Passmore again

From my autobiography.  Is this fair?  How distorted is my take on Passmore?                                                                                  

And then came Passmore.  Where Trafford had sought to make Downside great through the OTC, Passmore was going to do it through academic achievement. He was huge both in body and presence, the most unforgettable person you have ever met, a Renaissance pope (with all the unscrupulous worldly wiliness but without the love of art, for art didn’t get you an A at A level or into Oxford or Cambridge).   Using methods that put you in mind of Stalin’s industrialization of Russia, he instituted a reign of terror.  You could be beaten for almost anything, especially for leaving a book around which merited four strokes. For more serious offences there were more severe beatings.   Such punishments were, it must be said, common in the public schools of the time, but few with Passmore’s particular style. ‘That didn’t hurt, my dear, did it?”  He specialized in psychological confusion, the sidestepping of your expectations. Even more than the thrashings, it was his over-powering personaliity that overwhelmed  you.  He would light his room with nothing but an angle poise lamp and then turn the light full on you so that he could see you but you couldn’t see him.  It was like being interrogated by the NKVD.  He loved intrigue and secret communications – just between us my dear – double dealing and menacingly gnomic innuendo.  Yet with his huge girth and his round, owl-like face and thick pebble gasses there was something of the Billy Bunter in him.  And perhaps a hurt Billy Bunter hides secretly in the hearts of all tyrants.

Nor was it only the boys who were terrified of him.  He cut down the time between classes to two minutes and you would see lay teachers running from class to class lest they met him lurching through the corridors peering at them myopically and sacking them on the spot.  As he doubled the size of the school money rolled in, and he was able to build new classrooms with specially installed portholes that he would squint through as he patrolled the corridors to see what was going on.  It was like Bluebeard scrutinizing his victims, or suddenly seeing Stalin peering into the cells of the Lubyanka, in miniature.  The beatings did not quell outrageous, even bizarre, bad behaviour though, even perhaps caused it.  Not only were there the stolen car incident and Auberon Waugh’s night club in Holcombe.  One boy was beaten, it was rumoured, for dancing on a grave in the village churchyard, unfortunately spotted by a woman whose father was in the grave.  Another boy stole a rifle from the armoury and was reportedly beaten even more severely, but such was the unpredictability of life under Passmore, he was made head boy two terms later.  He had a secret admiration of the bad hat, I guess.  It was almost as if tyrant and tyrannized were fascinated by each other and egged each other on.                                                                                         

The atmosphere in the school was tense, febrile, quaveringly alert.  During supper, he would put up a list on the Headmaster’s notice board of those to be beaten that evening, and after supper there would be a mad rush down the corridor to the school hall to join the seething, terrified crowd of the boys already there, each trying to decipher the Headmaster’s illegible hand writing to see if he was on the list.  When I became a prefect, I enjoyed the privilege of access to the prefects’ room where we were allowed to smoke.  1984 had recently been published and we would hold hate sessions, stamping on the oak table and shaking our fists yelling Hate Hate Hate through the thick blue haze.   Being Downside boys, of course, we did with a half sense of comedy.  Downside never really took to the public school system, I suppose the quite different traditions coming down from old St Gregory’s were just too strong.  Father Benet once told me that when he was a boy in the school Trafford had come down to assembly one night and announced that in future the first fifteen pitch would be known as Big Side, only to be greeted with roars of laughter.  And indeed, Passmore himself jeered at public schools and did a hilarious imitation of a chaplain at an Anglican public school giving a sermon about death, “When the Great Umpire raises his finger and gives you out for the last time…” etc, although with a bitter undertone, for he himself was terrified of death.                                                                                            

He was the most memorable man.  You never doubted for a moment that he cared with the most extraordinary passion for Downside and every boy who had been given to him to cherish. The beatings yes, but never any moralizing; “and most of all you have let yourself down” none of that.  He had a sense of fun, too, and his witty comments on the ironies of life were part of his magnetism.  Most of all though, he cared.  He wasn’t just a tyrant but deeply loved those he tyrannized. You adored him or you hated him. You felt you mattered.  You felt you were living through something remarkable, and despite all the beatings most people revelled in it. In 1954 the school won more scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge (I was one of them) than any other school, apart from Manchester Grammar, but it was a high water mark of Trafford’s and Passmore’s ambition to make Downside into “the greatest pubic school in England”  Its genius had come from priests hiding in holes, recusant Catholics treasuring the shining chalice of the faith in cellars and attics, proud that they were despised, clinging desperately closely to each other for that very reason.  Nobody could have inherited the spirit of Old St Gregory’s more than Passmore with his profound love of Downside and fatherly concern for each and every one of his pupils.  Yet he thrashed them unmercifully.  “That didn’t hurt did it my dear?”.  Were they comforted or was salt rubbed into their wounds?  What an enigma he was. He doubled the size of the school, six hundred at its peak, yet reduced the housemasters to office boys.  In the end, even his vast energies could not bestow on each and every pupil the heartfelt concern that had been the mark of Father Ramsay’s school.  Did he kill the thing he loved?   Perhaps he did.  

Yet he never beat me.  To me he was the kindest and most gentle of fathers.  When my father first took me to Downside he had told him about the sex abuse and Passmore realized he had to treat me with the softest of hands.  I remember especially once when my father, thinking I was not working hard enough, wrote me a sharp, reproving letter and weeping I took it to the Headmaster.  He could not have been more gentle and more kind. “You’re all he’s got”.  I always remember that.  “You’re all he’s got`”.  He understood fathers.  It was like being enfolded in the down of angels’ wings.  On his death bed, he was bitterly regretful and penitent for all those beatings he had handed out.  But if I could, for my part I would dance on his grave not in contempt and hostility but in celebration and gratitude, though, as it turned out,  he had not done with me yet, To me you were kind, very kind.  You were huge, overwhelming, unforgettably memorable.  Lie in sweet earth, Wilfrid Passmore, and may flights of angels sing you to your rest.

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  1. David Briffa 31 July, 2022 at 12:14 · · Reply

    Blimey! Didn’t expect that. Full of surprises. Particularly the bit about Downside getting more scholarships to Oxbridge than any other school apart from Manchester Grammar. What happened between 1954 and 1971 when I arrived?

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