130 What a couple of years...There has been such upheaval and change to our normal working patterns, people being sent home from work, a recent seismic change in the relationship the UK has with Europe, the election of a new US President. 20202021 at the end of Mike’s 47 years at Brentwood (he was teaching just a day or two before he died) sound strangely like the year Mike started teaching at Brentwood,1973, fresh out of Worcester College, Oxford as a newly qualified History teacher. To put that into context, the ColdWar and VietnamWar still raged and the UK was in its first years of decimal currency and EEC membership, Edward Heath was Prime Minister and there was the three-day week. Despite being the School’s Head of Politics for many years, Mike was one of the most straightforward, decent and unpolitical of people. He suggested that one of his greatest sources of relief was to have twice failed to be elected, unlike cousins on both the Willis and Vanstone sides of his family, once by a mere 24 votes, when seeking to be a Brentwood Councillor. That independence from an ideological straitjacket is part of the reason why he was able (and so willing and daring) to expose Brentwood students to contentious issues, from inviting controversial figures to the Sixth Form Academic Society (SABS) and the Historical Society, and from speaking out on points of principle, in his inimitable way, teaching his pupils and colleagues by example that it is fine to express and hold an unpopular or unfashionable view, as long as it is sincere. During his time overseeing the Sixth Form Academic Society he secured visits, to name but a few, from Cabinet Ministers, Peers of the Realm, former hostage, TerryWaite, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, a previously jailed Government Chief Economic Adviser, bizarre art critics, Strictly Come Dancing competitors and Big Brother Housemates. Throughout his near half-century of teaching, Mike remained innovative and intellectually curious, always ready to challenge received wisdom or faulty logic. Generations of pupils, upon seeing his pained facial expression, feared they had the wrong answer, only for him to nod in grudging acceptance of their “Mike leaves behind a void not easily filled”
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