About Newsome and caning:
Wellington gave up caning in the early 70s, around the time Newsome left to work at CH, so Newsome would have known that a similar school could phase it out. He chose not to.
My late civil partner did a teaching diploma at Cambridge about 1970. Caning wasn't on the syllabus, and a shock to any new teachers who got jobs at boarding schools (Culford was the one) to find that housemasters still did it. On the other hand I suppose a lot of mainstream day schools kept on beating through the 70s till 1984 when it was outlawed in state schools. (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/date ... 516621.stm) Richard Beard's "Sad Little Men", about Radley College, lists two different types of beating as well as cold baths and early morning runs as part of the sadism well into the 80s - I don't know when it ended but the legal limits were in the 90s with Northern Ireland tha last part of the UK to forbid it in - I'm not sure - maybe 1999.
Newsome would have had some ideas about beating from his interest in victorian beaters, or headmasters housemasters and teachers as they were called then but they would quickly find themselves in prison nowadays. EF Benson, first head of Wellington, sounds similar to John Smyth (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smyth_(barrister)) the summer camp child abuser and likely murderer, but I have not read Newsoms books. Some of them are free to borrow on web.archive.org:
https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL388370A/David_Newsome
I've been reading about CH and WC like places recently, specially Merchiston Castle where my ex Wellington Housemaster became head and then wrote a witness statement for the Scottish Child Abuse Enquiry. It forces thought about why heads like Newsome did not introduce counselling services as universities did, or train prefects to look-out for bullying. The answer, I think, is that they were more interested in living in a timewarp than solving problems.
On the academic side, my ex-housemaster has some ideas as well: whey not make sure that A level teachers know the mark scheme well enough to explain it to other people? This was a real problem at Wellington where predicted grades were nothing like real grades. The problem was known; my ex housemaster had a solution for it. And about careers: did Christ's Hospital have an encylopedic reference book of job titles, and routes into these jobs including polytechnics? If it was like Wellington, the answer was no: not worth the few hundred quid. It was odd. A bit like living in an Amish colony I suppose, where the need to fit in with the outside world does not apply but head teachers could still claim to be caring and keen on academic results.
Generally, dealing with Newsome once while a pupil at Wellington ("take your hands out of your pockets while you're talking to the master") I thought him better face-to-face than his CV would suggest.
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The Times obituary, usually behind a paywall
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David Newsome
Headmaster-don whose vision of the Victorian age began with a history of Wellington College
Friday April 30 2004, 1.00am, The Times
David Newsome was a distinguished exemplar of that dying breed, the headmaster-don. In the increasingly secular climate of the 1970s and 1980s, he was a beacon of civilised values, many with their roots in the best of the Victorian age, of which he was an important social and ecclesiastical historian.
Sometimes he was regarded by fellow public school headmasters as a slightly archaic figure, respected at confirmation time but not necessarily first on the list for Christmas festivities. But like Matthew Arnold, Newsome knew that there were certain “touchstones” that were inviolable, and no pupil of his would mistake the ephemeral for the deeper truth.
In a career that zig-zagged between the university world and that of the Victorian-style boarding school, there were two recurring themes — the Benson family and Wellington College — that gave focus to the pattern. E. W. Benson, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first Master of Wellington College, and much of Newsome’s early research into the academic and Anglican world of Victorian England stemmed from his profound knowledge of the Benson family papers, the inspiration for one of his most original books, Godliness and Good Learning (1961). In this study of Victorian ideals, he examined the transition from the mid-Victorian world of what Thomas Arnold had taught to the late-Victorian cult of muscular Christianity that Thomas Hughes practised.
Wellington College, opened, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, in 1859 as the national memorial to the Great Duke, was at the heart of this transition, and Newsome began and ended his own academic career at Wellington. As Master he was not the least of Benson’s successors, and he shared his forebear’s belief in the importance of spiritual values and hard work.
David Newsome was born in 1929, son of Captain C. T. Newsome and his wife, Florence. He was educated at Rossall School, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Scholar and Bachelor Scholar, 1950-54.
With his military antecedents, Wellington College was an appropriate place for him to start his schoolmastering career. In 1957 he was appointed head of the history department, by which time he was already working on his centenary volume on Wellington College. The official school history, often entrusted to a retired Mr Chips, is a notoriously difficult genre, owing more to the demands of public relations than to historical truth and possessing largely parochial appeal. Newsome’s History of Wellington College (1959) broke new ground in several important ways. The author was only 26, a junior master and a comparative stranger to the school, when he was commissioned by a committee of governors that included the Duke of Wellington and Sir Harold Nicolson, who shrewdly spotted the potential of an intelligent non-Wellingtonian author.
His brief was to provide a critical and detached assessment, based on primary sources. With the help and advice of Nicolson, who had recently published the official life of King George V, New-some made outstanding use of documents, including the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle (Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had both been instrumental in founding the college), the papers of the 17th Earl of Derby and the voluminous Benson archive at Trinity College, Cambridge. No stone was left unturned in the research and the result was a work of genuine scholarship that was published to wide acclaim. The bulky volume, although it took the story up to the mid-20th century, was essentially a paean to the vision of Victorian England, and the skill with which Newsome brought the story to life made a distinctive contribution to social history.
In 1959, his reputation established, he returned to Cambridge to take up a Fellowship at Emmanuel College and a lectureship in ecclesiastical history. In 1965 he was appointed senior tutor of Emmanuel College. His second book, Godliness and Good Learning, had as its centrepiece two contrasting biographical studies: James Prince Lee, a notable Victorian headmaster-bishop, and the poignant tale of the tragically curtailed life of Benson’s eldest son, Martin, who was born in the Master’s Lodge at Wellington and who died of meningitis as a Winchester schoolboy at the age of 17. It was hailed as one of the most moving insights into the world of Victorian public schools.
Further books on the Victorian age followed at regular intervals. The Parting of Friends (1966), a study of the Oxford Movement through an account of Henry Manning and his three Wilberforce brothers-in-law, developed Newsome’s particular talent for examining larger issues (in this case the turmoil in the Anglican Church in the early 19th century) through the lives of particular individuals. Bishop Westcott and the Platonic Tradition (1969) was in the same distinctive mould.
In a change of direction, Newsome returned to the boarding school world in 1970 when he became Headmaster of Christ’s Hospital. The illusory certainties of the early 1950s public-school world, when long hair was a serious solecism, had departed by the time Newsome arrived in Horsham and, for all boarding schools, the decade was to be a difficult one in which he was not entirely at ease.
In an address to the Headmasters’ Conference in 1972, Newsome asked his fellow headmasters to imagine the rebuilding of a school from scratch after some dreadful catastrophe. His theme was that the heart of the school would not beat if the chapel was left till last, “a heap of rubble at the side of the quad”. John Rae, the worldly-wise Headmaster of Westminster, wrote that many headmasters “could not altogether share Dr Newsome’s vision” and that if they stressed the Christian aspect of their foundations, it was usually “as a means of discrediting Labour plans to take over their schools” — a far cry from the ideals of Victorian England.
Two Classes of Men (1974), an ironic title in the circumstances, was Newsome’s next book: a study of Platonism and English Romantic thought. There was also a “parting of friends” when he left Christ’s Hospital in 1979 after a disagreement with his governing body over co- education. His honourable resignation came after he was presented, without consultation, with a fait accompli, and the Headmasters’ Conference did not initially extend an invitation to his successor to be a member — a public vote of confidence in Newsome, who was rumoured to be on the verge of appointment to head an Oxbridge college.
However, in 1980 the wheel came full circle when Newsome was appointed Master of Wellington in succession to Frank Fisher. His return to Crowthorne coincided with his greatest commercial (and, arguably, literary) success when he published On the Edge of Paradise, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1980. Based on the four million-word diary of A. C. Benson, Archbishop Benson’s second son, On the Edge of Paradise evoked the vanished Edwardian male society of Eton and Cambridge, where Benson was Master of Magdalene college and a friend to such diverse younger luminaries as Hugh Walpole, George Mallory and George Rylands. “It is so strange to be always, as I seem to be,” wrote Benson, in a sentence that gave Newsome the title for his study, “on the edge of paradise and never quite finding the way in.”
Not the least of the book’s achievements was Newsome’s ability to write frankly and without any hint of prurience about Benson’s susceptibility to the boyish charms of his Eton pupils and his Magdalene undergraduates.
The Wellington that Newsome inherited had a reputation — not entirely deserved — as a military, games-playing school, and his brief was to provide a greater academic focus. He rightly saw a revised entry list as the key to this change, but this took time and was accompanied by an unusually high turnover of staff.
He reorganised chapel worship in a manner which was not entirely appreciated at the time, introducing a voluntary College Communion as the standard Sunday service, but building the Crypt Chapel of The Epiphany for private prayer and meditation. Ironically, his most tangible monument remains the Newsome Hall, a state-of-the-art multi-purpose sports centre, for which he raised over £600,000 in his last year as Master.
After his retirement from Wellington, Newsome settled in the Lake District, where he continued to give full rein to his enthusiasm for all things Victorian. A successful essay into the difficult form of dual biography, first seen in Godliness and Good Learning, came with the publication in 1993 of The Convert Cardinals: Newman and Manning. In 1997 he drew together many of the threads of his career with the publication of The Victorian World Picture, the most successful single volume study of the age since G. M. Young’s in 1952.
David Newsome was always greatly in demand as a lecturer on Victorian themes. He gave the Gore memorial lecture at Westminster Abbey in 1965, the Bishop Westcott memorial lecture at Cambridge in 1968, and the Birkbeck lectures in 1972. He served on the governing bodies of Ardingly, Eastbourne and Epsom.
Newsome married his wife, Joan — the daughter of Colonel L. H. Trist — in 1955. She died in February 1999. He is survived by their four daughters.
David Newsome, historian and Master of Wellington College, was born on June 15, 1929. He died on April 28, 2004, aged 74.
