No . 133
The Trusty Servant
Michael Fontes
Michael Fontes ( D , 55-60 ; Co Ro , 66-04 ; HoDo , D , 75-90 ) was a Winchester legend . To commemorate the joy of his presence and the diversity of his impact , The Trusty Servant has asked three former colleagues – his great friend and cultural ally Rob Wyke ( Co Ro , 85-15 ), his Telemachus in the Economics department , Tom Lawson ( Co Ro , 98- 13 ) and his rival on the canvases Nick MacKinnon ( Co Ro , 86-20 ) – to share their memories .
Rob Wyke speaks first :
One of Michael ’ s favourite writers , John Aubrey , records that , at the funeral of John Selden in 1654 , the Master of the Temple ‘ tooke an occasion to say , “ a learned man sayes that when a learned man dies a great deale of learning dies with him ”’; and that ‘ if learning could have kept a man alive , our brother had not dyed ’.
Michael ’ s learning and cultural embrace comprehended early English watercolours ( by David Cox , John Varley and Peter de Wint in particular ), Manchester United , food , fine furniture , orchids , butterflies , photography , beautiful clocks … I would add , as further examples : the canon of English verse ; antique maps ; PG Wodehouse ; early British porcelain ; academic Economics ; tea ; France in all its aspects – its food , its furniture ( fine and provincial ), its buildings ( most recently those of Chartres ) and its people , especially his neighbours in Najac ; the Llyn peninsula ; good foreign films ; dogs – his own and other people ’ s ; he was an expert guide to birds of prey : he became obsessed with the ospreys of Glaslyn .
Like Aubrey ’ s friend , Thomas Hobbes , Michael was , as we have heard , ‘ much addicted to music ’
( classical , that is ). As well as singing in Winchester Chapel Choir and at St Endellion , he ran an early music consort ; he had a vast record collection ; and he wrote the essays for Wasfi Kani ’ s Grange Park Opera programmes . The appearance of the drafts of Michael ’ s pieces became an annual event ; and he expected you to comment , by return , in detail on content and style . He welcomed corrections ( he claimed ); and if I spotted a rogue italic comma , so much the better . He was researching pictures for this year ’ s programme just days before he died ; and he ’ d already polished his essays on the coming season . He loved attending Wasfi ’ s productions and masterminding the interval picnics .
Michael ’ s appetite for what our old friend Tom Howarth termed ‘ the vagaries of human nature ’ was insatiable . He relished the idiosyncrasies of members of his family ; of those who had taught him , notably Harold Cox , his Philosophy tutor at Lincoln ; of his friends , some of whom were his colleagues ( Michael on Joe Bain or Peter Tombling , on Martin and Mary Scott , on Eli McCullough , was a treat ); of his pupils and their parents . The Brothers of St Cross furnished him with plenty of material , too .
Michael was liberal in an old style . He cherished beautiful traditions , objects and places ; he could not forgive the unthinking destruction of them , whether we ’ re talking of ancient buildings , unspoilt French villages , the glories of Jacobean English or the grass tennis courts at Winchester College that he cherished for decades and which the philistines have swept away . This sort of thing made him lose all his mirth and grow melancholy . It ’ s also fair to say that he could be less than patient with other people ’ s enthusiasms . On the phone one day , I embarked on a rhapsody about an interest of mine , only to be cut off with : ‘ My Bokhara carpet looks very good in front of that fine piece of furniture that you don ’ t like very much ’. My obsession was known thereafter as ‘ Bokhara ’ and talk of it was banned .
Breadth of culture allied to a certain bloodiness enabled this extraordinary person to be an equally extraordinary schoolmaster .
A bald summary would tell us that he was a teacher of specialist Economics , of French and of general culture in his divisions ; head of two departments ; College tutor , Housemaster , house tutor . He organised various extracurricular groups . He coached soccer and Winchester football ; he ran the tennis .
But there was far more to it than that . Michael Fontes was programmed to teach . He was obviously a special classroom performer : his style was a phenomenon beyond the previous experience of his pupils ; and he was an exemplary corrector and returner of their work . But he taught his colleagues as well . By telling you that a certain text had gone down well with his group , he implied that you might try it with your own . Without Michael , I might never have taught La Princesse de Clèves , Le Grand Meaulnes , a spot of Proust , Pushkin , Gogol , Chekhov ’ s stories … Without Michael I would not have discovered France and all that that came to mean .
I found the Economics material less congenial . I never really absorbed his talks in the van as we travelled
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