The master Builder who made me

Michael Schützer-Weissmann was the greatest teacher I ever had. When I was 17, I got into trouble at Sherborne, my school in Dorset, after a friend and I each drank a bottle of whisky. I felt splendid, but my friend had to be stomach-pumped. For that the headmaster, Robert Macnaghten, caned me. It was amazing that he managed to hit me six times, because he was famously blind — and had once awarded a detention to a coat hung on a peg at the end of his classroom, mistaking it for a boy refusing to sit down.

Caning probably saved me from expulsion, but I was thoroughly fed up with Sherborne: neither a ‘blood’ at rugby nor good in lessons. That’s how ‘Schutz’, as we all called him, found me. The day he walked into my English class and we opened Paradise Lost, my school life changed, as it did for the generations of boys and girls he taught. ‘He combined the scholarship of a don with a disdain for… intellectual humbug,’ recalls Richard Hudson, a master at Shrewsbury where Schutz taught for many years after Sherborne. ‘An innate respect for his fellow men – I never heard him speak ill of anyone, was… allied to a Swiftian instinct for satire.’

Schutz’s Jewish family had fled Budapest for London before the Holocaust. He grew up in Blitz-ruined West Hampstead and attended St. Quintin’s, the grammar school where –- as he enjoyed telling people — Jihadi John was later a pupil. After Cambridge he converted to Catholicism.

Schutz was a great English master whose religion never tampered with his teaching, though it burnished our appreciation of Evelyn Waugh — and even T.S. Eliot and Milton. I found him fascinating, partly because at that age I needed an exotic spiritual antidote to the dull Anglican sermons I heard under the cannonballed flags of Sherborne Abbey.