Mark Palmer

Great masters

It only takes one excellent teacher to transform someone’s entire school career, says <em>Mark Palmer</em>

Frankly, I wasn’t a great success at school — although I like to think it was more a case of peaking at prep school, where I was captain of football, a prefect and even managed to pass Common Entrance, thank you very much. And then it all went downhill.

No excuses (plenty actually), but one reason for failing to dazzle at Eton was because my classical tutor cast such a long, dark shadow over me that by the age of 16 all my energies went into disliking him as much as he clearly disliked me.

His name was Fred How and he was a bachelor so set in his creaking ways that even the swots and goodie-goodies struggled to find anything pleasant to say about him.

We dreaded our weekly sessions in his pokey ground-floor flat in the cloisters not far from the Head Man’s plush quarters. It seemed that he went out of his way to say nasty things in his reports (‘Palmer displays jaunty incompetence’ was one of his kinder comments) but thankfully my father — who never had a bad word to say about anyone — did not take it too seriously because How had taught him 30 or so years earlier.

‘Not my favourite beak,’ my father admitted. In other words, he couldn’t stand the fellow.

After three long years, Fred How and I parted company. I still have all my reports. This was his final salvo: ‘I cannot pretend to be sorry that this is my last half as his tutor… I hope that a change will be as good for him as for me.’

And it was. Night and day. A revelation, in fact. I approached a young man called Jeremy Nichols to be my tutor in the senior school and I remember how pleased I was that he agreed to take me on, given my abysmal academic record and, well, jaunty incompetence.

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