Harry Drew BY NEIL CROALLY
the student writers – the Head of Creative Writing tells me – to get their heads round their feet, and to devise some spectacular hexameters. What, I suspect, Harry was most trying to convey in his teaching was that, while it is of course always necessary to be scholarly, to be careful and to learn the material, there is also a genuine pleasure in intellectual discovery and development. This might manifest itself in persuading Junior School students to re-enact the Battle of Cannae (!) as part of the Junior School Symposium, when most of us might have offered the rather more conventional, and less time-consuming, PowerPoint. Also notable in this con- nection was Harry’s eagerness to offer courses outside Classical studies (at least as they are strictly defined). Thus, in addition to some time as a part-time member of the English Department, Harry offered important and interesting courses in Gender Studies and Comparative Mythology. In the last of these courses, and most recent- ly, students from the College, JAGS and Sydenham High have co-operatively written their own version of an Attic tragedy. I believe some filmic evidence of this remains. Harry would probably argue that his catholic approach to matters intellectual was at least in part derived from the fact that he was a classicist. Certainly, he has al- ways championed and promoted Classics as a various, wide-ranging and open-minded discipline suitable for the intellectually adventurous. In his early years at the Col- lege, in addition to his teaching, Harry was the main or- ganizer of a series of marvellous trips to areas of classical interest, to Sicily, that is, and to Crete, Croatia, Greece, Rome and Turkey (and this is not to mention all those trips to Bath and Lullingstone). Apart from being smooth-
Harry arrived at the College in January 2011, in posses- sion of a first-class degree from Oxford in Classics and English at Highgate and The Tiffin Girls’ School. The marriage of intel- lectual achievement (never easy, that) and having taught
and teaching in this opening comment is deliberate because it was obvious from the beginning that, sophisticated literary critic though he was, Harry was also a thoughtful and innovative teacher of even the most basic material. That said, Harry’s sharp mind was, arguably, always happiest when focused on literary concerns. Here he provided our students with an interpretive attention to a writer’s language of an intensity more usually encountered at university. As a creative writer himself, Harry inspired especially rich lessons in the study of Latin poetry. The readings he excited in the students were marked not only by attention to linguistic detail but by an openness to plurality of meaning and by a sensitive understanding of the politics of the text. But Harry the creative writer was also willing to involve himself in the much more unpredict- able arena of creative writing classes, heroically helping
222
THE ALLEYNIAN 712
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker