You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
An enthusiastic aristocratic voice called to me while I was slating my croft roof in Orkney.
She asked a hundred questions, where could she learn this skill? Where could she find the slates? Who had taught me? Could they teach her? She was full of fun and mischief. I liked her immediately.
She and her husband were on the cusp of starting the restoration of a derelict farm on the north west point of mainland Orkney. I got the feeling she was about to tackle the project single handed. She insisted that I visit their hut. I was captivated.
The hut was a wartime wooden relic, weather beaten and just water tight. It had no electricity, oil lamps provided light, water was from a well. The next storm might have flattened the whole structure. They felt it's days were numbered too and that was why they were going to start work on the stone building. It was in equally precarious state.
I have her name in my address book but I never thought to look her up to see who she really was. Last time I was on the island I looked for the hut. A modern bungalow stood where it once battled the winds.
Jane Addis died recently, her obituary was in the Times yesterday. I recognised her instantly, her life was inspirational, I'm thankful I had the chance to have met her and hear her laughter.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/obituary-jane-addis-0kr0k50d3
I would love to read this but hidden behind a paywall. Boo.
I really like obituaries, not for morbid reasons but instead because it opens your eyes to how much others have filled their lives.
More obituaries should feature a trapeze
....unless it's on the last line as cause of death.
See also: Tigers
Jane Addis was reading on the veranda of her bungalow in the Gambia when her young husband, Ritty, joined her, turned pale and said quietly: “Lift your feet up very, very slowly.” She did so. He reached for his gun, took aim and fired. A huge cobra, coiled beneath her chair, whipped from side to side in its death throes.
Reminiscent of a scene from Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, this was one of several adventures that she had as a district officer’s wife, all of which helped to form the dauntless character that would later make her a wildly eccentric but influential teacher.
Addis was born into a sporty, middle-class Warwickshire family. Her father, Geoffrey Taylor, who played rugby for England, was the eighth child of a country parson and met his future wife, Isobel Lamond Lackie, on the golf course. She had played lacrosse for Scotland. A gruff man of few words and ferocious temper, Taylor went into private practice as a surgeon in Leamington Spa, driving a succession of Bentleys. He became known as “a bit of a toff”, not least because he met all the “county families” whenever they were injured after falls on the hunting field.
Jane was sent to Tudor Hall School, near Banbury, but scarcely opened a book, preferring lacrosse and tennis to reading. While still at school she met Ritty Addis and was instantly smitten. The son of Sir William Addis, the colonial secretary of Bermuda, Ritty was a fearless, handsome young man nicknamed “Heaven” by lustful debutantes. Throughout an unwelcome spell at a Gstaad finishing school Jane itched to be back with her beloved.
Disappointingly rejected by the Foreign Office when he achieved only a third at Cambridge, Ritty applied to the Colonial Service instead and was posted to Malaya, impulsively proposing to the 19-year-old Jane: “Let’s get married so you can come with me.”
Months later they were married and sharing the privations of a District Officer’s life, coping with scorpions, attacks by communist guerrillas and, within a year, the arrival of their first child, Richard, followed two years later by a daughter, Willa-Jane.
Richard is a media entrepreneur and former editor of the Daily Express. Willa-Jane worked as a teacher and as an aid worker in Rwanda.
They were posted to the Gambia in 1960, where Addis home-schooled her children and local expatriates’ offspring, soon developing her central tenet: “You must say at least three interesting things to get children’s attention before you tell them the uninteresting one they need to learn.”
Returning to England in 1964, Ritty found a job at Courtaulds in Coventry and the family moved to a tumbledown smallholding in rural Warwickshire. Money was tight and they lived frugally, clearing the pigpens and outhouses with sledgehammers then ingeniously creating a welcoming house and a garden, including a homemade swimming pool and a trapeze in the kitchen which proved a magnet to local children. Clothes were always threadbare hand-me-downs or fashioned out of the offcuts of Courtaulds textiles.
She invented a dinner party game that she called ‘flaming hockey’
Addis had no patience with modern food hygiene or “best before” labels; she considered them an overrated affectation — although when a fox ate a bowl of elderly soup she had left outside it died.
She trained as a teacher at Bordesley College in Birmingham, then when the family moved to west London she taught eight-year-olds at Colet Court, the St Paul’s prep school.
Bored by the answers elicited by the turgid Colet Court entrance exam, she rewrote the tests and enjoyed a far more stimulating selection of essays as a result. Her young charges included Nat Rothschild, later a leading financier, and the future chancellor George Osborne, whom she remembered as “clever but unpopular”.
A tour of stuffy pre-prep schools so horrified Addis that she resolved to start her own and give children the exciting education she would have liked herself. With financial help from the developer Sir Alford Houstoun-Boswall she bought a large house in Putney and opened the Merlin School in 1986 for children aged four to eight. The Merlin soon had a waiting list thanks to its electric atmosphere and reputation.
“I looked for bright young graduates with first-class degrees, but no teaching qualifications,” she recalled. “Potential teachers would have dinner and drinks with Ritty and me. If they were entertaining, I’d hire them.” Her daughter, Willa-Jane, also taught at the school.
Jane Addis with some of her pupils
Jane Addis with some of her pupils
“The great joy of the Merlin was how Jane allowed children’s imaginations to run free,” remembered the actress Patricia Hodge, whose sons were pupils. “She had a wonderful scheme for teaching maths. A washing line was strung across every classroom with coloured strings hanging off it. Kids would be told to get up and move ten pieces of string around in groups. ‘Give me three lots of three,’ for example. They’d see there was one left over, which gave them a really visual idea of numbers.”
Addis enjoyed being provocative and quirky and her deepest insult was “ordinary”. A favourite dinner party game was “flaming hockey”, which entailed thwacking balls of paraffin-soaked rags in the darkness with walking-sticks.
When she bought a wooden shack in a majestic setting on mainland Orkney, she thought nothing of driving up alone from London, well into her seventies, in an old van laden with tools, and installing a staircase with only a local youth to help with the donkey-work.
She detested planners and health and safety regulations. Forbidden to create a roof garden at the family’s Holland Park mews house, she smuggled tons of earth, containers and plants on to the roof and enjoyed bohemian gatherings alfresco. The only drawback was the lack of a guardrail, omitted to avoid betraying the existence of her picturesque, though illegal bower.
After her husband’s death in 2007 Addis moved to a flat in Mayfair, going to the theatre most nights and writing detailed critiques of what the director got wrong. As she became frail she moved into a Banbury care home. There she enjoyed visits from her children and grandchildren, the latter being given lessons by her on the art of making collages.
Jane Addis, teacher, was born on July 29, 1934. She died from Alzheimer’s disease on January 4, 2018, aged 83
She might get on R4 on Friday...
Al, she died back in January . R4 may have already mentioned her.
i can’t think of any other public service broadcaster that features an obituary. I always find it a fascinating programme
What an incredible woman. She sounds like my gran.