Gerry Ashton was one of those rare men who achieved distinction in his career in the three levels of the educational system: at university, and at secondary and primary schools. It was clear that he could have pursued that career successfully at any one of these three levels. His cruelly premature death in May came during his tenure as headmaster of one of the most successful Preparatory Schools in London.
Gerry was born in Wigan in 1946 and educated at the Salesian College in Bolton. Coming from a traditional Roman Catholic background, he found enough nonconformism in his French teacher (and part time UFO expert) to satisfy his impish sense of humour and at the same time to inspire his love of languages. From School he joined the Seminary at Upholland in preparation for the Roman Catholic priesthood. When he decided not to pursue orders he went up to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to read Modern Languages. He began to learn Spanish and developed a great devotion to its language and literature. It was at Cambridge that he developed the clarity, structure and succinctness which became the hallmark of all his writing. In Spanish he covered more ground in three years than many achieved in more than twice the time; and he did so with relish. He took a First and was awarded the Gibson Spanish Scholarship. His time at Cambridge was one of great freedom: released from the struggles that he had had to resolve as a seminarian, he sought to be a liberal in all things and enjoyed the challenge which that posed. On the way to visit his supervisor to discuss proposed research, Gerry bought a copy of Boethius’s De Consolatione for his own interest and it was to become the topic for a PhD.
It was during his time at Cambridge that he met his wife Rosemary. Subsequently he took up a permanent post at Strathclyde University. At this time there was a lack of mobility in higher education and this restricted pursuit of a purely academic career. As a result, and because by this stage Rosemary had moved to University College, London (where she now holds a Chair), in 1975 Gerry applied for a teaching post at Westminster School. He found himself surrounded by bright and committed pupils in a fledgling department. When he became Head of Spanish, he built unobtrusively on the department’s developing success. Boys and girls found his understated intellectualism and his deceptive casualness attractive, and the brightest of them took from him an academic rigour which gave their work new purpose and quality. The less (or at least, less obviously) able trusted his teaching and enjoyed his lessons. His knack of bringing the best out of pupils, to engage and to be listened to, made him a certain candidate to be a Housemaster. His interest in his pupils and the time which he gave them were prodigious. From being Housemaster of Liddell’s he was invited to become Registrar of the School, a critical post which involved a good deal of contact with the Preparatory School world. When Westminster Under School headmastership became vacant in 1991, Gerry was appointed by the Governing Body of Westminster School and moved to Vincent Square as Master.
In some respects Gerry seemed an unlikely Prep School head - a mild sceptic, curious, inclined to humour rather than passion, and wary of enthusiasm. His strengths lay in personal relationships, never expecting or demanding too much, always philosophical and kind when confronted with doubt or failure. His family was the welcoming centre of his life: he and Rosemary were generous in their hospitality. Even during his illness he was to invite the staff to his home in Dulwich after a school inspection. Gerry encouraged and aided Rosemary in her distinguished career: family holidays were spent, on occasions, at Yale; Gerry was always the first to review each completed chapter of any new biography.
The warmth of his family life spilled over into school where he acknowledged adolescent angst with sympathy but equally relished biking sorties and the wizardry of Harry Potter. The happiness of the boys around him was his primary aim. He actually liked his charges, and behind those thick glasses were two highly intelligent and mischievous eyes that always enjoyed engaging the boys: it was impossible to pass him without looking at him and speaking a few words. Temperamentally unable to punish, he inspired widespread affection: an authority figure who was more likely to wink than to preach, to distribute toffees than clichés - perhaps his sternest word was ‘Stop’. Each pupil felt that he was given individual attention: despite the privileged home circumstances of many of the pupils, Gerry perceived that there was no guarantee that each had been listened to sympathetically and understood, and he sought at all times to bridge that possible gap. His Mastership became a wonderfully enriching experience. His family, friends and colleagues are bereft and a generation of Under School boys feels that they have lost a friend.
Funeral Oration
The reason I am speaking to you today about Charles Keeley is not simply that I was one of his many pupils in the History VII at Westminster School, or that we went on to become life long friends but that, in my case his influence was life long and directly determined the course of my own career; and that in the end I came to accept all his views on liberalism in education and maybe most on Catholicism.
In case you don't know who I am, and if you don't you do not need to know, I started and ran for many years a little experimental school in Richmond in Surrey, that was committed to academic standards, an easy timetable, very few games, a good social mix from the state sector and no corporal punishment. This was between 1975 and 1991. But the story goes a lot further back to 1958, when as a junior boy I met Charles in the cloisters and being in considerable difficulties in things like Latin and Maths, wrote extra-curricular essays for him and found myself within a year, not in the geography remove, but in the History VII where I spent about half my time at Westminster School. The important thing about this, for me, was not that I learned the dates of the Kings of England - actually I was always very hazy about them - but that it taught me how to think, how to write and talk and, in the long run, how to teach.
The Times obituarist was in no way exaggerating when he said that, through the medium of his history, Charles Keeley was one of the great educators in the English public school system in the 20th century. I could not imagine him ever being concerned with things like teaching diplomas, any more really than with typewriters and computers, or even at the end of the day with results - though his results were, in his heyday in the fifties, the best results in the country.
His own early academic career was outstanding. Born in Maidstone in 1919, he won a scholarship to Maidstone Grammar School and then at seventeen to New College, where (after war service) he got a First in History in 1946, becoming a research student at Christ Church in the same year - though for some reason not a full Fellow of an Oxford College. He once described this time as the ‘tragedy of his life’. But as so often happens in life, tragedy turned into triumph after he went to Westminster in 1950 where his boys won scholarship after scholarship to every major and minor Oxbridge College, and a good proportion of them proceeded to become academics in provincial and commonwealth universities, editors of national newspapers and the like.
And yet at the core of this there was always the query that the system was not quite fair: that people had to pay too much money to go to schools like Westminster and that Oxbridge was too élitist and took too many pupils from the public schools. As the obituarist implied, when he resigned from the headship of department to run a boarding house, he joined the hearties by the soccer pitch, but still seemed to be running with the hares whilst hunting with the hounds.
When I went down to lunch with him at Harrietsham after he retired in 1981, we would discuss the state of my own little school, and then the name of some old Westminster would creep in, and the indication that if he had been to Westminster and Christ Church, perhaps he would have been a Fellow after all.
I think that it was this concern for a less divided society than we have, which apart from academic standards, was his most lasting and endearing quality for me. He had, after all, been in training for the Catholic priesthood after he came down in 1948 and before he went to Westminster, and his liberalism and his Catholicism, seemed to me at the end to be his most outstanding characteristics.
We all die and in our Christian faith, this is a release from this ‘mortal coil, the gateway to a much better and less transient world’. I think Charles would have been certain of this: I am sure that Charles would have agreed with Milton when he wrote:
‘The shepherd took up his cloak of blue Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new’.
Carey Palmer (OW, 1956-1961)
Leslie Spaull came to Westminster as art master in 1946, still very much in the aftermath of the war and life unbelievably difficult. Facilities for teaching art were virtually non-existent; the School’s buildings had been badly damaged in the war; there was no money for anything except reducing the School’s overdraft; and the Governing Body was, or appeared to be, largely philistine and gave little priority to art - which in fact had not for several years been taught at all. But Leslie was quite undeterred and set about establishing his department on a firm footing. His talent as a painter, shown not only in his pictures which could be seen in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibitions, but also in his painting of scenery for School plays, was quickly grasped and appreciated by discerning colleagues and pupils - the latter valuing perhaps above all his lectures on the History of Art, the former being no less impressed by the speed with which he solved The Times crossword! His skill as a teacher was demonstrated by the annual exhibition of his pupils’ work.
Anyone who got to know Leslie at all well could not fail to be impressed by the breadth of his knowledge and abilities. He designed furniture, was a successful photographer, a skilled repairer of clocks, a fine bookbinder, and no mean shot with a .22 rifle. He was the School’s archivist as a well as editor of a new volume of the Record of Old Westminsters.
Leslie Spaull was not an orthodox art teacher, and was teaching at a time when the subject was still not taken seriously at many schools. He was remarkably tolerant and open-minded, quite happy to let his pupils write essays on such obscure subjects as ‘Hispano-Flemish painting of the 15th Century’. He made no attempt to direct their artistic tastes, but stimulated an interest in many aspects of the subject without any rigid chronological approach. His restless encyclopaedic mind was always going off in unexpected directions - topics ranging from the Ancient Egyptian period to duelling pistols! He was a pioneer and a great original. In the 1960’s few Westminsters were fascinated by art, but for those who showed talent or interest, he provided a refuge. They could paint or browse through the art room library; they learned here to understand pictures, to create their own images.
Some art periods were devoted to drawing and painting, others gave greater insights into his talents as a great teacher. In a darkened room - a challenge to anyone’s disciplinary powers - he lectured in a drily humorous way, never giving judgements on what was projected on the screen, never hinting at his own preferences for any school of painting or sculpture. If other teachers taught how to think, it was Leslie Spaull who taught one how to look. In the opinion of one pupil who later became a television producer, his lectures on art were far superior to the programmes on Civilisation fronted by Lord Clark.
He was essentially a hospitable person, conspicuous for his talent for friendship. And in everything he did he was sustained by his wife José’s help and support. He is survived by her and their two daughters.
Denis Moylan
