124 he supported and donated generously to environmental and wildlife causes all his adult life. He ran a History and a Theatre Society. The first boasted a cast as rich as SABS, and the ensuing dinner parties allowed students enviable access to the distinguished guest speakers. One of the Theatre Society’s highlights was a visit, in full costume, to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Mike alone marshalling a coachload of less-thanobeisant Sixth Formers. He inaugurated the visit to Kentwell where the whole of Year 7 donned Tudor garb and experienced life as sixteenth century peasants. His History of Brentwood School was not to be the usual catalogue of praise or a teleological tale leading inexorably to the best of all possible worlds in its current incarnation. Instead, it would be a rigorous series of essays looking in a critical yet balanced way at each of the School’s epochs. Outside of the classroom, Mike was also wonderful company. Anyone fortunate enough to know him could not help but admire and learn from his deep, authoritative learning, especially in the fields of History and Politics, and the scrutiny and care which informed his judgments. I found it strange that Mike downplayed the importance of a sense of humour as he certainly possessed one, and in spades. Thanks to his beloved Victorian novels, he boasted a wide vocabulary and would intersperse his stories and expositions with juicy turns of phrase and anachronisms. Before I met Mike, I never realised a piece of cake could be ‘exiguous’. Mike loved to tell of the parents’ evening where a parent had to feign illness and run off to explain his paroxysms of laughter. He later confessed he couldn’t control himself because of Mike’s similarity to KennethWilliams. The resemblance is debatable, but Mike certainly shared Mr Williams’ talent as a raconteur. He also had an unselfconscious sense of fun. His spritely but chaotically arrhythmic dancing at the Sixth Form Ball is the stuff of legend, and his turn as the stern and stentorian Victorian headmaster was a masterpiece of self-irony. It was also strange that one of Mike’s favourite poems was Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, whose protagonist worries constantly about fitting in with social norms. Mike was rather the genuine loveable
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