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Saints, Ronnie and Colin’s inimitable
illumination of some of the obscurer
saints in the Anglican canon.
And their fourth collaboration, The
Masque, the remarkable dramatic
Entertainment which marked the
completion of New Hall in Cloister Time
1961 – written by Michael Burchnall,
with scenario by Colin, music by
Christopher Cowan, and produced by
Ronnie Hamilton. To quote from the
Programme, ‘It seemed that the most
appropriate theme for this Entertainment
would be the history of Winchester
College from its first beginnings. Those
entrusted with the execution of this
idea, though never ceasing to look on
the past with the reverent eye of piety,
soon discovered themselves ill-equipped
for the role of solemn annalists. This
Masque is the measure of their failure’ –
anonymous text, but with Colin’s clear
fingerprints, so typical of his modest,
nicely ironic self-deprecation. The
Masque was, of course, a spectacular
triumph.
Colin succeeded Gerry Dicker in
Chawker’s in 1962. It was, as I remember
it, a happy house. It was a disciplined
house, but although Colin presided
over the reasonably orderly Naval
establishment which you might have
expected, he did so with wisdom and
not a little forebearance, particularly
towards the ‘bolshy three-year men’ of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. For most
of his tenure, he was the only bachelor
Housedon: there was no alternative
‘private’ family on the other side of the
green baize door – the whole House
was his family. One of his Heads of
House has reminded me of Colin’s
steel-tipped shoes and measured tread:
if a misdemeanor was being committed,
you had deliberate advance warning
of the Housedon’s arrival. To a small
Chawkerite who failed to heed the
warning signal on one occasion, Colin
said sternly, ‘I’m not as stupid as I look,
you know’ – to which (as Colin told
the story) the small Chawkerite burst
into tears and said, ‘Please, Sir, I don’t
T he T rusty S ervant
know what to say to that’, which hugely
entertained Colin both then and long
afterwards. He was ever hospitable to
visiting dons at lunch – always a glass
of white wine beforehand, but gin for
Naval officers and the Headmaster – and
infinitely charming to mothers.
He stood down from Chawker’s just
before the end of his 15-year term, at the
age of 51. He very much did not want to
become a Dons’ Common Room fossil,
and with the aid of a combination of
that same Common Room and, again,
Henry Lambert, a very happy solution
materialized. He moved seamlessly
from Chawker’s to the Governing Body,
as the Common Room nominee, and
to Barclays Bank, where he managed
Barclays’ graduate recruitment for
the next decade. He had a flat in the
City during the week, but was back to
Winchester every Friday evening for the
weekend, where he shared Little White
House with his mother Frances until her
death.
There were outside interests, of course:
he was a governor of Horris Hill and
Twyford schools, and a trustee of the
Ernest Cook Trust. But perhaps his most
outstanding – certainly his most long-
lasting – interest was Swan Hellenic. He
was a guest lecturer on Swan Hellenic
cruises, sometimes once, frequently
twice, a year for nearly 30 years. When
Colin started Swanning in the lat e
1960s, there was a two-stage recruitment
process for prospective lecturers: your
name was somehow brought to the
attention of the great Mortimer Wheeler,
who was Swan’s lecturing supremo (a
role, incidentally, to which I believe
Colin later succeeded); if you passed
academic muster, you then had a long
lunch in Soho with Ken Swan, so that he
could check that you wouldn’t frighten
the fare-paying horses. Needless to say,
Colin was an instant success: unlike
some of his more specialized fellow
lecturers, who tended to lecture in
their known comfort zones, he was the
informative and entertaining all-rounder.
As the man who wrote about Colin at
5
HMS Collingwood said in the same
letter, apropos meeting Colin for the
second time in these rather different
nautical circumstances, ‘He delighted us
[passengers] with his erudition and wit.’
What were the common threads of
this versatile, much-loved, and truly
great man? Despite his oft-expressed
admiration for what he saw as the greater
intellectual abilities of some of his
colleagues, he was no academic slouch.
He was conservative, and a traditionalist,
but quick to poke gentle fun at sacred
cows and over-inflated balloons, not to
mention frequently at himself. Who but
Colin could have had such pleasure in
awarding himself the wildly inappropriate
soubriquet ‘the Old Swine’. He was a
man of great modesty, but – unlike Attlee
in Churchill’s jibe – someone with very
little to be modest about. He was wise,
witty, charming, entertaining, kindly.
Above all, he was fun. Whether to Swan
cruisers or A-ladder men at their books,
he was an inspirational teacher: he knew
how to make learning interesting and
enjoyable without detracting from the
substance and value of what he taught.
At risk of sounding like a headline writer,
I offer Humanity, Humility and Humour,
all of which Colin had in spades, but
especially Humour.
Could he have been something other
than a schoolmaster? Yes, of course: look
at the diversity of his talents. Could he
have been a schoolmaster elsewhere?
Yes, again. Would he have been a
schoolmaster elsewhere? No, of course
not. It was our immeasurable good
fortune that this very remarkable man
so loved this place, and in consequence
was such a perfectly formed peg in its
Wykehamical hole. I doubt that we
shall see his like again. To all his gifts of
himself to Winchester College during his
life he has now added on his death the
gift of all his worldly wealth. When the
Founder’s Prayer is said hereafter, not
the least of all other our benefactors for
whom we give thanks is Colin Badcock.