My Brother & I

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He became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, US, in the fall of 2009, and a fellow at the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat in March and April 2011. He also served as one of the trustees of the Beit Trust for many years. But Victoria not only laid Wellington’s foundation stone. She returned two and a half years later to open the College formally when our first 76 pupils arrived – 47 of whom were Foundationers – on 29 th January 1859. An act which is commemorated on this stone at the entrance to Great School.

Although Driver spent several decades living abroad in England, his early life in South Africa always remained a key focus in his writing and he was an active participant and supportive presence in the local literary community. He will live on in his written works and the memories of family and friends. Master (a Chinese friend, a stranger to English terminology, once murmured, "Downhill all the way"). After a year's teaching at Sevenoaks School, he went to Trinity College, Oxford, to read for an M.Phil, and afterwards taught again at Sevenoaks School and then at Matthew Humberstone

Jonty Driver (pictured above, centre) was Headmaster of Berkhamsted School, arriving from Hong Kong in 1983, before leaving to take up headship at Wellington College, after only six years, in 1989. The translator and facilitator was a charismatic young teacher, Sizwe Dyasi, then a popular figure at the school and among the town’s young people in general. At the time, Jonty remarked: ‘That young man deserves a good future.” Whether or not this has come to pass is of course yet another story. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. STILL FURTHER, New Poems, 2000-2020, was published by the Uhlanga Press in South Africa and the UK in 2021. It is available from bookshops in South Africa, fromthe Africa Books Collective in the

These experiences bound us together. We repeated the Bach-Driver combination several times, Jonty reading Requiemhimself one Good Friday when it represented animaginative reworking of the middle hour of a traditional Three Hours’ Devotion. At the time, Mandela had retired in some triumph after serving a single term as president of the supposed ’new South Africa’ – which I found hugely ironic, seeing that, not too long before, at a stage-managed provincial and local farmers’ union meeting, ostensibly about farm labour, I was singled out as a farmer in league with ‘the devil’. But I digress … Driver then taught at schools in Britain and Hong Kong for several decades, later serving as headmasterJonty was due to leave in a few days, so I had to communicate urgently with Lindiwe Maliti, a member of the HOD team at Umso. This required a degree of rural agility in a context of bad phone lines and no cell phones, and then some logistical acrobatics from Lindiwe in the form of moving chairs and benches and rearranging classes so that a special assembly could be accommodated. His success in all his posts has been achieved by knowing what he wanted to accomplish linked with a clear awareness of the compromises that might be necessary to arrive at the desired goal. Helping this clarity of mind was a strong and persuasive personality which took others with him CJ Driver will be missed by so many for a rare combination of straight talking, deep learning, and transforming friendship. Through it all, he offered a distinctive and rare example of the very best sort of leadership, the kind you cannot learn from books but is engraved in flesh. His passing surely prompts us to give great thanks for this and to hope for political and educational leaders who also possess such courage, insight, and grace.Amen, old friend.

The cover of this is from a water-colour painting by Jonty and includes one previously unpublished poem. The fifth is A WINTER'S DAY AT WESTONBIRT & OTHER POEMS; all the illustrations This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located. Jonty also spoke – he was asked to read the following passage from the play ‘Julius Caesar’, taken from a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works which had circulated among prisoners on Robben Island, and which Mandela had signed on 16 December 1977: It goes without saying that Wellington College would not exist were it not for Arthur Wellesley, the Iron Duke, the first Duke of Wellington. Quite simply, it is equally correct to say that Wellington College would also not exist were it not for the Royal Family. When Arthur Wellesley died in September 1852, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were determined that there should be a national memorial to commemorate the Iron Duke. But what should it be? There were some precedents. 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,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. The schools are: Sevenoaks (1964-5, 1967-73), Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive School (1973-8), Island School, Hong Kong (1978-83), Berkhamsted School (1983-9), and Wellington College Despite his demanding career as a teacher, Jonty remained a prolific writer, publishing 10 books of poems (most recently Still Further: New Poems ), five poetry booklets (the most recent one, A Winter’s Day at Westonbirt ), five novels (four still in print from Faber), five books of biography and memoir, and a book of verse for children. The Man with the Suitcase, the life, execution and rehabilitation of John Harris, Liberal Terrorist, was published by the Crane River Press in 2015 and is available from the publisher or

In addition to his career in education, Jonty has been a senior lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia since 2007. He has had numerous novels and volumes of poetry published including A Messiah of the Last Days (Faber) and Before (a collection of 22 poems, published by Crane River). Before. Crane River in association with the Africa Sun Press. August 2018. ISBN 9781909717978. (A collection of 22 poems) My favourite story, for now, involves Jonty and the late Archishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu at an event at Westminster Abbey on 3 March 2014. It resonates with another event at Umso Senior Secondary School in Colesberg, many years earlier. And both events revolve around Nelson Mandela as well as William Shakespeare. But let me start at the beginning … Forbidden for more than 25 years to return to his beloved South Africa, and rendered stateless, Driver turned increasingly to his writing, for which he had a natural gift. A stint at Trinity College, Oxford, provided him with the time to focus on this, bearing fruit in his first book, Elegy for a Revolutionary, published by Penguin in 1969, which brilliantly captured the zeitgeist, drawing heavily upon his own experiences.Omdraaivlei", "A Game of Tennis" and "Puppets"), and four poems in No 396 (April 2018): "Last Lesson of a Wintry Afternoon: a Kaddich for Joanna, Lady Seldon", "Extract from a Diary", "Diary Entry"