As you enter Chapel, the stained-glass windows on the right hand side are called the Presidents’ Windows. They carry the names and crests of all six of Wellington’s Presidents. The College has existed as a school for 163 years and has had 15 Masters; isn’t it remarkable that in all that time it has only had 6 Presidents?

illustrations taken from C.J.Driver's own water-colour paintings. This sequence was included in the collection IN THE WATER-MARGINS, 1994, and some of the poems were in SO FAR, Selected Poems, 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 What a mixmatch. The more so because the pictures in and around the hallway include examples of old stone engravings and stone age technology on Hanglip Farm by the earliest peoples on this land. The imagination boggles, if you so will.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, Head In the meantime, the obituaries proliferate, not always to good effect. The one I like best is that of fellow poet, translator and publisher Douglas Reid Skinner, mainly about Jonty as a word artist. It underscores that, in the final instance, it is Jonty’s poetry and other writings that stand for his life, as it (or any other artistic endeavour) should for us all – for everyone to discover, read, listen to, translate and share. I once tried to explore this idea with Jonty when feeling him out on prospects for an independent association of rural writers, based in Colesberg (which has since begun to come to pass). I could sense that he was hesitant, wondering whether this vision could work. There was a practical edge to his love for poetry and other forms of writing, as well as his career, as is evident in the tributes from the educational institutions he served in various capacities in many parts of the world. (If you google his name, something like 480 000 internet entries will pop up in 0.37 seconds – and that’s disregarding AI, which I suspect he must have abhorred). Some of these obits are inaccurate and some seem opinionated, manipulative and arrogant … but be that as it may …

What strikes me most about Jonty’s death – like those of other friends and acquaintances in recent years — is how lives lived in so many different times and so many different places can be compressed and imagined into a single instance of grief and celebration, shared among family, friends and colleagues, both locally and abroad. His sister Dorothy, partner of Nobel Prize-winning novelist JM Coetzee, was another exile, in her case in Australia where she and Coetzee lived, and she became Professor of English at Adelaide having relinquished her chair at UCT. The Friends of St Peter’s, Newenden try to introduce new and different fund raising events. They have invited CJ (Jonty) Driver to read extracts from his poetry and tell of his life at An Evening with Jonty Driver in St Peter’s on Friday, May 6 at 7:30pm.

Jonty is survived by his wife Ann, his children Dominic, Dax and Tamlyn, and his grandchildren. My thoughts are with them and his many loved ones at this time. He was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, United States of America, in the fall of 2009, and a fellow at the Hawthornden Writers" Retreat in March/April 2011. Another commented, “You don’t owe any explanation to anyone but thanks for clarifying. You are the best.” He is married with three children and eight grandchildren, and he and his wife live in East Sussex. At the end of 2016 he had major cardiac surgery to replace his aortic valve, bypass a cardiac Jonty restructured Common Room by developing a Senior Management Team; he reintroduced the notion of compulsory Chapel attendance; he espoused the use of IT; he set out to make the school more international; he aligned Wellington with the Round Square network of schools; he established the democratic election of prefects and introduced leadership training for staff and pupils; he developed a sense of corporate Identity; he founded the WCA which saw a much greater involvement of parents in the day to day life of College; he brought in the Basic Courtesies as a blueprint for well-mannered behaviour, and he began the process, by transforming the Quads, of making Wellington more beautiful.