Mr F

I have used this 1961 school photo before, but this time the focus is on our English teacher and form master. My school friend and I were talking about Mr F recently and out of curiosity I began to search for him on Ancestry.
 
Mr F was born in 1900. In 1918, aged 17 or 18, he joined the RAF as a cadet pilot. I don’t know how much flying he did or how much action he saw before the war ended. In 1941 he went to war a second time in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, initially as a trainer and later as a Pilot Officer. Again I don’t know how much action he saw, but it was surely courageous to return to war after what he had experienced the first time round.
 
Mr F didn’t generally talk about either of the wars, but I remember he once told us that the young men, boys really, who joined the air force in the first world war were pretty sure they wouldn’t be coming back; the death rate among pilots was so high. So they didn’t really have any plans for life after the war.
 
Mr F survived. He went to university, got a degree and became a teacher. As a young man he seems to have been drawn to creative, imaginative new models of school education. In the 1930s he taught at Sawston Village College in Cambridgeshire, the first community college of its kind in England. Village colleges were designed to be be ‘the community centre of the neighbourhood… not only the training ground for the art of living, but the place in which life is lived’. By 1941 he was headmaster of Lady Manners School in Bakewell, a foundation school with a proud tradition dating back to 1636.
 
There are many gaps in the story and I don’t know what brought Mr F to the fairly ordinary country grammar school where we knew him. By that time he was approaching retirement, a gentle, honourable man who loved Shakespeare. I’m sorry now that we laughed when he became teary reading poetry. Teachers are people too.