Shrewsbury and Oxford

At Shrewsbury Chenevix-Trench's philosophy was that he preferred that "the majority of boys kept the rules most of the time rather than one which stifled individual vitality". His lessons with the younger years also had a system of punishments and bribes: excellent work might receive a shilling or half crown reward at his own expense, while a major mistake in written work would be marked by a picture of a crab – more than three crab images would result in the boy receiving corporal punishment in the privacy of Chenevix-Trench's study. With the older years he introduced textual criticism, philosophy and history to give greater insight into the classical texts than conventional teaching of the time allowed. He would also regularly tutor older boys individually – with alcoholic refreshments on hand – and occasionally permitted his proximity in age to encourage excess humour, as when he let slip to some of the sixth form that a visiting speaker, Reverend Hoskyns-Abrahall, had been known to Chenevix-Trench in his own schooldays as "Foreskin-rubberballs".^[19]

Chenevix-Trench also served as an officer in the school's Combined Cadet Force, as a coach for rowing crews, and as an organiser of "holiday camps for underprivileged children in Shrewsbury". On school ski trips to Switzerland he would make up for his lack of skill at the sport by instigating "ferocious snowball fights", and abusing his linguistic skills in talking to other skiers, "talking a kind of German to the French, which they then disliked, French to the Americans, which they didn't understand, and Urdu to the Swiss, who were more than puzzled." In September 1948, he was promoted to the position of house tutor of School House, a role he relished as he took a keen interest in assisting boys with their academic work – both by practical advice and by once again instituting a system of corporal punishment for specific numbers of errors – and also in indulging the "juvenile tomfoolery" of his teenage charges.^[20]

In 1950, Chenevix-Trench was persuaded to accept the position of tutor for Classical Honour Moderations back at Christ Church. He took up the position in October 1951, but, despite the importance of the post, and the persuasive arguments that only at Oxford could his academic talents truly shine, he found the undergraduates lacking in enthusiasm, and the life of an Oxford tutor to be more detached from his students than he preferred. In February 1952, George Turner, the headmaster of Charterhouse, who was about to retire, wrote to Chenevix-Trench insisting he apply for the job, and Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury and chairman of the Charterhouse governors, visited him in person to urge him to do so. Soon considered the favourite, despite pressure from Christ Church not to leave, Chenevix-Trench caused chaos by first submitting his candidacy, then withdrawing it after Tom Taylor, housemaster of School House back at Shrewsbury, died suddenly in the post and he was offered the job. Loyalty to his old school and house won out over both the remarkable opportunity of being headmaster of a major public school at age 32 and his academic responsibility at Christ Church, and Chenevix-Trench accepted the promotion at Shrewsbury, despite great distress at the conflict of loyalties. From Christ Church, Roy Harrod wrote that "There is something about the way this has been done that shocks me. I have a terribly strong sense that it is wrong".^[21] At Shrewsbury there was delight at his taking the job, and a "pandaemonium of excited and happy chattering" among the boys of School House when they were told. Chenevix-Trench took up his new post in September.^[21]

In November 1952, Chenevix-Trench spoke with Michael Hoban in opposition to a motion at the school Debating Society, proposed by the old boys and then Oxford undergraduates Michael Heseltine and Julian Critchley, that "This House Deplores the Public School System". Both the proposers poked fun at Chenevix-Trench's proclivity towards corporal punishment, and he defended the practice by suggesting that the alternatives had their own problems. The motion was carried by 105 votes to 95, and the tabloid newspapers made a great story from the outcome.^[22] Chenevix-Trench did not change his approach, nor did he object to the continuation of the tradition of fagging, nor that of older boys having the right to use corporal punishment on younger boys. In addition to his added organisational responsibilities as housemaster, he also continued both his close academic tutoring and carefree informality with the boys of School House. On 15 August 1953, he married Elizabeth Spicer, a primary school teacher whose brother he had known at Oxford. She took over some of the organisational work in School House, resulting in reports from the boys of great improvements in the quality of the food. Elizabeth gave birth to twin daughters, Laura and Jo, in October 1955. The couple's two sons, Richard and Jonathan, were born after he left Shrewsbury.^[23]

Bradfield College

In January 1955, Chenevix-Trench agreed to be interviewed for the position of headmaster at Bradfield College, who were eager to find a younger replacement for John Hills, and were impressed by Chenevix-Trench's academic credentials. He got the job and left Shrewsbury with great regret. At Bradfield he continued his insistence on informality, regularly associating with the boys in their leisure time to relate his many anecdotes, and learning every boy's Christian name. He also abolished an ancient tradition whereby the entry of the headmaster to the most revered event (a play in ancient Greek performed once every three years) was heralded with a trumpet fanfare. He was successful in re-establishing close links with prep schools, which were vital for maintaining a flow of academically able boys to join the school and increase its numbers. He also charmed parents, of both existing and prospective pupils, lavishing great attention on them. As a disciplinarian he could be forgiving and open-minded: Richard Henriques was sent to him by the school chaplain to be punished for asking a controversial question about religion, but Chenevix-Trench dismissed the problem.^[24]

He relaxed some uniform rules, but maintained rules that he felt reinforced school spirit, such as boys being required to attend inter-school sports fixtures as spectators. As at Shrewsbury, he did not abolish fagging or the rights of older boys to beat younger boys, but at Bradfield he reduced both. Even after his minor reforms, new boys were still caned by prefects for "talking after lights out", "misbehaviour in the dining hall", "insolence to a prefect", and similar transgressions. The prefects themselves sometimes fell victim to Chenevix-Trench's harsher rules, though: he expelled the Head of School (head boy) for smoking on school transport after an official sports fixture. Other aspects of his approach were more controversial, even for the times. Chenevix-Trench's biographer, Mark Peel, stated that "although Tony's efforts to rid the school of homosexuality by engaging in a massive beating spree were seen by many as discrimination towards the non-robust boys, only the minority appears to have been alienated".^[25] His mixture of corporal punishment with close friendship continued, with some recipients of the cane offered an alcoholic drink immediately afterwards.^[25]

In later years, Chenevix-Trench liked to tell how a pet mouse called Peter had a lucky escape when its diminutive owner, already bent over a chair in his study to be caned, suddenly realised that Peter – the cause of the impending punishment – was still in his back pocket, and politely asked Chenevix-Trench to hold the mouse until the caning was over. Finding the situation uproariously funny, he did not administer the punishment.^[26] He also threw himself into the task of fighting for his teaching staff, succeeding in increasing both pay and rights for housemasters, and recruited young graduates constantly to modernise the range of teachers. Despite his own enthusiasm for boxing, when one new recruit was put in charge of gym and expressed his opposition to the sport, key to the school at the time, Chenevix-Trench agreed with his arguments (which were backed by the school medical officer) and boxing was abolished in July 1963. Although he actively but respectfully involved himself in his housemasters' running of their houses, Bradfield also saw the first signs of real problems caused by his administrative or communicative carelessness: heads of departments could find new staff appointed under them without being informed, much less consulted; staff accommodation arrangements were sometimes random; and he found the important consideration of the school timetable arrangements to be completely outside his sense of priorities.^[26]

Chenevix-Trench continued to teach while headmaster, and boys described his lessons as exhilarating.^[27] That, along with his determination to encourage his staff to follow his example, succeeded in substantially raising academic standards at Bradfield from their already relatively high level. Other triumphs included his use of his excellent rapport with the School Council to persuade them to increase scholarships for gifted but less pecunious boys, increase the numbers of teachers to support a wider curriculum, and approve a new complex of science buildings in March 1956. This was followed in March 1960 by the launch of an appeal fund that ultimately paid for central heating, new kitchens, new study bedrooms for the boys (whose accommodation had been criticised in a March 1959 report Chenevix-Trench requested from the Ministry of Education), and a music hall and language laboratory. Exam results soared, as did the number of boys gaining university places.

Chenevix-Trench's public profile saw a corresponding rise; in 1958 he appeared on the BBC television programme The Brains Trust as a panellist, broadcast on television during the peak time Sunday afternoon slot and then rebroadcast on Home Service radio the following day.^[28] Anthony Sampson, describing the headmasters of leading public schools in the original edition of the Anatomy of Britain in 1962, called Chenevix-Trench a "heroic and unusual man". He was the only headmaster appointed to the Committee on Higher Education which produced the Robbins Report^[29] that led to significant British university expansion in the decade and later. He signed the Marlow Declaration on society and equality, and declined headmasterships at a host of top schools including Shrewsbury. On 4 March 1963, the BBC announced that he would be the new headmaster of Eton.^[30]

Eton College

Chenevix-Trench himself told a friend "Eton's too big for me, I'm not the right man. I like to be involved individually with boys." His older brother said he should not take the job. From the outset, Chenevix-Trench did not get along easily with Harold Caccia, who held the uniquely influential position of provost at the school, and was concerned by Chenevix-Trench's administrative failings. Not being an old Etonian himself, he also struggled to find the proper way to deal with the aristocratic rank of many of the parents, and even felt intellectually eclipsed by some of the teachers, in contrast to Bradfield. The housemasters at Eton also had vastly more power and independence than at Bradfield, and Chenevix-Trench's interference with how they dealt with boys from their own houses now caused anger rather than just annoyance, as did his continuing blunders in promising the same promotion to more than one person. He ended up describing the housemasters as like medieval barons with swords half-drawn, and never mastered the subtleties of dealing with them effectively.^[31]

Chenevix-Trench's time at Eton, in the midst of the 1960s, was further confused by the sense of change sweeping through the country. The Daily Express said that Eton "may well have elected a man who will help to effect a quiet, but most necessary revolution" at the school.^[32] The Eton Chronicle, authored mostly by pupils, was more blunt about the expected upheavals of the times, writing about the new headmaster: "The whole problem of privilege, and the question of integration with the state system of education will inevitably become a political issue arousing vehemence and bigotry".^[33] In the final term of 1965, Chenevix-Trench was interviewed in the same publication, and publicly expressed a preference for entry solely by competitive examination rather than by birth and background, and the same year he was still assuring pupils that school uniform was to be abolished entirely. The Chronicle was again a factor in the debate over abolishing boxing; David Jessel and William Waldegrave wrote a piece against it in February 1964,^[9] and the Daily Express featured it on its front page.^[34] Not all these demands seemed important or realistic to following generations, who also wondered how significant it was whether "to listen to high thoughts and to be at peace in school for ten minutes every day", in chapel, should be optional or not.^[35] The BBC reported in 1967 that Chenevix-Trench had "considerably softened" the rigorous rules on chapel attendance.^[36] Nevertheless, Private Eye duly ran an article in 1969 (by Paul Foot) arguing that Chenevix-Trench had clearly lost his way, since neither school uniform, nor boxing, nor compulsory Chapel, had been entirely abolished.^[37][38]

The Private Eye article also reported on Chenevix-Trench's approach to corporal punishment.^[37] It had always been traditional and frequent at Eton. Until he became headmaster, disobedient students could be publicly birched by the headmaster or Lower Master (deputy head) on their bare buttocks as punishment for serious offences. In addition, senior students at the school were permitted to cane other boys across the seat of the trousers, and this was routine.^[39] The Council at Bradfield, always hugely supportive of Chenevix-Trench, had never considered his use of corporal punishment a problem. But at Eton, the modern era of adolescent challenges to authority, combined with the existing tradition of powerful housemasters expecting to make their own decisions, quickly led to problems. In June 1965, Chenevix-Trench failed to prevent a debate proposed by William Waldegrave, then president of the powerful self-selected pupil society known as Pop, on the abolition of corporal punishment, and the motion was only narrowly defeated. Chenevix-Trench caned sixth-formers for trivial offences against the urgings of the Captain of the School (head boy); he caned one editor of the Eton Chronicle and backed down after threatening to cane another; and on a later occasion he agreed with the Captain of the School and his housemaster to punish an offender in a formally witnessed ceremony, but then gave a private caning instead without discussing it with them. The long history at Eton of birchings being public, and most canings being widely witnessed, meant that Chenevix-Trench's preference for private beatings was viewed with suspicion. In 1966, the Provost made him promise that he would no longer issue beatings in private. He did not keep the promise, thus storing up yet more distrust.^[40] To replace headmaster's birching, he introduced private caning, also administered to the bare posterior of the boy, who was required to lower his trousers and underpants and bend over in his office. A few boys resented this and felt that a caning over the trousers, as was standard practice at nearly all other schools by this time, would have sufficed.^[41]

Despite being so obviously out of his depth, he made some minor and some major reforms. He ended the uniform requirement of smaller boys being marked out by having to wear the much shorter "bumfreezer" Eton Suit, but this was a tiny consolation for the crushing of his cherished goal of ending school uniform at Eton altogether.^[42][9] His reforms of the academic curriculum were colossal, moving Eton from being dominated by classics^[9] and catering almost exclusively for boys who had been privately and expensively educated in that field, to a vastly broader curriculum including the establishment of an English department for the first time, as well as introducing proper science teaching. In typical Chenevix-Trench style, these changes were achieved through a lengthy process of vacillation, U-turns, and another half-lie to the provost – massive expenditure was required to fund the new teachers, and even the Classics Department suffering worse than decimation (which contributed to the opposition to Chenevix-Trench) did not make up for it financially. But the consequence was that the school achieved a one-fifth increase in university awards, a "spectacular" increase in O-level and A-level grades, and improved university entrance results.^[42]

The tumult of the era continued to faze Chenevix-Trench's tenuous hold on Eton; he adopted a drugs policy that saw him trudging up and down the High Street looking for offenders, and at the same time he declined to expel those caught indulging.^[9] With his antipathy toward school uniform, the fashions of longer hair and particular styles of boots did not bother him at all; some of Eton's housemasters were appalled by this lack of diligence. Boys who ran away were rewarded with long talks with the headmaster seeking to find the cause of their problems; traditionalists did not approve, wanting them beaten or expelled or both. Chenevix-Trench had always been shocked by the proportion of boys then at Eton who had absolutely no interest in doing any work, and of whom some had the determination to continue to refuse even when threatened. If he had mastered his relations with housemasters, and understood how to run the school by delegation as it had always been run, this would have been no problem; but for a headmaster that already struggled even with the basics, it was too much.^[43]

Chenevix-Trench's health, both physical and mental, also began to suffer, with the return of the malaria he had caught during the war, and flashbacks and nightmares of his wartime experiences. He took tranquilizers to help him with his worsening nerves when carrying out public speaking engagements, and resorted to heavy drinking to drown his other sorrows. The final straw came after a dispute over the future of one of the housemasters, Michael Neal. Neal was a popular and effective teacher but failed to keep proper control over his house. After a major incident in summer 1968, Chenevix-Trench declined to dismiss him, instead offering to resign himself. The offer was rejected, but Neal's house continued to be problematic, and Chenevix-Trench eventually had to fire him on the pretext of a much less serious incident several months later. He handled it badly, leading to protests by the boys,^[9] and this combined with a growing awareness of the other problems led the Fellows to decide to ask him to leave. This was dealt with sensitively; Chenevix-Trench himself wrote to parents in July 1969 to inform them that he would be retiring a year later.^[44]

Fettes College

Chenevix-Trench's enforced departure from Eton made him very dubious about his capability to take on another post as headmaster, but in May 1970 he applied to be headmaster of Fettes College in Scotland, and began the job in August 1971. The break between jobs, punctuated by a brief time filling in as a teacher at the prep school Swanbourne House and once again lecturing on a Swan Hellenic tour of Greece, allowed him to recover from the illness and tiredness that had begun to overwhelm him at Eton. Fettes was a school much more amenable to Chenevix-Trench's style of headmastership, with only around 400 pupils, and he quickly resumed the approach he had used at Bradfield, insisting that "my study door is always open to those who want to see me", and making great efforts to please the prep schools and prospective parents and pupils – essential to increase enrolment to improve the parlous state of the school's finances.^[9] By January 1978, enrolment had reached 491 boys and 41 girls, in addition to the opening of an attached junior school for eighty boys aged 11 to 13. Chenevix-Trench declined to use the cane on female pupils, even though one girl demanded it – for herself – on grounds of gender equality.^[45]

Other reforms he instituted at Fettes included the abolition of personal fagging – part of the tough traditional system at the school where prefects held considerable power. Mark Peel wrote that "the sight of a petrified third former shaking with fear outside the prefects' room before being exposed to some lurid initiation ritual wasn't unknown". For Chenevix-Trench, modernisation began by relaxing ancient rules; boys were allowed greater access to the adjacent city of Edinburgh, sixth formers were allowed to visit pubs on Saturday evenings, and the dress code was made less restrictive. Some staff were less than happy at the dress code changes; Chenevix-Trench "would roll his eyes to the heavens in boredom if someone deigned to raise the matter at a housemasters meeting". Chenevix-Trench also came under considerable pressure from the teachers over pay; they were significantly underpaid at the time and the school could not afford to pay them (or him) any better. His continued tendency to make promises of appointments that he could not deliver also caused problems again.^[46]

Chenevix-Trench also continued his practice of administering corporal punishment in private; as the 1970s progressed, this was increasingly an anachronism when many schools were beginning to abandon caning. After complaints, its use in the school as a whole was discussed by the governors in December 1978, but their eventual conclusion was merely to require proper records to be kept, allow only the headmaster and housemasters to use corporal punishment, and to insist that it be specifically a last resort. By this time, despite having brought the school back from threatened bankruptcy and rejuvenated its fortunes entirely, Chenevix-Trench was once again starting to lose his grip on himself. His father had died in 1964, and his brothers Christopher and Richard in 1971 and 1977 respectively; he himself was increasingly a victim to fatigue, and also to intense regret at what he felt was his failure at Eton. He once again resorted to heavy drinking, trying unsuccessfully to conceal it from his wife. On numerous occasions he had to miss appointments due to drunkenness, and he also used corporal punishment on the wrong boy at least once.^[9] In February 1978, he was admitted to hospital suffering from a massive intestinal haemorrhage. He was soon well enough to leave hospital, but was pressured by the governors into announcing that he would retire in August 1979. He attended a series of events to mark his leaving, and in June 1979 he briefed his successor Cameron Cochrane on his hopes and plans for the school, telling his wife "I've handed my life's work over to Cochrane and I'm happy." Two days later he died during an emergency intestinal operation,^[47] aged sixty, before his term as headmaster had officially come to an end.^[48]