This Post will act as a reference point for many of my Posts. Particularly interesting will be the admissions list 1858 – 1954
In the Prospectus of 1965, I knew all the teachers mentioned. The Headmaster, K.I. Thomas was at the peak of his career and all seemed to be going well. However, little did anybody know about the looming disaster:
- Within a couple of years, Senior Master Vyas left to become Headmaster of Hansraj Morarji School Mumbai.
- Replacing Vyas was Hariharan who was teaching Maths.
- In place of Hariharan arrived Leonard, a newly qualified, immature, inexperienced and unskilled maths teacher. The man was, using modern parlance, a bullshitter! After a year or so he resigned as he thought he had a better paying job in Tanzania. The Tanzanians booted him out and so he returned to Lovedale, cap in hand. Sadly Thomas took him back. A further year later, he resigned again never to return, thank God!
- S.K. Banerji was in School only because he was courting the daughter of fellow Bengali C. Mukerji. He was staying with the C. Mukerji family and when things didn’t work out, Banerji left.
- Jacob the Physics teacher left because of a falling out with Thomas; Thomas should have had the diplomatic skills to placate Jacob, US qualified physicist who had been in the job 12 years, was producing excellent results. Initially, nobody could be found to replace Jacob so Thomas made do with a passing Old Lawrencian, Vasanti Vasudevan a lovely lady who was ‘press-ganged’ into teaching Physics, before one of Thomas’ worst recruits, Durairaj was enrolled. Apart from anything else, Durairaj had to learn to communicate in English ‘on the job’! Durairaj, who was virtually unemployable outside Lovedale stayed on for some 30 years, made full use of staff facilities (free accommodation and food, free education for offspring etc.) and left to join his offspring who had emigrated to USA.
- Biology Teacher Naeem left on a sabbatical to attend a course in USA. Headmaster Thomas allowed that knowing that he didn’t have any replacement. Disastrously, he recruited a Mr Ahmed who could barely speak English, Ahmed lasted 6 months and was replaced by Botanist Justin who barely knew any zoology.
- R.K. Sharma left and that was no big loss; I recall one of his lessons vividly: ‘Captain Cook was caught by the natives in Hawaii, and was killed again and again until he died!’
Thomas was exposed as having no plan whatsoever to replace any teacher who left. Matters deteriorated further in the year after I passed out. This is because the sabbatical that was given to Naeem was also taken advantage of by Hariharan, Vaidyanathan, Iyengar and Raina all of whom left for the USA, and then resigned from the school shortly thereafter for better paid jobs. Had all these characters not been promised their jobs on return, they would not have dared to leave. Thomas was too weak to say no and this had disastrous consequences!
The best thing the Board did was to get rid of Thomas in 1971 as he was not at all interested in taking a pro-active role in running the school; he was merely biding his time!
Note that there were unqualified staff: Mrs.Enos, C. Mukerji, Mrs Brown and staff with rubbishy qualifications: Barbara Prince, Dorothy Dudley. And this was the elite school my father spent a fortune sending me to! Compare that to what was available in Kenya: see my Page: Alternative Schools in Kenya.
There is an interesting statement in the Prospectus: ‘The Headmaster has the right to ask for the withdrawal of a child from the school without assigning any reason’. It is most likely that such a term would now be thrown out by a Court.
