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meet the HEAD
School memories
GEORGE WATSON’S PRINCIPAL, MR MELVYN ROFFE TELLS US ABOUT HIS OLD SCHOOL DAYS
Did you enjoy your time at School? Yes, on the whole. There are always bits of any experience which you’d rather not have to do (Technical Drawing for example) and some aspects of discipline I would rather forget, but I did enjoy my school days.
Were you hot on the sports field?
No, I was regularly very cold. My sporting career peaked just before I was dropped from U13 rugby for being “too slow, too short and too skinny” to quote the coach. He hadn’t been on the course about giving positive feedback.
Did you have any favourite teachers? Yes, I got on well with the English department (and no surprise I went in to study English at university) and other individual teachers who understood me better than others. I grew to admire the Head and his Deputies as I took on positions of responsibility in my final years, not least because they gave me the benefit of their considerable
wisdom and, probably unknowingly, were modelling some very progressive models of leadership at a time when not so much about schools had moved on from the 1950s.
What about friends? I had different circles of friends for the
bits of school life I was involved in: debating, satirical writing, drama, pupil leadership. Looking back the support we gave each other was often quite extraordinary at a time when emotional support for pupils at school was pretty scant. Peer pressure is often seen as a bad thing, but it can be positive if applied in a good way and peer support is often the mark of a good school.
What did you want to be when you grew up? Taller, faster, less skinny. I have achieved two out of three.
Were your family academic? My mother was a teacher and my
father an electrical power engineer but I was the first in my family to go to university. The main thing was that I
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was encouraged to read, was taken to interesting places and encouraged to have opinions.
How do your children compare to you?
I try not to compare my children to each other or to me. They are very much their own people but it is always intriguing to see how the throw of the genetic dice has produced such different combinations of qualities.
Do you have any advice for your school-age self? You probably should try harder with your Maths.
What do you think your teachers would think of you now? Some of them got in touch just before I started my job at Watson’s. They were in a pub and had decided to send me a message of congratulation on my success. The rugby coach was not amongst them, sadly, but I like to think that he would have been impressed that in later life I took a pass from Andy Irvine in front of TV cameras and didn’t fumble the ball.
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