Learning the ropes

My school owned a boat.  And not some dinghy or fibreglass pleasure craft either:  Jolie Brise — the name was always, of course, pronounced ‘Jolly Breeze’ — is one of the best-known tall ships in the world, three times winner of the Fastnet race, a pilot cutter so famous that she has a pub named after her. (A Wetherspoons, admittedly, but that counts.) It was only after I left that I realised that this was unusual: especially for a former direct grant grammar school in Wiltshire, about as far away from the sea as you can get in England.

There were two sorts of master at Dauntsey’s in the 1980s: the younger ones, who had postgraduate diplomas and pedagogical theories and career paths, who might actually describe themselves as teachers; and proper schoolmasters, men who had fallen into teaching at some point in the 1950s or 1960s (as in the Molesworth cartoon of Mr Gabbitas and Mr Thring trapping a young graduate and leading him into captivity) and were still there 30 years later. Mr Parish was one such teacher. He had originally intended to join the Royal Navy but, after being invalided out of the service, ended up as my school’s head of maths.

Some of the more insightful pupils perceived that he still felt the call of the ocean — perhaps because trigonometry lessons were almost entirely devoted to navigation on the high seas — and argued, rightly, that it was deeply unfair to do navigation exercises but never actually go to sea. Whether this was a genuine grievance or a ruse to avoid trig (most probably both), Mr Parish allowed (or encouraged) them to place an advert in the sailing press seeking the owner of an ‘embarrassingly large yacht’ who might be prepared to let a bunch of schoolchildren sail her in return for working on the boat over the winter.