An Inspirational Teacher: Mr Arnold Fellows

BY SCOTT WHITEHEAD (OC 1955-1964)

On a miserable grey day in February 1955, I remember sitting the entrance examination for Brentwood school. My parents had decided on Brentwood as it was the nearest independent school to where we were then living and because my cousin Craig had already been accepted. I sat at an rickety old  desk in a large drab wood panelled classroom with high level windows, too high to see out of, in preparation for the English entrance test. I was then presented with a sheet of paper and an ink pen with instructions to write a composition on the subject of ' The Weather Today' with thirty minutes to do it in. I was completely perplexed not being able to see out of the windows and after twenty minutes chewing the pen, I finally wrote in five words the shortest essay of my life "Outside, there is a puddle". Naturally, I was not invited to join Brentwood school and my parents had to fall back on Chigwell. Craig would have to attend Brentwood on his own.

A little later that year, I sat the entrance exam for Chigwell. The contrast could not have been greater. A small group of boys were brought to the school by their parents to be greeted by an aging man in an academic gown at Grange Court and having been invited into the magnificent 18th century house, we were taken into its beautiful garden to see the flowers in bloom and the trees springing into life. Arnold Fellows took us round the garden, pointing out the trees in full foliage and the different shapes of the leaves that each tree possessed. Later in the morning when we finally sat down for the English test, we were asked by this elderly gentleman to write a description of the garden, what we had seen and what we had experienced in the sunshine. Here was a teacher who clearly recognized that if you want to bring out the best in young minds, you need to stimulate their senses and their imagination. I passed the entrance test and was accepted for Chigwell school in September 1955.

That was exactly seventy years ago this year. It seems strange, looking back on a bygone age that my parents should have entrusted my care to a man they didn't know and a single gentleman at that. But the school had a fine reputation and Arnold Fellows himself must have been there for a very long time so I was in a safe pair of hands. He was a man with a charming wit, an unforgettable presence  and an avuncular style which would have charmed and disarmed any parent. He was also a man whose life dated back to the Victorian era and whose morality and whose Christianity were immersed in 19th century values. 

When I joined the Chigwell junior school, I knew nothing of the life of Arnold Fellows other that the fact that he was obviously a very learned and venerable old gentleman with a slightly horsy face and a shock of white hair. He also regularly shrugged his shoulders which boys would whisper was the result of shell shock in the trenches of World War One. He never talked about it, but somehow we all learnt that he had fought at the battle of Passchaendale in 1917.  He had also lost his elder brother, Harold, on the Somme. I say he never talked about it, but Grange Court possessed some fascinating old black and white slide photographs of the Great War and an early form of viewfinder to view them on. Here was recent history, written large, and a towering figure of a man who had actually fought on and survived the Western Front.

We learnt later that although teaching at a school only twelve miles from London, Arnold Fellows was not a Londoner. He hailed, as he would often remind us from the 'black country'. Having never ventured out of Essex, none of us eight year olds had any idea

whatsoever where or what the black country was. Fellows himself was certainly not a black man! He would attempt to illuminate us with photographs of Burslem and the other five pottery towns with their lime kilns and smoking chimneys – images of a distant past that was beginning to disappear even in the 1950s.

In fact his home town was a little further south towards the Birmingham conurbation.                

Arnold Fellows was born in Wednesbury in 1899. Far from the back to back houses of the depression he actually came from a middle class but not a particularly privileged background. His father worked as a solicitor's clerk while the mother was never a well woman and was in and out of hospital her entire life. None of his family showed academic prowess. Yet Arnold Fellows won a scholarship from Staffordshire County Council to attend Queen Mary's Boys Grammar School in Walsall in 1911, one of the most prestigious schools in the West Midlands. He was at school there until 1917 before being conscripted into the Northamptonshire regiment  to see out the final year of the First War and  fight in one of its fiercest battles.

After the War, Fellows won a further scholarship to attend New College Oxford where he read  History, and could well have developed as a serious academic. Throughout his life he remained in close contact with a number of highly rated academics and on the family gravestone in Ryecroft cemetery in Staffordshire, he is identified not as a teacher but as a historian. He graduated in Modern History but at heart he was a mediaevalist and his primary interest was in the architecture of the Middle Ages. Throughout the inter-war years, he travelled the length and breadth of Britain in his beaten up old Morris car, visiting churches, cathedrals and ancient castles and taking endless black and white photographs of their interiors and exteriors. In 1937, he published 'The Wayfarers Companion' which even today is an astonishing guide to the surviving castles and churches of the nation and to the development of mediaeval architecture. In retirement he was later to publish an updated version that he called 'England and Wales'. It really is a fascinating travelogue, with endless detail and also dating from a time when motoring could still be considered  an enjoyable pastime. During the inter-war years, he also regularly attended functions at New College Oxford where he would park his jallopy in the area designated for ' Fellows Only'.

Away from academia, Fellows also excelled as a sportsman. Whilst at university, he won Oxford blues in Soccer and and Cricket. Rowing was also a significant pastime at Oxford . He was  the leader of the club that won the Isis river challenge in 1921 and although rowing was never really developed as a sport at Chigwell school, Fellows later bought himself a small Edwardian house in Barnes, where he could have a commanding Thameside view of the annual university boat race.

Arnold Fellows sporting prowess was certainly one of the key reasons for his appointment to Chigwell school in 1924. Through the 1930s, he was Head of Games and David Ballance refers to his reputation of dominating the cricket field with his powerful voice. He regularly practised cricket shots in the nets with the boys at Grange Court garden and used his magic lantern to demonstrate how perfect batting shots should be played. There is no doubt that he inspired many pupils with a love of team sports and it was partly due to his influence that Chigwell developed in the twentieth century as a soccer school. Perhaps it might also have developed as a rowing school if Fellows's plans to evacuate the school to Shrewsbury and the River Severn, far away from the German bombers in the Second World War, had ever come to fruition.  But it is also arguable as to whether the school itself would have survived the move and the disruption. In fact it never happened.

Arnold Fellows taught under three headships at Chigwell. Appointed to teach history by Ernest Walde, Fellows rapidly gained promotion to become second master at the school. Through his career, he was also Housemaster at several of the houses, finally taking responsibility for the running of the Junior School in the years after the Second World War. As his administrative duties began to dominate, his teaching commitments in the upper school began to recede, although he was still required to teach a selected elite group of  high-flyers to prepare them for possible Oxbridge entrance. One of his most successful pupils in this period said of him „Through his teaching, I learnt what thought and scholarship were about“. He was clearly an impressive historian but his main duties involved the management and the running of the Junior School at Grange Court, a position that he retained from 1947 until his retirement from Chigwell in 1959.

It was only in this period that I first met the man so the obsevations I make are very selective.  But my recollection is that he carried out his duties as a senior housemaster with great assiduity. He could teach more or less anything and did. He conducted  the daily teaching of his pupils himself, covering what he considered to be a balanced curriculum that delivered the essential requirements for the moral education of young boys. Religion figured high on the list of subjects taught, as he was himself a devout Christian and encouraged many others into Christianity, particularly encouraging participation in the chapel choir. On Sundays he would march the starched collared boarders from the Junior school up the High Road to the school chapel for morning and evening prayer. I am still in possession of an inscribed  copy of 'The Combined Gospels' which he gave me as a present for my birthday in 1959, inscribed as always to his friend Scott Whitehead. All his pupils were his friends.

He also referred the boys in his house as gentlemen and his favourite maxim was 'gentlemen do not take advantage'. Richard Mohr, who started school at the same time as me, recalls that he called us all gentlemen and made it clear that he expected us to behave like gentlemen. His first duty was to teach us good manners and how to behave while at school and out in public. Needless to say those lessons inevitably had an impact upon those of us in daily contact with the man and influenced our behaviour through life.  He always ate together with all the boys in the Junior School who he treated as his family and  insisted upon good table manners. He also impressed upon everybody that food was to be enjoyed but never wasted. I remember that he kept his own loaf of bread and would never disgard it, however stale, until it was fully consumed. This emphasis upon the importance of food was clearly a result of his war experiences and times of scarcity but it impressed upon us all the importance of frugality.

He also frowned upon misbehaviour as did many of his contemporaries. David Ballance in 'The Buds of Virtue' comments that he had a traditional approach to discipline. What this implies is that as a committed Christian but also as a relic from the Victorian era, he believed implicitly in the principle enshrined in the Book of Proverbs – 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'. So a cane was always in the cupboard. But when he punished a boy, he would always add that I am punishing you because I love you. Paul Keska remembers a caning for running across Chigwell High Road without checking for traffic first. He always followed the Green Cross Code from then on.

In the evenings, Arnold Fellows would regularly read to the boys in the dorm before lights out and in this way introduced us to a wealth of literature. Every evening he would regularly sit at the side of a different boy's bed and hold the hand of the child lying there as he read another chapter of ' Three Men in a Boat' or some other colourful tale from the Edwardian age. He would also occasionally terrify us with a ghost story. I still react in fear to the Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs.

The library at Grange Court was also furnished with great adventure stories for boys – particularly sea stories. It was in this period that I first encountered the Hornblower novels, Captain Maryatt's Masterman Ready, Richard Dana's Two Years before the Mast and of course Homer's Odyssey.  Oddly though, I never became a seafarer. Perhaps it was just too dangerous. However there were also many other books which were not about life at sea. Arnold Fellows certainly introduced me to a love of literature which I have never lost.

Although unmarried, his behaviour towards the boys in his trust was only caring and fatherly. He would sometimes take us out for a jaunt in his passenger carrier. A special day of the summer was Ascension Day, usually in June  when the school regularly called a half holiday. Because boarders could not go home, he would take all the  boys out in his Bedford Dormobile, always to a place of historical interest. During my time in the Junior school, I remember visits to the historical sites at Greenwich, St Albans, Waltham Abbey and Colchester. I think he enjoyed these trips out as much as did his pupils as it gave him the opportunity not only to develop our understanding of mediaeval architecture but to educate us into the story of Britain from Roman times up to the present.  

Christmas was also fun at Grange Court and often involved a treasure hunt. Fellows would buy small presents for all the boys and then hide them away somewhere in the house.     In order to find your present, you had to solve your clue. Lively entertainment! One year, the boys clubbed together to get the caretaker, Mr Gillam, to buy Arnold Fellows a bottle of sherry which was then wrapped up with a multitude of wrappings, rather in the manner of 'pass the parcel'. Fellows spent twenty minutes opening the parcel, shaking it, examining it and even testing it out to make sure it wasn't an explosive device. He clearly enjoyed playing with the boys and sharing their love of Christmas.

There was another side to Arnold Fellows which certainly needs mentioning.  Throughout his tenure as Head of the Junior School, the walls of Grange Court were decorated with a large numbers  of artworks and landscape watercolours. I don't think that Fellows was ever a patron of the 'Art in Schools Movement' and I don't believe that he had any recognizable artistic talent himself. I certainly do not ever remember him with an easel or paint brushes. But he was an avid collector of fine art and amassed a sizeable and valuable collection, including some  European pictures dating back to the 17th century. He would often recommend to us youngsters that art collection was a wonderful hobby but we should only ever consider buying genuine and original works of art. I'm sure he was talking of the aesthetics of art and an appreciation of beautiful paintings but in the light of the value of fine art on the contemporary market, that was certainly good advice.

After retirement, his art collection graced his home in Barnes, but before his death in 1973, he bequeathed it in its entirety to Queen Mary's School in Walsall where he had been a pupil and also taught briefly in the early 1920. Sadly, it looks as though this school was unable to afford the insurance for such a valuable collection and very recently sold the pictures on, lot by lot. Many of Arnold Fellows' paintings are now in private hands, but some are on display in some of the major galleries of the world.

We all remember Arnold Fellows as a kindly, fatherly but unmarried man. However, after retirement  he met up with a French-American music teacher, a few years his junior, Marguerite-Anne Sharon. She introduced a beautiful grand piano into their home in Barnes but I haven't been able to establish whether Arnold Fellows in his twilight years with Marguerite's instruction actually learnt to play. They spoke together in English, although Arnold was fluent in French. Some of their letters to each other survive which indicate that they were devoted to each other and  passionately in love. They were married in Paris in June 1965 and spent their remaining years together, partly in England and partly in France, thus proving that there is a life beyond retirement.

A remarkable man who influenced many generations of Chigwellians and whose life spans the twentieth century!