HM Blog

21st June

Text of speech at HM's retirement bash 21 June 2024

3rd June

…the sudden announcement of a UK General Election by the Prime Minister just over a week ago brought the concept of democracy and the right to vote into sharp relief. I remember at the start of this academic year warning the sixth form they needed to their ears and eyes open during this hugely important twelve months or so when roughly half of the global population was going to be voting. That was then though. This is now - as over 50 million in Britain, 700 million in India, 250 million in the states, 50 million in South Africa all get ready to cast their ballot or put a cross in a box. Add to that list Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia and the European Union. Lots of our Year 13 students will be able to take part in an election for the very first time, and the customary BWS election hustings is now scheduled for 25 June in the Sports Hall.

13th May

As usual the top six senior prefects from Bishop’s attended the Annual Salisbury Mayor making at St Thomas’ Church in the heart of the city last Saturday. In my invitation to them for the event I asked them, slightly flippantly, whether they had read any Thomas Hardy – and that if they had them the spectacle that awaited them would have an unnerving familiarity about it. Salisbury (or Melchester in his novels) may be towards the eastern edge of Hardy’s literary world, but on Saturday in glorious May sunshine you could be forgiven for thinking that you had returned to the nineteenth century. The streets were closed, the procession of the great and good included a marching band, robed councillors, judges, members of the public services and armed forces, local politicians and even the Salisbury Giant and Hob-Nob taking up the rear. Morris Men dancing in the city centre and the Charter Market completed the time warp illusion. Lots of 21st century clutter remained of course, but I felt that it was easy to ignore all of that and simply enjoy the spectacle of the day – after all Sven Hocking is reckoned to be the 763rd Mayor of Salisbury. There is some history – especially bearing in mind that Reuben Bracher, first Head at BWS was also Mayor of Salisbury 1923-24...

9th May

Good morning, Year 11.
You’ve made it through to the end of lessons (for the moment anyhow) and study leave is about to begin, so 8th May 2024 has some significance. For most of you, today marks the end of a 5-year road in school at Bishops. Think back. There will be moments of which you will be justifiably proud. Inevitably, there will be other times which you will recall with rather less of a glow. Every road has bumps in it – or, this being Wiltshire, pot-holes – but I really do hope that you can look back over the past years with nostalgia and a good deal of pleasure. Yes, even to those dark days of Year 8 and 9 in Covid times.
I thought I’d read a short extract from a book by the late Malcolm Muggeridge – broadcaster and moral philosopher. It seemed appropriate to me for such a day: inspirational, uplifting language shot through with hope and aspiration. Here is Muggeridge’s short essay ‘Response to Life’.
At its highest level…happiness is the ecstasy which mystics have inadequately described. At more humdrum levels it is human love, the delights and beauties of our dear earth, its colours and shapes and sounds; the enchantment of understanding and laughing, and all other exercises of such faculties as we possess; the marvel of the meaning of everything, fitfully glimpsed, inadequately expounded, but ever-present.
Such is happiness; not compressible into a pill; not translatable into a sensation; lost to whoever would grasp it himself alone; not to be gorged out of a trough, or torn out of another’s body, or paid into a bank, or driven along an autoroute, or fired in gun-salutes, or discovered in the stratosphere. Existing, intangible, in every true response to life, and absent in every false one; propounded through the centuries in every noteworthy word and deed and thought; expressed in art and literature and music; in vast cathedrals and tiny melodies; in everything that is harmonious, and in the unending heroism of imperfect men reaching after perfection.
This is a significant day for every one of you. You’ll probably have mixed feelings – anticipation tinged with some sadness; excitement and a desire to get on with exams tempered by uncertainty about what the future – both short- and long-term – might hold. If you’re anything like me, you won’t really know where exactly you’re heading at present. A-levels and higher education both seemed a distant prospect when I was in Year 11 (or the Fifth Form as it was then!) despite the fact that my older brother and sister had told me what was in store. I didn’t have much idea of what the future might hold or what my part in it might be. Some of you will share that feeling, I’m sure. Don’t panic – it’s quite normal! Others will have set sights on achieving something amazing. Some of you will have planned the summer ahead with military precision. Others are sure to drift from day to day. No matter: after the exams are through, decompression is needed before many of you return here to take on the challenge of A-levels.
Whatever your plans are, I wish you all the good fortune in the world – with your exams and with realising your dreams. I wish you luck and a following wind as you take on that unendingly heroic task of reaching after perfection.

9th May

This session where we are all together in our cathedral just shy of exams is significant for you - and for your school too. For the school it’s all about the passing on of a brilliant group of young adults. Our 3rd coeducational year group, both trail blazers and role models. For you all it’s a right of passage. The end of your time here after seven years or just two. The end of the second act and the start of an interval before the next begins.

8th May

Ask a Geologist what is meant by hidden depths, and you could get a very long and technical answer. Geologists (like me) spend most of their time looking at rocks, working out how and why they have formed and then predicting what they cannot see – the vast volume of rocks layers below the earth’s surface. Ask a mining geologist about hidden depths and they will talk about how to find ore deposits, valuable reserves of metals buried deep within the earth. To find the layers of ore, geologists must read the rocks they can see like a detective. Get the answer right and the rewards can be enormous.
Of course, being a Geologist is not all about financial rewards, and prosperity for gold – nor for that matter about digging huge holes in the ground or sitting drilling rigs to discover black gold beneath a serene and unsuspecting landscape. There are other ways in which hidden depths can be discovered, uncovered, chanced upon.
One of the things that caught my imagination when I was young was the experience of breaking open a seemingly rather dull piece of stone to find a perfectly preserved fossil inside. There’s an example – a perfectly preserved ammonite from Lyme Regis. There’s an art to finding them. The ammonites usually occur in concretionary nodules, hard spherical lumps of limestone that have formed around the animal’s shell shortly after death and burial. The nodules form because the ammonite is there as the decay of organic matter causes chemical changes in the newly deposited mud below the sea floor. The trick, of course is to be able to tell where to find the nodules. The reward is tangible and memorable, as opening that rock reveals something that has never been seen by anyone else, an extinct creature that had lived and died in a sub-tropical ocean perhaps 160 million years ago. Quite something - and here am I, happening upon well-hidden ancient treasure, purely by chance.
So yes, Geology is a science and yes, those fossils can be used to date, to correlate and to tell the palaeoecology of that ancient sea – but there’s more to it than that a feeling of surprise, of awe, of excitement.
CS Lewis, the author, wrote this:
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading a book on Astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures of Godlight in the woods of our experience.”
I understand that completely, I spend most of my time with the mundane, the everyday that tend to occupy my mind all to easily. I don’t have the time to look for deeper meaning very often, to reflect on what’s going on around very often, to reflect on what’s going on around me – but I still like to know – what lies beneath. Like the geologist with a fossil, I am now a different person from the person that bent down to pick up that unpromising rock. Look for those moments – they’re pretty special and they happen to us all.

29th April

Founder’s Day Address 26/4/2024

14th April

It is of course very tempting to make the assumption that William Golding was actually writing about Salisbury school boys instead of a group of youngsters on a tropical island. Look carefully enough today and you could probably identify some suitable characters in the playground at Bishop’s, or at least the seeds of the personality traits are there. Boys, I am sure, have changed comparatively little over the last seven decades, and Golding was still working at the school when the first editions of ‘Lord of the Flies’ appeared in 1954. Ralph, Jack, Piggy, Simon and Sam ‘n Eric can be found - or parts of them anyway - as the masses emerge from the classrooms to run off some energy at break and lunch.

18th March

...to London's South Bank, where I rendezvous with my three (allegedly) grown up children to see 'Dune II' at the iMax. Before the film there was time to enjoy lunch and then take a wander through the cacophony of activity that heaves and scurries around the Royal Festival Hall on a weekend afternoon. Multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi faceted, the piazzas beside the Thames are back to their best and busiest, a feast for the senses.

7th March

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.
Pursuing it with eager feet,
until it joins some larger way
where many parts and errands meet
and wither then? I cannot say.”