Please tell me a bit about yourself, your job and your family?

I work in the English Literature department at the University of Birmingham. I’ve been there since 2017, having previously worked at the University of Nottingham. My job is hugely varied, and also quite pressured, entailing teaching, research, writing, and administration. The best bits of it are the interesting conversations I get to have about books with individuals from all over the world: undergraduates, postgraduates, PhD researchers, and fellow lecturers and professors, alongside the people I meet when I give public talks. After Sidcot I went to Birmingham to do my BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees, staying there from 2002 to 2010. I met my wife, Alice, at the university. We now live in Worcestershire with our two young daughters.

When were you at Sidcot?  Why did you come to Sidcot?  Was there a connection through family members being there, Quakers or something else?

Quakerism has always appealed to me intellectually, but I’m not and never have been especially religious in any formal sense. I attended Sidcot from 1993 to 2001, during which I came to relish the lambent silences of meetings for worship. Prior to this I was at an independent prep school in Weston-super-Mare: Ashbrooke House, which closed in 2022. If memory serves, Sidcot’s management in the early 1990s were looking to offer scholarships to promising pupils at local schools. I arrived in the days when Christopher Greenfield was Head. I sat an entrance exam and was offered a generous academic bursary on the basis of my performance. It was a gesture of faith in my potential, by Christopher and the wider community of the school, and I hope I’ve lived up to it.

Did you board at Sidcot?  Which house were you in?  Did you enjoy it?

My memories of Sidcot are generally very happy ones. I was a geeky, naïve, unsporty kid, and at times, particularly in my first few years at the school, I sometimes felt like an outsider. But over time I found my feet and increasingly felt part of something special. I didn’t board, though I was given the chance to when I became Head Boy. I chose not to take the school up on the offer because my parents lived so close by. By the time I was in the Sixth Form I was spending long hours on the school site, not least because I wanted to hang around for dinner. Sidcot’s catering was always fantastic and I’ve been pleased to find on recent trips back to the school that the high standards haven’t slipped.

What do you think you gained from being educated at Sidcot?

Self-belief. Who knows how my life would have unfolded had I not attended Sidcot, but I left the school with a sense that I could trust in my capacities. This, far more than the grades I achieved in any exams, is Sidcot’s legacy in my life and career. I was fortunate to find a similarly encouraging set of educators at Birmingham, who helped me to flourish in my discipline as a student and then as a lecturer. I also had a lovely circle of friends at Sidcot with whom I’ve stayed very close. One of them, the incomparable Chris Gee, obliged at my wedding as a Best Man—greedily, I had two—and he’s someone I still talk to most days.

Was there a particular teacher who inspired you while at Sidcot?

It seems unfair to single anybody out. I genuinely enjoyed learning from all the teachers I had. One person to whom I owe a lot is Celia Starr, who taught me Mathematics and Further Mathematics at A-Level and AS-Level. I found GCSE Maths counter-intuitive and struggled with it, but Celia took a chance on me and I thrived in the subject as a Sixth Former. I haven’t used one iota of this kind of Mathematics in my professional life, but that’s not what matters: Celia saw an aptitude in me that I didn’t, or couldn’t. And my wonderful English teachers—Andrew Sinclair and Christopher Potts—remain inspirations to me to this day.

I know you have just been appointed to serve on the Governing Board of Sidcot?  As an old scholar, it’s always good to have someone who has had the lived experience of actually being at the School during their formative years.  What do you hope to bring to your role as Governor?

Some benefit of first-hand insight, I hope, allied to the fruits of my educational experience at Nottingham and Birmingham. The Sidcot I attended is in the past, of course, and nostalgia can be a treacherous thing, but there’s a lot about the school that’s still the same, even as many other things have changed. I’ll permit myself one literary reference: the poet T. S. Eliot’s apparently paradoxical view that ‘tradition cannot mean standing still’. Eliot’s point is that traditions aren’t dead but living things, constantly renewed and self-renewing, and that therefore maybe the most traditional quality of a place or community is its ability to evolve. I’d like to use my appointment as a Governor not only to help the school thrive amid the pressures of imposed change but also confidently to determine its future, and in the process to keep what makes Sidcot uniquely itself.

If you had the opportunity to sum up Sidcot in a few words, what would they be?

They’d have to be Sic vos non vobis, no? Sidcot’s Latin motto—‘Thus we labour, but not for ourselves’—has stayed with me through thick and thin, serving as a reminder that the best kind of work lies in helping others. Becoming an educator revealed the phrase’s truth at a professional level, whereas becoming a parent helped me to recognise its melancholy freight: we labour not for our transitory selves, but to ensure our children have a future. Words to live by, I think, as fathers, mothers, guardians, mentors, and teachers.