Sometimes they thought him unduly harsh, sometimes incomprehensibly lenient. He could be decisive, as he demonstrated towards the end of October, when he expelled two boys for stealing and roundly denounced the ‘deplorable lack of a sense of responsibility towards private property in the school’. Yet the staff, and Stump especially, no longer felt […]

V.F.O. Francis, Headmaster: “In second term, Mark Stump told Francis that the staff had lost confidence in him as Headmaster and were becoming concerned for their own reputations. He accused Francis of missing classes and failing to correct examination papers in time for reports to be issued when they were due. He said the spirit […]

Carey Grammar School. Mr Harold Steele, Headmaster: “School ended at 3.45 pm except for those boys undergoing detention, the normal form of punishment for misdemeanours, although H.G. Steele did not hesitate to cane for serious offences. Persistent laziness was an especially heinous schoolboy crime in his judgement and a severe caning the only cure.” “I […]

Michael Aikman, Headmaster: “When an article in The Age treated Haileybury’s traditional educational programme under the provocative (but misleading) heading, ‘Cane Makes Them Able’, Haileyburians were delighted by an unexpected flood of parental enquiries about school entry. It is true that Haileybury has not abandoned recourse to the cane as a deterrent disciplinary tool, and […]

Inclined to eccentricity, he was known to declare in terrible tones that ‘I’ll tear you limb from limb and splatter your brains across the room’, before banging his 36 inch ruler on the desk so that it sometimes broke. For students not easily intimidated, MacGregor kept a heavy leather tawse, providing an alternative punishment to […]

“In 1967 with I.M. MacGregor’s death Haileybury lost a prime mover in the Keysborough project, and an influential English teacher. His nickname of ‘Jock’ was hardly original, but fitted the broad Scottish accent, craggy appearance, and dry humour. An avaricious reader of English classics, he was especially fond of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

“The ordered march to Brighton was replaced by a trip to North Brighton Drill Hall when R. Nicholl and K.K. Garnock were the school’s only Senior Cadets: ‘We used to buy a packet of “My Darling” cigarettes and smoke them going to and from the Drill Hall’. They would have been sore had Dickinson known.” […]