The Trusty Servant May 2018 No. 125 | Page 5

N o .125 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.