My Brother & I

Product Information

Among the heroes of the struggle to defeat apartheid, many stood tall but none perhaps physically taller than CJ Driver, known to many as Jonty. The positions he held in those schools were: English teacher, then Housemaster of the International Sixth Form Centre; Director of Sixth Form Studies; Principal; Headmaster; and When Nelson died in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar, it was decided that a square should be created in his memory in London with a suitable centrepiece monument. Trafalgar Square was duly created in 1835 and Nelson’s Column – one of London’s most iconic tourist attractions, was completed in 1843. His father, an Anglican priest as had been his grandfather before him, nurtured in him a strong sense of justice, a passion for the development of young minds, hearts, and bodies. Even at sixty Jonty was still to be found “flailing”, as his distinct running style was called, around a school playing field. He also had deep literary interests which he shared with his sister Dorothy, professor of English successively at UCT and Adelaide University, and her husband, the Nobel Literature Laureate, JM Coetzee. It was really through this sequence of poems that I came to know Jonty well. We had met through a shared love of haiku. He had been perhaps over-generous in writing about my own attempts at the genre. He never of course lost the teacher’s desire to encourage nor the ability to do so. But when I read Requiemfor the first time I saw the chance to do something creative with it. Jonty had explained that Brahms’ German Requiem,a much more “secular” requiem than the liturgical texts usually set, had been the inspiration for him. It seemed obvious to me to wrap music around the poetry. So I asked the cellist Guy Johnston, then a recent winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year, to weave a Bach cello suite “around” Jonty’s poetry. It was one of those happenstances in response to which you could hear a pin drop, as an entranced congregation of hundreds in Westminster Abbey oneSunday eveningpaid rapt attention to both music and text, and found in them a depth of spiritual encounter that was as moving for them as for the author and Ann, his wife of almost fifty years to whom he was so devoted. When, later, I suggested that Jonty himself be asked to read lines of Shakespeare at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Nelson Mandela in the Abbey, he was both thrilled, honoured, and humbled.

After a year's teaching at Sevenoaks School, he went to Trinity College, Oxford, to read for an M.Phil, and afterwards taught again at Sevenoaks School and then at Matthew Humberstone The Man with the Suitcase: The Life, Execution and Rehabilitation of John Harris, Liberal Terrorist. Cape Town: Crane River. 2015. ISBN 9780620668521. Some Schools. John Catt Educational. 30 November 2016. ISBN 9781909717978. (About the five schools at which Driver worked) Earlier this year, Jonty published a short (15,000 words) memoir called ROBERT BIRLEY, MAINLY IN SOUTH AFRICA (No. 3 in the Booklet Series). Birley was Hedmaster of Charterhouse and, later, Headand recently retired from its Advisory Council. He was a Bogliasco Fellow in 2007, a Fellow at the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire, USA, in the Fall of 2009, and a Fellow at the Hawthornden

in STANZAS, No 11. Two poems appeared in the magazine Theology, May 2018, No 121 No 3: "In a French Garden" and "The hymn of the Christian atheist". CJ Driver will be missed by so many for a rare combination of straight talking, deep learning, and transforming friendship. Through it all, he offered a distinctive and rare example of the very best sort of leadership, the kind you cannot learn from books but is engraved in flesh. His passing surely prompts us to give great thanks for this and to hope for political and educational leaders who also possess such courage, insight, and grace.Amen, old friend.It used to be said that all of us think we know about education because we have all been to school; Some Schools, very attractively produced (a handful of misprints) by John Catt Educational, should enthral any reader for that reason; it will convey to anyone what teaching is really like with its difficulties and its joys. The strongest impression I had from it is that any parents reading it would be truly delighted to have someone with the qualities of Jonty Driver overseeing the education of their children. Driver published five novels: Elegy for a Revolutionary (1969), Send War In Our Time, O Lord (1970), Death of Fathers (1972), A Messiah of the Last Days (1974), and Shades of Darkness (2004). One user reassured him, saying, “Sir you are a legend and please don’t pay attention to these online trolls.”

Although Driver spent several decades living abroad in England, his early life in South Africa always remained a key focus in his writing and he was an active participant and supportive presence in the local literary community. He will live on in his written works and the memories of family and friends. Collections at the end of these recitals have been given to the Hantam Community Education Project in the Karoo. In 2017, Jonty contributed a foreword to the history by Anne Hill of the first 25 Jonty’s personal recipe for success has been ‘motivation and inspiration, the germs of which he has introduced in epidemic proportions to the School. We have all been shaken and stirred and are the better for it.” Master of Eton and, after his retirement, he went to the University of the Witwatersrand as Visiting Professor of Education. He had, between his stints at Charterhouse & Eton, been i/c the

at some of these schools. In 2000 he retired from Wellington College, having served 11 years as headmaster. In 2007 he was appointed as an honorary Senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Jonty Driver in the 1960s. Photo: www.jontydriver.co.uk Today, many years after my retirement from Umso, I am still greeted as ‘My Prince’, ‘My Teacher’, ‘Sir’, ‘Meneer Prince’ , ‘Meneer Teacher’, even sometimes ‘Meneer Prince My Teacher Sir’, when I appear or reappear in the village. (Many who do so ever hopeful that their school education could somehow be transformed into sustainable employment … )

To the last years at Wellington belonged perhaps one of his finest works, Requiem, a beautiful sequence of poems in which some of his most consistent themes, memory and exile, the power of family and the landscape among them, found consummate expression.available from Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, tel: 01394 610600 [email protected]