent on team games , the only instruction we ever had was for cricket , and that only batting in nets . Only when I went to Cambridge did I improve my bowling because I taught myself to swing a shiny ball and found it surprisingly easy to do . The adult social games that one is likely to play later in life were completely disregarded : I played a lot of golf at Hockley , but no lessons were ever provided , though I am told this has now been remedied . In my day , there was only one squash court for the whole school , though I hope this has been altered since the death of Podge Brodhurst , when I remember funds being raised to address this . Tennis was similarly disregarded , though at least in Trant ’ s we had the use of a grass court next to the house , though no tuition .
Election , 1870-style Christopher Normand ( F , 76-81 ) has discovered the following anecdote from his great-great-uncle , Charles Plumpton Wilson . Born in 1859 , Charles took Election in 1870 , prepared by a daily diet of three hours of Greek and Latin from his clergyman father and a supplement of arithmetic from a local schoolmaster .
In the summer of 1870 , I was taken out into the cold wide world . Father , Mother and I , wearing a straw hat with ‘ Labor omnia vincit ’ on the ribbon , faced the ordeal of the Winchester Scholarship Examination . In those days the cruel custom of turning out boys after every paper prevailed . My first paper was a Euclid paper . As I had never heard of Euclid , this was a teaser . I concluded that the General Enunciations were very odd sentences to be put into Latin , although such language as ‘ If two triangles have two sides of the one equal to two sides of the other , each to each , then shall their bases or third sides be equal , etc ’ was quite strange to my previous experience . However , I tackled the job , and put it all into Latin . The Examiners obviously had no sense of humour , as my name was promptly deleted from the list of candidates .
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