My Brother & I

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A poem called "The Short History of a War" was published in a recent number of the Oxford Magazine (No 408, Trinity term 2019). There were three poems in the same magazine (in January 2019: Jonty and Maeder Osler, owner of Hanglip Farm and founder of Toverview, were close friends, and were sharing accommodation in Cape Town when Jonty was detained. Maeder stood in for him as NUSAS president during his detention, and succeeded him in this position after his departure. They were able to renew their friendship in the 1990s, when Jonty was allowed to return to South Africa, and Jonty, his wife Ann, and their children became regular visitors at Hanglip Farm.

It was really through this sequence of poems that I came to know Jonty well. We had met through a shared love of haiku. He had been perhaps over-generous in writing about my own attempts at the genre. He never of course lost the teacher’s desire to encourage nor the ability to do so. But when I read Requiemfor the first time I saw the chance to do something creative with it. Jonty had explained that Brahms’ German Requiem,a much more “secular” requiem than the liturgical texts usually set, had been the inspiration for him. It seemed obvious to me to wrap music around the poetry. So I asked the cellist Guy Johnston, then a recent winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year, to weave a Bach cello suite “around” Jonty’s poetry. It was one of those happenstances in response to which you could hear a pin drop, as an entranced congregation of hundreds in Westminster Abbey oneSunday eveningpaid rapt attention to both music and text, and found in them a depth of spiritual encounter that was as moving for them as for the author and Ann, his wife of almost fifty years to whom he was so devoted. When, later, I suggested that Jonty himself be asked to read lines of Shakespeare at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Nelson Mandela in the Abbey, he was both thrilled, honoured, and humbled. In 1976, he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for 23 years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978–83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983–9; Master, Wellington College, 1989–2000). [2] [6] Writing career [ edit ] The cookie is set by CasaleMedia. The cookie is used to collect information about the usage behavior for targeted advertising. His sister Dorothy, partner of Nobel Prize-winning novelist JM Coetzee, was another exile, in her case in Australia where she and Coetzee lived, and she became Professor of English at Adelaide having relinquished her chair at UCT.Among the heroes of the struggle to defeat apartheid, many stood tall but none perhaps physically taller than CJ Driver, known to many as Jonty.

Schooling at St Andrew’s College Grahamstown, with its traditional combination of muscular Anglicanism and Scottish-style military marching band, would one day find obvious fulfilment and echo in his leadership of Wellington College, where the sons and more recently daughters of the military continue to be shaped by the same vigorously Anglican spirit of self-sacrifice and service.It is difficult to summarise a life such as Jonty’s, more so immediately after his death. The Jonty I knew was a man who spoke, wrote, and thought with uncommon sensitivity and moral clarity. To my mind, he is one of the finest poets South Africa has produced. 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 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

Driver is married with three children and eight grandchildren and stays is East Sussex with his wife. 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. 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. Before. Crane River in association with the Africa Sun Press. August 2018. ISBN 9781909717978. (A collection of 22 poems)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.