PETER SMITH (Head Master 1985 - 2003)

Si monumentum requiris circumspice’ – what was set in stone for Wren can be written of Peter. The Bradfield campus still testifies to his mighty contribution as Head Master.

In Peter’s Chronicle ‘Valete’, Antony Collieu pointed to three girls’ Houses, Palmer, Armstrong, and Stevens, ‘built to a market-leading standard’, and to Faulkner’s which had ‘proved to be an attractive option to modern parents’. The last was an expensive strategic investment but is now credited both with reversing locally the sector-wide decline in Year 9 boarders, which then threatened Bradfield’s future as a boarding school, and with creating a USP that now distinguishes the College in the over-crowded boarding school world of the Home Counties.

In parallel, there was the investment in sports facilities: the Sports Complex and Swimming Pool; a new football pitch on Rectory; a golf course and tennis centre. Enhancement of the academic facilities came in the creation of the Garrett Library and development of an IT Centre, federated computing facilities also received steady investment in the latter half of Peter’s time.

Perhaps more peripheral to Bradfield’s core purposes; a new Medical Centre was created in Bridge House; staff accommodation was increased by the building of Tanners’ Mews and a new garden was made below Terrace representing just one part of the careful work done to enhance the campus by extensive landscaping.

Arguably, it is not too much of a stretch to add to this catalogue at least some of the improvements effected by the Bradfield Foundation. Peter was instrumental in its inception as part of his general project to make the College less conservative when funding capital projects. He was the Head Master who first took advantage of borrowing to invest in growth, and steady success in achieving a 12.5% budget surplus necessary to manage the debt, was due in no small part to Peter’s astute business acumen. This was enhanced early in his headship by a short period at INSEAD, the European Business School. Servicing the investment loan not only reflected a mind attuned to good business; human skills were also evident and Collieu notes Peter’s ‘sympathetic understanding’ of families when they first visited the College. He believes it ‘led many who at first sight might not have felt suited to a boarding school environment to enter the College and have a successful outcome of their time at Bradfield’.

The monuments in which Peter took most delight, however, were the human ones he left behind. He was proud of the quality of the staff he appointed over the years: Collieu recalls he had ‘almost always been able to spot the candidate most suitable for the job’, maybe the significance of Peter’s recollection that he was not at first persuaded of the merits of this author is for others to judge.

Coeducation developed under his stewardship. When he arrived, Anthony Quick’s eventual commitment to a handful of Sixth Form day girls evolved quickly to become a policy rapidly developing a programme to facilitate girls’ boarding and, by the time Peter retired, Bradfield could boast a Senior school where the eighty girls accommodated were not merely a sizeable constituency but a highly influential one, too. Importantly, the girls did not replace boys as they did in many schools deciding on coeducation at the time and their presence made Bradfield a school which could afford to expand the A-level programme. Additionally, the girls enriched the creative arts, long thought a strength of Bradfield. There was more vibrancy in fine art, where girls raised the Commem Art Show to unexpected heights and their value was even more strongly evident in Music and Drama where they permitted new flexibility in programmes.

Women joined the teaching staff to support much that the new girls required and their impact on the Common Room was comparably far-reaching. The old SCR had enjoyed termly stag dinners in black tie and a wine cellar which was the envy of the local school circuit. Now it underwent a gentle revolution that speeded far-reaching change, not least in the tone of relations between staff and pupils. Nowhere was this more evident than in one scene from a publicity video which Peter commissioned, avant-garde in its day for all that the equipment to play such a thing is now quite obsolete. During the recording, Anne Schlee discussed a task with one of her students in the English department: it is evident that the work was

not very good but the deliberate affirmation which tempers the teacher’s suggestions for its correction reflected a new tone, for Peter had found many reports ‘querulous affairs’ when he arrived from Rugby School.

Peter’s final strategic decision was to extend coeducation to the Junior school and, whilst it might now seem strange that the plan was thought sufficiently contentious for a green light to be delayed by Council when first proposed, his commitment to the project meant that his successor, Peter Roberts, was faced only with the mapping and achieving of plans necessary to realise the change: he did not find himself delayed by preparatory politics. The two Peters could not have been less alike in many, many ways, but Roberts not only wrote of his predecessor as ‘an excellent and necessary moderniser’ but as someone ‘for whom I had great respect’.

Peter’s taste for modernisation was apparent in every one of his widely acclaimed Commem speeches which gently mocked the plodding education policies of governments – both Conservative and Labour. It was equally evident in his commitment to an international Bradfield which he pressed as purposefully as he strove to make an authentic coeducational community. There were few pupils from overseas when he arrived at the College, except for a cadre from Thailand encouraged by the Chaplain’s Thai wife. By 2000, Council had adopted a strategic target of recruiting 15% of the pupil body from abroad and almost thirty countries were represented on the school roll. Peter’s disappointment that, in today’s UK, it does not make any sense to advocate an understanding of students from Continental Europe as part of the ‘home market’ became palpable in recent years and is indicative of the red carpet he had felt determined to roll out beyond the British coast. His belief in the integration of communities previously distant from each other was equally apparent in his efforts to use the College’s improved facilities to enhance sporting opportunities within the local community and implicit in the strong support he gave to the Friends of Bradfield.

Through-and-through a family man, Peter and Diana made Crossways a real home for their daughters, Helen and Lizzie, despite the challenges present in living with several school offices at one end of the house. They were, to an extent, used to sharing for, when Housemaster of School Field at Rugby, they had been accustomed to boys coming and going through the front door of the private side during the evenings, and popping into the kitchen en route for their studies. Lizzie was born just as they moved into School Field, two weeks before term began, and Diana remembers a very busy and rewarding life as the wife of a young Housemaster: laughter accompanies her recollection of boys’ fascination as she looked for some privacy to feed her newborn daughter. She remembers, too, the stress that can come with running a House: in the first term a boy who was very seriously ill almost died and, in the second, an outbreak of Russian Flu quickly overwhelmed the sanatorium, so much of the house became a nursing home with meals ferried to boys’ rooms on trays from the in-house kitchen.

Much that formed Peter professionally can be found in such experiences and in younger years. He won a scholarship to Magdalen College School from Headington CP School and went on to read History at Lincoln College, Oxford. At MCS, he was not only Head of School but also played first team rugby and hockey and captained cricket. Later, as Captain of Oxfordshire CC, he led his team to the Minor Counties Championship and his strong pedigree as a sportsman is amply illustrated by the scrapbooks Diana showed me on a recent visit to May Cottage.

His understanding of what makes for success undoubtedly developed on the sports field: he believed that a team, even a group of schoolteachers, does best when individuals are empowered to participate responsibly in a defined strategy. Subsequently, his capacity to meld people with diverse opinions made him an outstanding Chairman of the governing bodies at St Neots and The Abbey School, where he drew on experience in school governance that began very early in his career at the Crescent School in Rugby and ended, after his retirement, at Whitchurch Primary School. Moulsford also featured in the portfolio, but his work with United Learning, previously the Church Schools Trust, was possibly his most demanding time, for the successful merger of three girls’ schools in Kent required him to spend a lot of time in the county and the eighteen months unifying the schools and persuading them to admit boys now bears evident fruit.

Almost immediately after he arrived at Bradfield, he showed his strategic intelligence with the inception of a Senior Management Team, then a novelty in schools of the type. It involved creating a new post of Director of Studies to complete a top managerial tier of Head Master, Bursar and Second Master. The intention was to accelerate decision making, previously bogged down in various committee discussions where there was difficulty finding consensus. In similar vein, he appointed a Head of Games to take on much that had previously been the responsibility of a conservative Games Committee. This decision facilitated a more strategic approach to building Bradfield’s strengths as a major football school and the formula was repeated when he appointed Roger Wall to do for hockey what Steve Long had done first for football. Thus, by the end of Peter’s time, these sports had eclipsed cricket as Bradfield’s most important games. Consequently, when in his last year, Bradfield reached the ISFA Cup Final for the first time in College history, the loss to St Bede’s, Manchester was a disappointment; however, the sustained support given the team by the huge crowd testified to a community, then as now, filled with determination and zeal in commitment to its purposes.

Peter’s eighteen years and a term at Bradfield were longer than any previous Head, except Gray, and followed seventeen at Rugby where he was Head of History and then Housemaster of School Field. A man of broad personal interests who had a life beyond the College, he read very widely, loved music and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His house at Rugby had been Rupert Brooke’s home as a boy, when his father was its housemaster, and, with Diana, Peter set up the Rupert Brooke Society that took small groups to plays, concerts and even the ballet; Diana recalls her concern that rugby players might not enjoy Swan Lake fading as the youngsters fell in love with Odette. Such tales remind us Peter was always an advocate for liberal education.

Personally liberal, too, his charming, easy manner was never boastful and in fact tempered by a degree of shyness. It is instructive for our understanding of the man to remember that, in his later years, rather than celebrate his undeniable professional successes he would choose to talk of good friends and, above all, of his family, that now includes the four grandchildren, of whom he was immensely proud.

SERVICE OF THANKSGIVING

At 2pm on Tuesday 27 August 2024, the College bell rang out across Quad and into the Bradfield College Chapel where pews were filled for the start of a Service of Celebration and Thanksgiving for the life of former Head Master Peter Smith.

Bradfield College Chaplain Peter Hansell warmly welcomed all those gathered on behalf of the Warden, Council and Headmaster before introducing former College Chaplain Cathy Pynn (SCR 00-06) who led the service. Reflective of the esteem in which Peter was held and the wide-ranging nature of his career, the service was interspersed with speakers each talking about different aspects of his life. These included Stuart Williams (SCR)who spoke of Peter’s time as Headmaster at Bradfield and former Housemaster Chris Saunders who spoke of Peter as a friend.

In addition, there was a family musical tribute and memories shared by family members. Following the service the admiration for Peter by the community, friends and family was apparent as all gathered in the College’s main Dining Hall for refreshments. It was a very special occasion to remember a very special man who did so much for so many.

Diana, Peter’s wife was keen to ensure the widest possible access to this event and accordingly the service was livestreamed to those unable to attend in person. If you would be interested in watching the service recording. Watch the live stream of the Thanksgiving service HERE

PETER SMITH (Head Master 1985 – 2003)

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