Robert Baynes

We meet today to mourn the death of a father, grand-father, great grand-father, friend and thoroughly good man. He was a big man physically, of outstanding intelligence and of commanding moral stature. His vocation was that of a teacher. He inspired many young historians and he interested the most apathetic General Studies class in serious discussion of culture, politics, ethics and religion. In character unself-regarding and unassuming and conducting himself in a slightly self-deprecating manner, he caught boys unaware, and before they knew it they had been hooked and their brain set to work. For 22 years he was a Headmaster, first of a tiny north country grammar school in Richmond, North Yorkshire, and then, from 1962 to 1982, in charge of the Stationers’ Company’s School in north London.

Bob was born in Derby in 1921 of sound northern stock. His father had been horrendously wounded on the Somme, and after the loss of a leg and a difficult period of recuperation, had settled in that city in a desk job at Derby Power Station. He was stoic about his injuries, about the continuing twinges they caused (‘just a touch of the old trouble’ he would say), and his acceptance of a life that was less ambitious than he might reasonably have expected. Bob admired his uncomplaining and steadfast character, and his father ‘s willingness to roll with the punches. Bob ‘s mother, also, was hugely intelligent, one who, in a later generation, would have had greater educational and professional opportunities. She set about to make a home with modest financial resources. She adored her son, who did, and could do, no wrong in her eyes; and he rewarded her devotion by never disappointing her by his sheer determination and hard work that marked his character.

He was only eight when he won a Scholarship to Christ’s Hospital and entered the School as a boarder. For the next 11 years his mind was stretched and disciplined by excellent teaching; he formed friendships that lasted a lifetime; and he became conscious of the value of life in a community. Although good at Mathematics and Classics – indeed, good at every subject, he applied to Cambridge to read History, and won an Open Exhibition to study at Trinity College.

Rather than going to university in October 1940 and awaiting his turn to be called up for military service, Bob opted to join the army straightaway – as a private in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He was immediately spotted as officer material, and within six weeks he was sent on the appropriate training courses. He always used to say, when asked, that he’d had a rather easy war. He spent most of it in India, doing two consecutive tours of duty there. His first posting was to a battalion that had borne the brunt of the retreat from Burma. After two years of internal peacekeeping (Bob liked to recount in humorous mode the capture of a Congress flag from a small bunch of nationalist rioters) his battalion was sent on to the North African and Italian campaigns. But Bob had been struck down with malaria and could not accompany them and, transferring to a sister battalion, he stayed for another two years in the sub-continent. He found the terrible losses his regiment had sustained, both in Burma and in Italy, recorded in regiment’s Chapel in York Minster, hard to bear; and he marvelled at his own good fortune at being spared.

Whilst in India, he learnt a good deal of Urdu, and was surprised later in life to find how much of it had stuck. He was also curious and un-judgmental of the alien society into which he had been drawn. During his recent time in hospital, he found rapport with one of his nurses, a young Muslim man who came from Sylhet, where Bob had been stationed for a while, now in north-eastern Bangladesh. ‘I still have a clear memory’ Bob wrote, ‘of a broad river, bustling with all manner of craft, a splendid fish-market on the quay-side, and along the river bank earnest small boys and earnest elderly gentlemen flying serious kites. On the basis of a shared memory of a faraway spot (my nurse) relaxed, and as he made my bed and took my blood pressure, we talked of his expectations for his young family in a still strange land, and of the beliefs we shared in common.’

Because his place at Trinity was waiting for him, Bob was discharged from the army (with the rank of Captain) almost immediately the war ended, and he was able to begin his course in Cambridge in the middle of the Michaelmas Term 1945. His war service entitled him to a fast- track degree, and so he graduated in the summer of 1947. At Trinity he found some old friends from Christ’s Hospital, and he made new ones, not least on the rugby field where he was a formidable prop forward. His time at Trinity was then followed by a year at the Institute of Education in London, where he completed his teacher-training course. He took teaching very seriously, but never thought much of the PCCE course itself. He regarded it as a blissful time to read widely and deeply far beyond the formal requirements of the curriculum; he was now ready to explore fully his vocation.

It was in London, of course, that the Derbyshire boy, sent to boarding school as an infant and then next to India for the war years, met and wooed Delphine Crews. She was many of the things he was not: ebullient, dramatic (how he could widen her eyes to make a point), unashamedly full of Welsh joie de vivre. But they shared a deep seriousness, a clear sense of right and wrong, and great faith. They fell in love which endured for ever, and Bob sealed the engagement with the present of a Cairn terrier, who would ride in one or other of their bicycle baskets as they explored the countryside. They were married in 1951 and had a daughter and three sons; in 1960 they acquired an orphaned 16-year-old ward of court, and I shall be forever grateful for the kindness and for their welcome to me as a member of their family.

Bob‘s teaching career progressed rapidly. His initial appointment was as an Assistant Master at Abingdon then as house tutor at Denstone, but this was followed by significant move to be the Head of the History Department at the Haberdashers’ Aske School. This was an elite school of the period, drawing on talent across north London, and Bob formed the minds of many intellectually ambitious and very bright boys. Richmond School was something of a contrast: it was very small – only 12 students in all in my Sixth Form year – and we weren’t at all ambitious. Bob set about to change this, by his own stimulating teaching and by and throwing his weight behind any useful project that would encourage the students to think and do more. It would have been too much to think that such a dynamic head would remain long at the School, and sure enough, in 1962, he was brought back to London to be head of the Stationers’ Company’s School.

In another time, or another place, Bob might have had a conventionally successful career as a learned and distinguished Head of an academically elite school, laden with conventional honours on retirement. But he was to face much greater challenges, and be tested much more fiercely, than if he had been in a more stable School environment. For the Stationers’ Company’s School was, through the 1960s and 1970s, to experience turmoil beyond belief. It is one of Bob‘s great achievement that he stuck with the school and that he led it through extraordinary difficulties with extraordinary wisdom. First, he navigated its transition from being a selective grammar school to becoming a neighbourhood comprehensive school. Then he steered a way through a period of massive social change in the locality, as one new immigrant group after another came to settle there: ‘In 1966’ he wrote, ‘out of 600 pupils there were 26 from families recently immigrated into the country – 4 ½% of the School population. By 1973 the proportion of pupils whose parents had recently settled in England was 25% and in 1979 it was 69%. Moreover, the countries of origin were very diverse: places in Africa, Asia, Cyprus, Europe, Turkey and the West Indies were all present. At one time, eight different Indian languages were spoken by his Asian pupils and Bob never ceased to remind people that the ‘West Indies’ was a term that covered distinct islands and cultures, scattered over thousands of square miles. His great achievement was to provide in the School a place where this diversity was celebrated but also brought into community: difference was understood but the main task, and how hard this was in practice, was to bring people together in shared experiences in shared space.

Early in his Headship school roles were growing and so the main problems were how to accommodate the growth in old buildings with poor facilities. In the last decade, the problem was of declining student numbers, so the question was how to serve the community best as resources shrank and reorganisation and closures followed. Political life in north London was not always helpful (as Bob himself might have said – he had a fondness for understatement); and he was beset by ideologies and experts, who were good at sounding off but not very sensible when it came to actually doing anything constructive. Reading the accounts of the time, it is hard to believe that even Bob retained his sanity, his humour and his good sense. But that he did was recognised, even by professional meddlers. A Local Education Authority report on Stationers’ School one year after it became comprehensive recorded, with some astonishment, that things had gone well. The inspector wrote: ‘This is largely due to the fact that the Head has the full confidence of his staff. He is able to survey any situation calmly and analytically and can then make a just decision by which he stands.’

He was so good at all this partly because he had the historian’s sense of society and change, and it instinctively informed his current actions. He considered evidence carefully. This meant that there was freshness to his thinking; but it was allied with an understanding of how we had got to where we were. And, of course there was his underlying faith expressed in a quiet but totally secure, Anglicanism.

The tumultuous years at Stationers’ left him ‘bloodied but unbowed’. It had been a controversial time, and Bob had one way or another challenged the shibboleths of every vested interest. But as the dust settled, it became clearer that Bob had served the School and community outstandingly well. ‘Now that I have been retired for a quarter of a century’, he wrote to me last year, ‘all my pupils seem to have forgotten my multitudinous shortcomings, and since there has been no successor to my office, I am regarded now as a sort of totem pole, which, like all totally undeserved compliments, I rather enjoy. It is also, of course, a great advantage that the history of the School is what I wrote; no other version is permitted’.

But what a stunningly good history it is: beautifully written, soundly based on the archives, and remarkably dispassionately balanced when he himself became a central figure in the story. Moreover, though in a sense a piece of local or institutional history, the account given sets the School’s development in a far broader social and political context and gives it an interest far beyond its particular remit. And Bob wrote other things that are of lasting value: an account, for example, arising out of study at SOAS and of a sabbatical term experiencing Boston‘s school system and how the good burghers of Massachusetts had organised their schools and handled racial and social tensions. In retirement, there were a number of short papers on family and local history, and his letters, always a joy to receive, invariably included a paragraph or two which shed light on some human predicament.

After such a tough professional life, it would have been only right that Bob and Delphine should have enjoyed a long and calm retirement together. But this was not to be: Delphine was struck down by cancer. Bob cared for her and they experienced some really good times together as she faced death with a brave spirit. Their shared faith never wavered, and it carried them both through the slough of despond. Bob’s steadfastness came to the fore: he did not believe in complaint, and he saw things in a grander, more universal, setting: ‘all time is equidistant from eternity’, was one of his favourite sayings. ‘We all have our pear-shaped moments’, he wrote a few years ago when I was having difficulties at work. ‘Happily, they pass in the stream of history.’

And he found much to enjoy: his family and what they were up to; his grandchildren, to whom he wrote a circular letter once they were of university age, and whom he cheered on as they severally passed their driving test and were added to the pool of ‘Grandpa ‘s chauffeurs’. He and Delphine had always had a great capacity for friendship: not just keeping up with those of their youth, but engaging with the new friends as opportunities arose. Their children’s in-laws have reason to be glad of the choice of partner their sons and daughters made; and some of my and Faith’s friends have written this week to say how sad they are at Bob‘s passing – for he was such good company; serious, to be taken seriously, but such a joy to be with as well: so witty and so funny. He was capable of tremendous self-parody: replying on behalf of the guests after dinner at a meeting of the Richmond Grocers, Mercers and Haberdashers, he said that school teachers had never had a guild of their own, but then, he went on, they could always join that of the Leatherworkers and Tanners: he maintained a traditional view about how best to manage young miscreants. In the summer of 1972, a group of London school children called a strike. Bob recalled ‘Six of our cheerful rogues from the Third Year spent the day sunning themselves in Finsbury Park. On their return I had to explain to them that while I didn’t recognise their strike they were about to recognise mine.’ Adding, ‘ We remained good friends after this industrial dispute.’

I realise that in saying all these words, I have said so little about what could be said and what is worth saying and should have been said: nothing here about Bob‘s work with and for the Church especially at John Keble in Mill Hill; nor of living his life according to Saint Francis’s rules of charity and service; nor of the enjoyment he got from being a Liveryman of the Stationers’ Company and the advice he gave to further their charitable education work; nor of the pleasure he took in other people’s successes and of the support he gave in difficult times; the list is endless. Gathered here, today, though, I know Bob would want to remind us that this also is a passing phase, and it too will be carried away on the tide of history. If we feel his death diminishes us, let us remember how much the life that went before so greatly increased us; and that while we grieve, let us hear the trumpets that call him to the other shore.

Gordon Johnson is The President of Wolfson College, Cambridge and Old Boy of Richmond School, Yorkshire and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.