Clifton College Headmasters and Freemasons

 

The two Clifton Head Masters most closely associated with the OC Lodge were Albert Augustus David (1905-9) and his successor John Edward King (1910-23).

 

The Lodge dates from David's last months at Clifton, and although we do not know what part he played in its foundation, it must be reckoned the most enduring feature of his short reign. He and King were also successive Worshipful Masters from 1919-21, and during King's mastership the PSLC Festival was held here for the first time. Albert Augustus David came, as three of his four predecessors had done, from the Rugby staff, and to Rugby he returned as Headmaster. At Clifton he is remembered chiefly for introducing Swedish drill, a fad of the time which even the Army adopted. Here and in his early years at Rugby, David was well regarded as a brisk administrator with a modern approach. His doctrine, as distilled in Life and the Public Schools: A Prospect (1932) may still be studied with advantage. But as often happens with Headmasters, towards the end he became slightly unhinged. David fell under the spell of a quack psychoanalyst, whose homespun therapies he applied to every adolescent malady and malice. This worried the Common Room and the Governing Body, so David was encouraged to move to a bishopric where he would be harmless. In 1921 he accepted St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, and two years later was translated to Liverpool. His episcopate there was not untroubled, but he had a significant role in the great cathedral project. Meanwhile his naïvely tolerant headmastering was parodied by his former colleague G.F. Bradby in The Chronicles of Dawnhope (1921), and obliquely by Evelyn Waugh as the crackpot Prison Governor in Decline and Fall (1928).

 

While David's departure may be said to close Clifton's colonial phase, John Edward King was a home-grown product, Cliftoniensis natus, the first and only OC to become Head Master. He was also the first layman, though the severity of his attire diminished the impact of this innovation. He had been in School House from 1871 to 1877, winning his Cap and XXII, and coming in 6th in the Long Pen of 1876. He went on to Lincoln College, Oxford, and after a brief spell teaching there and at St Paul's, he was appointed High Master of MGS in 1891, Head Master of Bedford School in 1903, and so to Clifton in 1910. Though he had been one of Percival's boys, he was not Percival's candidate. The former Head Master, by this time Chairman of the Council, hoped to promote his godson William Temple. Temple's father, when HM of Rugby, had jobbed Percival into Clifton, so it was a reasonable aspiration. However the other members of the Council were not enthusiastic: William Temple, though a good deal more amiable than his father, was yet more radical. Their decision looks to have been vindicated, because when Temple did become a Headmaster (at Repton), he made no great impression. His gifts lay elsewhere, and he would of course follow his father to Canterbury. Even so, William Temple's Clifton is one of the intriguing unwritten pages in our history.

 

King had the satisfaction of presiding over the College's golden jubilee in 1912, and of welcoming King George V and Queen Mary as part of those celebrations. He then had to lead Clifton through four years of war, in which almost 600 of her sons were lost, the equivalent as elsewhere of the entire population of the school. After the war King wanted to retire, but was persuaded to remain on being allowed to give up School House; and though this was meant to be a temporary separation of duties, it became a permanent one. King eventually retired to his native Somerset in 1923. In his early days he had published some classical scholarship; he also translated from Latin to English verse the epic Carmen Blagdonense celebrating the prodigious fish of a Mendip lake.

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This article was written by Dr CS Knighton and was originally published in the Festival Booklet for the PSLC Festival held at Clifton College in 2019