I wasn’t my idea at all to fix a blue plaque to commemorate William Golding outside the school entrance in The Close. My wife is an English Teacher and so perhaps her view that we should be celebrating our Nobel Prize Winner a bit more prominently was always going to hold sway, and so it did. I worked with a very supportive and efficient Civic Society Committee, the unveiling ceremony took place on a sunny morning on the North Walk and there it was. It was the right thing to do (most things suggested by Head’s wives fall into the category of course!), but what I had not foreseen at the time was that it would become a tourist destination all of its own. The coachloads from Spain, France, Italy, the States and (increasingly) China disgorge their cargoes on Exeter Street and the river of the curious flows through St Catherine’s Gate and past the school gates. Second stop, after Malmesbury House and stories about Handel is the Golding Plaque, so that it is not uncommon for the entrance to be entirely blocked by camera-phone wielding crowds before they move on to contemplate the splendour of the Cathedral.
There are other parts to the Golding legacy of course. Pictures in No11 and the Chapel of WG, photos in the archives of him taking part in choral concerts in the 1950s and the School Hall (now the Art Studios) and many alumni who claim direct experience of his teaching and guidance while he was at Bishop’s. ‘Scruff’, as he was affectionately known by his contemporaries, was not a member of staff who was anonymous – whether it was because of his slightly unkempt day-to-day appearance or his habit of wearing his dress naval uniform at parents’ evenings. In lessons he was not a natural; the stories are legion of him writing longhand during lessons and also of him asking boys to complete word counts from manuscript copy. His focus, surely, was elsewhere, and in a framed copy of a hand written letter on my office wall he says that the boys faces ‘blend into one that is not unpleasant’ from his 17 years at the school. Teaching, one might conclude, was not really his niche.
Golding’s breakthrough with ‘Lord of the Flies’ came in 1954. After over a year of editing work split between Scruff and Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber, the novel was published on Friday 17 September to almost universal critical acclaim. At Bishop’s the celebrations appear to have been unbridled – according to John Carey’s biography ‘a zinc bath packed with ice and bottles of champagne appeared in the staffroom and there were convivial scenes. One master, Walter Watson, a fitness fanatic renowned for standing on his head on a mountain peak, stood on his head, when the rejoicing was over, on the small peak of ice that remained in the bath’. It's a compelling image, and one that seems very fitting given both the magnitude of Golding’s achievement and the idiosyncratic nature of the school and staff at the time. I am left wondering whether something similar would happen today…
Times have changed and we live in a World that in some ways is radically different to that of the ‘50s, though human nature remains an enigma and at times the veneer of societal sophistication that we like to think is so robust can erode all too readily. Golding’s writing addresses fundamental questions and forces that have not gone away, and his spare prose and narrative drive still entrance generations of readers in school and beyond. The plaque outside the school gates reminds all of those tourists that genius can flourish anywhere, and the selfies that follow migrate their way onto mantelpieces throughout the World…
SDS
