No. 140 The Trusty Servant
Valete
Edmund Lewis( CoRo, 20-) says a fond farewell to Peter Olive( CoRo 24-25): Peter Olive has come to the rescue of the Classics department twice. Originally, he signed up for two terms in September; then, when another member of the department became the emergency Exams Officer, I was delighted that Peter agreed to stay on for Cloister Time.
That delight was partly professional. Peter’ s classroom teaching is fantastic. The pupils love him, in part because he so obviously cares about them and works hard for them: he is extremely generous with marking ink and his time outside lessons. And he is a serious scholar: how wonderful to have someone mid-way through a DPhil on Greek intellectual history teaching a paper on the Culture of Athens to the top years?
But that delight of mine was also personal. He is the kindest and most polite and most helpful man you could imagine His many friends encouraged me to mention his style – has he ever come to school in anything less than head-to-toe Vivienne Westwood?- and the joy we all receive whenever Peter is asked what his doctorate is on( answer: the incest taboo in the Graeco-Roman world).
Peter joined us after a year at Westminster School, and returns to Westminster in September. We have loved having Peter with us, and look forward to keeping in close touch.
Alistair Henfrey( CoRo, 23-) writes of Shanti Mosher( CoRo, 24-25): Shanti came to Winchester College in April 2024, meaning she has spent only a little over a year as a member of the Common Room: the relative brevity of her tenure at the College, however, belies the force and magnitude of her impact. A voracious reader, a dedicated scholar, and a mainstay of the Chaplaincy team, Shanti is – as those of us who have had the privilege of working closely with her will attest – a force of nature.
Arriving to us from postgraduate work on Coleridge at both Oxford and Cambridge, she brought with her a formidable intellect and a freshness of perspective, both of which have evidently filtered down into her pupils: one can often tell which pupils are taught by Shanti, as – more often than not – they are the ones who are still reading before lights out in their galleries.
Her work in the classroom has been exemplary. Most of the Common Room would recall their own first year of teaching with shiftiness and embarrassment when measured against Shanti’ s. Combining academic rigour and an infectious passion for literary study with a knack for teaching young people how to write essays, she is the kind of English teacher one might expect to encounter after years in the profession.
The classroom has been only one of Shanti’ s arenas for success, however: she has a real talent for putting together spiritually and intellectually enriching Cathedral services. Her knowledge of liturgy and wide-ranging familiarity with religious verse have yielded services that are excellently curated, well-paced, and engaging. Notably, too, she has taken a lead in encouraging more pupils to read in these services – yet another example of her thoughtful and well-executed initiatives. As James McKinnel( Co Ro, 18-; HoDo, I, 23-) says,‘ Shanti is a woman of deep personal faith and spiritual conviction, she has strong pastoral instincts, incredible liturgical knowledge, and has served the life of the chapel with diligence and creativity, devotion and humility.’
Shanti leaves us to undertake ordination training at Oxford: the classroom’ s loss is most definitely the Church’ s gain. That said, I suspect all of us who have worked closely with Shanti will hope – quite earnestly – that this is not the last Winchester College sees of her.
Will Guast( Co Ro, 19-) is in awe of Layla Stabile( CoRo, 23-25): Not a lot of people know this, but Layla actually had a starring role in the Staff- Student review in December, providing epic vocals for an enormous dancing Brussel sprout from the safety of the wings. Encouraged by this early success, she had a further starring role, this time in her own person, at‘ Sing a Song of Science’. By this point, the secret was out: LGS is officially a cool don. Not only is she chief shape-thrower as MiC of DanceSoc on Mondays, she also brings the dank memes at LinSoc on Tuesdays.
Layla knows a lot of things. In a school of teachers who are very good at telling you why a Latin word is in the dative, she also knows about archaeology. She knows about Italic tombs; she knows about Etruscans. She even knows about something called‘ Italic peoples’. On Classics trips, teachers usually look nervously at the floor when asked about archaeology: not so Miss Stabile. On the Rome trip she negotiated with angry Roman restauranteurs for us at lunch and still had the energy to lecture on Italian nationalism on the Janiculum in the afternoon.
Fundamentally, she was a fine teacher. She worked hard; she cared; she was clever and interesting; she was always thinking about how she could improve her teaching still further. And she was a fine house tutor, always friendly and supportive, and a sought-after guest at chamber teas in College. She was a popular coach, too, urging on her‘ mighty Es’ with all the manic enthusiasm and profanity of an Italian dad.
Being literally too cool for school, Layla is now going to back to Cambridge to be with her own kind. We can only hope that we will one day be able to coax her back into schools.
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