From Michael Barrett: Prompted by the many expressions of gratitude that you have circulated I also wanted to offer a few personal recollections of Frank. My experience is apparently distinguishable from many of these classroom stories, as I was taught by Frank after his retirement on a tutorial basis (i.e. at Gothic Lodge). I was probably his last pupil and, like Nick Shrimpton, was under his tutelage for quite a short time (perhaps six months). As Nick has said, it was “enough”. For a further 17 years (including during my A Level Year, spells at Cambridge and Liverpool Universities, my early experiences – abortive as they turned out – in journalism and later during my legal career) he remained an energetic correspondent and friend. I first met Frank on a Saturday morning in September 1986. Frank had retired from KCS five years earlier, but my father had approached him for assistance with my A Level English preparation. This led to a fairly daunting (for a 16 year old) interview at his flat and, following that (apparently approving) assessment, subsequent weekly tutorials. This lasted until about March or April 1987 when (owing to the expiry of his lease) he decamped to Suffolk, returning to Wimbledon only for the purposes of working on the KCS Archives. During these six winter months, the pattern of my working week (framed by regular school commitments) was altered. I found myself stretched by submitting myself to a Cambridge Scholarship Entry paper selected by Frank the previous week. Written in haste usually in the very late hours of a Friday evening or early hours of a Saturday morning, my effort was posted through his letterbox at Gothic Lodge at dead of night in time for a 10am practical criticism tutorial. Each week, on the dot, I would knock on the door, Frank would appear in his shirtsleeves (this was invariable!) immediately curious as to the time of the essay’s delivery. He would conduct me through the downstairs lobby of his flat past innumerable well- thumbed volumes, up a narrow red- carpeted staircase to his kitchen. We always sat on opposite sides of the small square table (always drenched in sunlight, as it now seems to my fading memory), the fridge supporting the largest single volume dictionary I had ever seen, and spent a few hours devoted to close reading. This was my introduction to Practical Criticism. Often, the business of the analysis over, the session would progress to a Milesean lecture on a given writer or text before a carefully annotated essay was returned…complete with Frank’s own essay trailing mine! Geoffrey Jackson has written inspiringly of Franks’ nourishment of the young mind and my own experience was one of being dared, almost, to self-improvement (how often would I be challenged with an illustrative quotation followed by the words “whom am I quoting?”). His facility for verbatim recall of great stretches of prose and poetry from almost any period of English literature was unexampled and would have fitted him for the stage or politics. The pure theatre of watching Frank blow his nose has already been observed and I wonder to what extent this type of “performance” was a carefully cultivated strategy to deflect the excesses of ridicule, curiosity or antagonism no doubt prevalent among the boys he taught or even colleagues he worked with. Despite the bravado I am certain that he was acutely shy. The self-denial (not humility), generosity, fidelity to standards, and sensitivity to life’s absurdities were hallmarks of Frank’s particular style. He “eschewed” and ridiculed self-aggrandizement or “hauteur”, mocked the “aphoristic motto” or any form of “glibness”, disavowed the “recherché”, ridiculed “attitudinizing platitudes” and “grandiloquence”, and generally “lambasted” thoughtlessness (or any “swooning abstractions”) that came his way. Small wonder he found the Victorians such a rich source of interest. Small wonder too that people were taken off at the knees for a careless thought or verbal slip. How difficult it was (as anyone who knew him will attest) to contradict him save by well-reasoned, “cogent” and already-assembled-ready-to-deliver argument. If you did not know what you thought, better not to voice it! . This, after all this time, I now find interesting. Was it not fascinating, at the wake, to hear Sarah and Jocelyn talking about Frank’s mother and her apparently acute sense of the theatrical? Does this provide some explanation for Frank’s own penchant for “galvanizing” re-enactment, for recitations of verse with exaggerated animated vivacious gestures, for producing champagne as Clive describes after the miracle of surviving an IRA bomb attack? I am sure that we each have our own memory of a particular FRM dramatization (ventriloquizing when wishing to be parodic; august when wishing to inspire) usually followed by his own self-comment or corrective “bon mot” - sometimes a “telling” observation, sometimes a “trenchant” piece of satire. The showmanship of Clive’s tale for me is much less interesting than the fact of Frank’s silence after the performance! Frank’s retirement to Suffolk in 1987 did not stop him returning weekly to work in the School’s archives. Following my A Levels and during the Cambridge vacations, I would often be invited (“my sympathetic energies”, in his terms, would be “recruited”) to help in the business of filing papers, recording or disposing of information or providing answers to school or old boys’ enquiries. Frank got to know my friend Bruce Gibson at this time and we both attended and assisted Frank as invited. Of course, at Cambridge too, Frank remained in touch. Every month or so a letter would be waiting in his inimitable hand in the Porters’ Lodge inviting me to meet him at one of his three favourite locations: the Graduate Centre, the University Library, or the Fitzwilliam Museum (the last of which houses the early 17th Century Indian picture of A Turkey which featured almost every year on the Christmas cards he would send: “I always choose this turkey card. The appearance of the bird is far preferable to its taste on the dining table!”). One term I recall his meeting me in town in his lemon yellow Fiat (I think) and driving me to Ely to view the Cathedral. Following the FRM-guided tour (I recall his delight at the octagon spire and then showing me Prior Crawden’s chapel at the King’s School – an example of “the more bizarre nook(s) or corners” of a cultural experience that Geoffrey has identified as Frank’s penchant) we took off for a splendid lunch in a local restaurant. His kindness and generosity was always unstinting. Another memory I have is of stopping on the staircase at Gothic Lodge (after a tutorial) and being shown a photograph of a KCS old boy with a look of surprise on his face. Frank suggested that he had a “fey” look and then challenged me to define “fey” (which he glossed as being derived from the Anglo Saxon word “feogh” meaning foreseeing one’s own death). Frank was not a little interested in the literature of “death” and I wonder if my experiences of being taught by a man who had retired some 4 years earlier is indicative of a pessimistic later-life view or if this had always been an interest? Does it resemble what others remember? I attach the text of one Cambridge entry paper I attempted for Frank. I have also transcribed his comments (including the telling aside “the poetess doesn’t recognize Death, and treats it (don’t we all?) as something that can’t possibly happen to oneself”) to illustrate what I recall as a preoccupation. Another reason for publishing his comments is that our recollections and anecdotes may never do justice to what we would all wish to celebrate, namely, the measure of Frank’s intellect as applied to literature, the text. I hope that it will do some justice to Frank’s memory and hopefully provide those who never met him with a flavour of the power of his thought. As Frank says of Dr Johnson in his General Introduction to the selection of Johnson’s writings that he produced for Macmillan: “To begin any examination of Johnson’s work as critic and poet with a discussion of his temperament and character is dangerous in itself. During the last twenty years, so much emphasis has been placed on Johnson as a social figure, a conversationalist and sage, that it is too easy to forget that he was an author at all…Consequently, the many studies of Johnson the man, rather than Johnson the author, and the publication of what seems to be a never-ending supply of Boswell’s journals have led to F.R. Leavis’ timely comment that “Johnson, after all, was a great English writer”. Frank, I believe, was a “great English teacher” and his writing was integral to that. I have kept the hundred or so letters that Frank wrote to me and, re-reading them the other day, was amused by some of his comments and strongly-voiced opinions. These include epistolary comments on various sports: (Golf): “Oddly enough, a year ago John Higgins sent me the Times anthology of obituary notices of the year, which included a foreword by (Alistair) Cooke. I admire his apparent agelessness, though I don’t share his passion for golf – a game that Henry James described as “hitting a little white ball from one place to another and then pushing it into a submerged jamjar”. (Football and cricket): “I have to admit that professional football merely gives me a marked feeling of nausea. As far as cricket goes, I can’t find myself in transports over the present Test series (June 1996) – a contest between fleas?” (Tennis): “Our sad women tennis players! The U.S. Wightman Cup team will soon include players in nappies, no doubt”. I also recall his comment on Rowing: How can anyone take a sport seriously where you win by going backwards! Also: his observations on various overseas locations, institutions with eccentricities, all of which were fertile material for quizzical or trenchant comment: (Boston): “I remember Gordon Haight telling me that Boston was his favourite American town, partly because it has maintained so much of its 18th. century English architecture. Many years ago I corresponded with one or two learned Boston societies about portraits that they had, done by Samuel Laurence during his American trip. However, one of my Boston memories comes from a scene in the Marx Brothers at the Opera. A hectic backstage flight and pursuit during a performance of Il Trovatore results in the unexpected lowering of background scenery. On one occasion, while the mysterious gipsywoman, seated in front of a camp fire, is uttering a sinister vatic curse, a street scene of Boston in the 1890s, complete with tram cars and gentlemen in tophats, suddenly manifests itself behind her, with devastatingly bathetic results….Dickens speaks graciously about Boston, partly because the male inhabitants did not indulge themselves in the widespread American pastime of expectorating into spittoons (and more often onto the floor or accidentally over human beings).” (On the China Consular Service, whose history by P.D.Coates he had been reading in 1992): “Why people wanted to join the China Consular Service baffles me. Most of them died young or went insane. One of them, while on leave in Hong Kong, rushed into the dining room at his hotel at breakfast stark naked and cavorted in front of a party of disconcerted female missionaries. This, incidentally, was not considered grounds for dismissing him.” (On Carlyle and Archbishop Randall Davidson): “Like most people north of Watford, he lacked the graces. Which reminds me of Queen Victoria’s comment when Archbishop Benson had been succeeded at Canterbury by the Scottish Randall Davidson: “I’m afraid the new Archbishop has no manners, and I’m afraid he is too old to learn”. (On the postal service): “Many thanks for your letter, which managed to stagger its way here in a breathtakingly speedy five days. As I am an involuntary sojourner at numerous railway stations, I have the chance to observe the handling of Her Majesty’s mails. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that any of it ever arrives at its destination. Those responsible clearly regard the sacks of letters as irritating distractions from their real business in life – gossiping, sitting down and making tea. I have watched with amusement while the latest products of our state education system attempt, with furrowed brows and expressions of total incomprehension, to read the direction labels on the sacks”. (Again, on the postal service): “Many thanks for your card, which arrived two days ago, having managed to stagger over the Atlantic in a mere fortnight. I think it must have followed Columbus’s original route.” (On the Railways): “Incidentally, I’m genuinely beginning to believe that I am some sort of Jonah every time I board a train. Rails break; signals fail; trains catch fire; locomotives seize up etc. When I travelled into Cambridge from here by train the other day, we were hit at an unmanned level crossing by some inane bumpkin driving a tractor. Fortunately it was only a glancing blow, so the half-wit on the tractor was not injured – which is more than he deserved. But the hydraulic system on the train’s brakes was damaged. We spent half an hour stationery while, presumably, the bucolic clown on the tractor explained himself; then we crept into Cambridge at a speed equivalent to that of a somnolent centipede. It was just as well that the accident occurred fairly close to Cambridge”. My last meeting with Frank was in about 2004 or 2005 when I visited him in Milton. Having not succeeded in making contact by telephone or post, I took the opportunity of a visit to Cambridge to call upon him unannounced. Although surprised, he took the visit in good part and we spent about half an hour chatting on his doorstep. I recall his lament at being unable to type any longer and the difficulty of writing by hand, but that apart he seemed little altered from the Frank of a few years earlier. Only later (at the wake) did I appreciate how difficult these last few years must have been. My subsequent letters went unanswered and this is where my contact with Frank ended.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 09:27:14 +0000
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