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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