N o .126
T he T rusty S ervant
Tony Ruth (Co Ro, 51-90)
In 1957, his future wife, Beverly, arrived
at Winchester as catering manager. Tony
and Beverly made a devoted couple and
were soon to adopt the three children,
Jo, James and Amanda, who made
up their close and lively family unit.
Nothing illustrates their extraordinary
parental attributes better than the
exchange year Tony and Beverly spent
at St Mark’s College, Massachusetts, in
1966-67. With three children under six,
they settled them into new schools and
during the holidays drove 35,000 miles
across the length and breadth of America
towing a tent trailer.
Tommy Cookson (I, 55-60; Co Ro, 64-65,
67-72, 74-90; Headmaster, 03-05) writes:
Tony Ruth, who died on 1 st May 2018,
just after his 90th birthday, was for 39
years a distinguished teacher of Physics
and Housemaster of Hopper’s from
1968-83. An enthusiastic oarsman at
Cambridge, he coached rowing for much
of his career and having done two years’
national service in the army was regularly
in attendance on field days and summer
camps. He ran Astro Soc for many years
and was a great friend of Patrick Moore,
presenter of BBC TV’s The Sky at Night.
Tony’s son, James, recalls coming into
the drawing room to find them sprawled
on the carpet discussing the celestial
charts spread out before them.
Tony Ruth was born in Wimbledon in
1928, the younger of two brothers. His
elder brother, Den, a career pilot in
the RAF, was ten years his senior and
in August 1942 Tony spent two weeks
close to Den’s airfield being smuggled
onto training flights in Lancasters. Den’s
death on patrol in the Bay of Biscay
two years later caused Tony lasting
grief and on the eventual release of the
relevant documents he spent long hours
determining how and where Den had
been lost.
Already a pupil at King’s College School,
Wimbledon, he won a scholarship in
1946 to read Natural Science at St
John’s College, Cambridge, where he
gained a First in Part 1. His enthusiasm
and precise way of thinking made him
a natural schoolmaster and after two
years’ national service he joined the
staff at Winchester. As a very young don
he was fated to be nicknamed after his
famous baseball namesake, Babe Ruth.
He suffered this with quiet fortitude and
a sense of humour which, despite his
precise and formal demeanour, was never
far from the surface.
It was a good moment to start his
career: soon afterwards, Winchester
began to play an important part in
the modernisation of the secondary-
school curriculum, particularly in
the development of Nuffield A Level
science courses, with Physical Science
introduced alongside Physics and
Chemistry A Levels. Tony embraced
the new Physics course with enthusiasm
but he did not volunteer to teach the
new Physical Science A Level. This was
an ambitious course which required
the same don to teach both Physics
and Chemistry up to A Level and to
explore the connections between them.
Perfectionist as he was, he would have
worried that his Chemistry wasn’t up to
it. Tony as family man is the key to his
success as housemaster of Hopper’s, a
post he took up soon after his return
from America. As a scientist he was of
course tidy and orderly - his successor
in Hopper’s found an impeccable filing
cabinet and an enormous bunch of keys,
each labelled clearly as ‘Back Door’,
‘Drawing Room Windows’ etc and,
mysteriously, ‘Nether Regions’. But his
qualities as a man were obvious. Letters
to the family after his death speak of
his humanity, decency and dignity.
One old Hopperite declared, ‘He had
greater confidence in me than I had in
myself.’ Another wrote, ‘I was neither
the most academic nor the most sporty
but I always felt he cared about me.’ A
boy queuing up to take a pound out of
house bank would find himself serenaded
with Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’;
and in bequeathing the house to a new
housedon he whispered, ‘If you want to
check everyone is in on a Saturday night,
set off the fire alarm and have a roll call.’
If Tony did not live as dangerously as
some, he made his way into the esteem
of his colleagues by his mastery of his
subject, his reliability, his determination
to play a full part in school life -
and above all by his kindness and
appreciation of others. Letters, written in his small, neat
hand, followed after any event, happy
or sad, which occurred to his friends,
former colleagues or pupils long after
his retirement. People mattered to him.
Asking after a lost wallet at an American
supermarket car park, he was required
4