My Brother & I

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illustrations taken from C.J.Driver's own water-colour paintings. This sequence was included in the collection IN THE WATER-MARGINS, 1994, and some of the poems were in SO FAR, Selected Poems, To the last years at Wellington belonged perhaps one of his finest works, Requiem, a beautiful sequence of poems in which some of his most consistent themes, memory and exile, the power of family and the landscape among them, found consummate expression.

In 1976, he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for 23 years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978–83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983–9; Master, Wellington College, 1989–2000). [2] [6] Writing career [ edit ] Terrorist, Crane River, 2015. Used to be Great Friends, an essay in autobiography, originally published in Granta in 2002, was issued in an expanded form as an e-book by The cookie is set by Krux Digital under the domain krxd.net. The cookie stores a unique ID to identify a returning user for the purpose of targeted advertising. During and after his studies at Oxford he taught at several schools in England, including Sevenoaks School and Mathew Humberstone Comprehensive school. He then became principal of Island School in Hong Kong, Headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and Master of Wellington College. He was also a noted poet and writer, and held honorary teaching posts in literature and creative writing, as well as fellowships associated with writing programmes.Driver is married with three children and eight grandchildren and stays is East Sussex with his wife. He is married with three children and eight grandchildren, and he and his wife live in East Sussex. At the end of 2016 he had major cardiac surgery to replace his aortic valve, bypass a cardiac He is survived by his wife Ann, and by his three children. Dominic is head of land stewardship at Natural Resources Wales; Dax is chief executive of the Energy Chamber of Trinidad & Tobago; and Tamlyn is deputy managing director at cxpartners, a digital consultancy.

It was really through this sequence of poems that I came to know Jonty well. We had met through a shared love of haiku. He had been perhaps over-generous in writing about my own attempts at the genre. He never of course lost the teacher’s desire to encourage nor the ability to do so. But when I read Requiemfor the first time I saw the chance to do something creative with it. Jonty had explained that Brahms’ German Requiem,a much more “secular” requiem than the liturgical texts usually set, had been the inspiration for him. It seemed obvious to me to wrap music around the poetry. So I asked the cellist Guy Johnston, then a recent winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year, to weave a Bach cello suite “around” Jonty’s poetry. It was one of those happenstances in response to which you could hear a pin drop, as an entranced congregation of hundreds in Westminster Abbey oneSunday eveningpaid rapt attention to both music and text, and found in them a depth of spiritual encounter that was as moving for them as for the author and Ann, his wife of almost fifty years to whom he was so devoted. When, later, I suggested that Jonty himself be asked to read lines of Shakespeare at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Nelson Mandela in the Abbey, he was both thrilled, honoured, and humbled. The translator and facilitator was a charismatic young teacher, Sizwe Dyasi, then a popular figure at the school and among the town’s young people in general. At the time, Jonty remarked: ‘That young man deserves a good future.” Whether or not this has come to pass is of course yet another story.

Several issues required Jonty’s immediate attention when he took over: discipline needed tightening with Housemasters and senior pupils perhaps too influential; numbers were on the wane and academic standards were slipping. Jonty, who had already enjoyed successful headships at Island School Hong Kong and Berkhamsted, brought a steely, but always fair, sense of purpose, not only solving problems, but also bringing in many important innovations. in 2000), and two memoirs, My Brother & I (Kingston University Press, 2013), and The Man with the Suitcase:The Life, Execution and Rehabilitation of John Harris, Liberal Jonty’s personal recipe for success has been ‘motivation and inspiration, the germs of which he has introduced in epidemic proportions to the School. We have all been shaken and stirred and are the better for it.”

Jonty eventually made the decision to stay in England permanently, becoming a British citizen, and building a family and professional life there. In 1976 he became a research fellow at the University of York, and for twenty-three years he was a headmaster in Hong Kong, at Berkhamsted School and, most notably, Wellington College. In sum he published ten collections of poems, (most recently Still Further: New Poems, published by uHlanga), five novels (four of which are still in print from Faber), and numerous works of non-fiction and essay. Hospital poem) and "On Shadows". A letter to the Oxford Magazine, No 397, explained that "On Shadows" was dedicated to Ken Gross and Liza Lorwin; Ken recently edited a new edition of John My favourite story, for now, involves Jonty and the late Archishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu at an event at Westminster Abbey on 3 March 2014. It resonates with another event at Umso Senior Secondary School in Colesberg, many years earlier. And both events revolve around Nelson Mandela as well as William Shakespeare. But let me start at the beginning …After his degree, he worked as a teacher at Sevenoaks School and then at Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive School in South Humberside. In 1976 he became a Research Fellow at the University of York. From 1978 to 1983 Driver worked as a headmaster at Berkhamsted School. He spent a considerable amount of time as a Principal in Hong Kong. He was Master at Wellington College from 1989-2000. The positions he held in those schools were: English teacher, then Housemaster of the International Sixth Form Centre; Director of Sixth Form Studies; Principal; Headmaster; and He was described within his valete, which appeared in the October 1989 edition of The Berkhamstedian as “the first of the ‘modern’ headmasters of Berkhamsted who recognised the need to get out and about- forging international links, teacher swaps, the introduction of scholars from other continents, contributing to the work of the Headmasters’ Conference and many other public engagements and visits abroad. All these activities have brought the name of Berkhamsted to the forefront, sometimes in places where it was little known before, as well as enriching the life of the School in many ways.” His sister Dorothy, partner of Nobel Prize-winning novelist JM Coetzee, was another exile, in her case in Australia where she and Coetzee lived, and she became Professor of English at Adelaide having relinquished her chair at UCT.

On Friday 2nd November 2018 (All Souls' Day) Jonty read his sequence of poems, REQUIEM, in the parish church of Ewhurst Green. Martin Bradshaw, cellist, played excerpts from Bach's CelloThe programme for the memorial service usually stands in the entrance hall at Hanglip Farm, next to the collected works of C.J. Langenhoven, collected editions of Punch and other colonial magazines, farming manuals, family bibles of a branch of the Van Zyl family, and stern family portraits. In the Anglo-Boer War, Hanglip Farm had served as headquarters for General Koos De La Rey, and later for British soldiers under Lord Kitchener. Driver’s life was full of searching and longing, for South Africa, and in particular his beloved Karoo. The joy he felt at the coming to power in the mid-1990s of Nelson Mandela and the ANC evaporated in his latter years, when it became clear that the ANC had lost its way. at some of these schools. In 2000 he retired from Wellington College, having served 11 years as headmaster. In 2007 he was appointed as an honorary Senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Jonty Driver in the 1960s. Photo: www.jontydriver.co.uk