PETERHOUSE NOSTALGIA

... MEMORIES ...

FREDERICK ROWLANDSON SNELL : FOUNDING RECTOR

Address by Alan Megahey at the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Fred Snell, the Founding Rector, in the Peterhouse Chapel, Friday 24 May 1991

Frederick Rowlandson Snell was born in 1903, into a world very different from our own: the Tsars still ruled Russia; Kaiser Wilhelm was on the throne of Germany, the Boer War had ended only 16 months previously, the town of Salisbury in Rhodesia was a mere three years old. The British Empire was still not at its fullest extent. The telephone was practically unheard of; there was no radio, no commercial air flights... The horse was still a more common means of transport than any other.

Schooling

To be the child of an English vicarage in those Edwardian days was often the entree into the privileged world of education at public school and Oxbridge. So it was for Fred, who sat his scholarship examination to Winchester while the bloody and terrible battle of the Somme raged in France, and the sound of it could be heard in Southern England. One of his older contemporaries at school remembered how he watched a cricket match in that summer of 1916, thinking to himself "I shall be dead before two years are up..." Happily he lived to write the history of the school. So Fred went to Winchester College - the most elite intellectual powerhouse for boys in the whole of the empire, perhaps in the whole of the world. There he worked, and played hockey, and learned to play the organ. He arrived there before the Russian Revolution broke out He left Winchester while this country was still ruled by the British South Africa company. In 1924 Fred went up to Oxford, to the sort of collegiate atmosphere and life style you may have glimpsed in that marvellous film about the youth of those days, "Chariots of Fire".

Oxford

Fred was a scholar of Oriel College. I wonder did he ever chuckle at the story about the head of his college, Provost Phelps. When Fred met him the old man with his long white beard must have looked at least a hundred, and perhaps he wasn't far off it, because back in 1879 he had been part of a delegation of Fellows sent to congratulate their most distinguished old boy, John Henry Newman, on his creation as a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. When they were ushered into Newman's presence, Phelps with fine Anglican and public school heartiness went up to his Eminence, shook him firmly by the hand, and said, "Well done, Newman, well done!" Fred entered Provost Phelps' college to read chemistry at the same time that A J P Taylor, who recounts that Newman story, went there to read history. Fred might have gone on to do research in Chemistry, and indeed he stayed long enough to gain an extra degree in his subject But instead, he chose to be a Schoolmaster, as did another young man at Oxford who was just two months older than Fred and who also went on to be a great headmaster - Robert Birley, of Eton, who himself spoke in this chapel in 1966. Both of them became schoolmasters for the same reasons - a sense of service, a feeling that this was a significant way to use one's talents; a desire to pass on to succeeding generations the riches of a civilization which had seemed all but to destroy itself in that war to end all wars. For Oxford in the twenties was not merely the Oxford of "Brideshead Revisited"; it was also the Oxford of Fred's radical Winchester contemporaries Dick Crossman and Hugh Gaitskell; the Oxford of the General Strike and political activism. Reaction to the Great War sometimes expressed itself in the indulgent hedonism of cocktails, the Charleston, the world of Bertie Wooster; but it also expressed itself in great social and political causes or - as in the case of Birley and Snell, a firm commitment to the education of the young.

St John's College, Agra

So in 1927 Fred went to teach in India, at St John's College, Agra. In 1928 he married Margaret, also a clergyman's daughter and an Oxford graduate who was up at Somerville College with Birley's sister. Their first two children, Janet and Pippa, were born in India, the India of the Raj, though already beginning to feel the stirrings of Ghandi's nationalism: that India so vividly and caustically recorded by Malcolm Muggeridge, an exact contemporary of Fred's who also worked as a schoolmaster there, and actually under Fred's Headmaster, in the early twenties.

Climbing

Fred had already discovered the joys of mountaineering in the Swiss Alps and the Austria Tyrol in his student days, and now was able to enjoy them to the full in the great peaks of the Himalayas, three years after another old Wyckhamist Mallory, perished on Everest. But service called, and Fred became active in TocH founded after the war on the four principles of Fellowship, Service, Fairmindedness and the Kingdom of God. Even now, in Giant's Castle up at Nyanga, there hangs a picture of the Prince of Wales flanked by TocH Founder Tubby Clayton lighting the fire to kindle that movement: the photo is a leaving gift inscribed by Fred's colleagues, "Agra 1934".]

Eastbourne

The family returned to England as Hitler came to power and at the time of the great depression. Fred became Head of Science, and a Housemaster, at Eastbourne - a public school in Sussex far from the worst of the depressed areas. Here again, service called, and Fred became Vice Chairman of The Eastbourne Unemployment Council and took parties of boys to Yorkshire and Wales to do social service in those distressed areas, before he allowed them and himself to indulge in a holiday with the inevitable climbing

Michaelhouse

At the age of 35, a few months after the Munich Crisis, Fred and his family arrived at Michaelhouse in Natal, he the youngest Rector ever appointed, and certainly the youngest looking. I'm sure many of you know the story of how one day, returning from a swim clad only in a towel he was accosted by some prospective parents who asked this "boy" were they would find the Rector. Fred directed them to his study proceeded there himself by a quicker route, and the astonished parents found themselves ushered into the presence of the same towel clad "boy", now the Rector of Michaelhouse. The chapter in the school history which deals with his rectorship is well entitled "Creative vigour amid war's disruption". There were wartime constraints as staff went off to the forces, money was tight, building was prohibited. Yet by the time Fred left Michaelhouse in 1952, the enlarged Chapel had been completed - a war memorial to all those who had died. And in it, largely thanks to Fred's insistence, there was that magnificent rose window by Bossanyi. Again, too, he left a record of the importance of service: links were encouraged with Adams College, a school for blacks - and testimony to the importance of those links is recorded by an old student of Adams, Mr Douglas Sagonda, now a member of our Governing Body. The Michaelhouse estate got its own school for workers children, and, not without considerable opposition, a few non-whites were enrolled in the school. These were the actions of a man who was to speak here in this chapel 15 years later of the need to build bridges between the races, and who lived to hear the first prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe quote his words with approval and esteem at Speech Day in 1987. And these were the actions of a man who viewed with unease the National Party's policies, which after their election victory of 1947, were taking South Africa in the direction of a more divided and intolerant society.

Founding Peterhouse

Having served longer than any Rector before him, Fred now in his early fifties - took up another challenge. He had visited Rhodesia and enjoyed the climbing here. He could see the need for an independent school like Michaelhouse in this country -- there was no such school, and the Ruzawi governors had long hoped there would be one. Fred the Rector became Fred the prospector, the pioneer, the builder. The site was chosen from a selection of 47, and a galaxy of notables were recruited to patronise the new foundation -- Ellis Robbins, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, Archbishop Paget, Canon Grinham, Mr Harry Oppenheimer, Sir Keith Acutt. These are our founders and benefactors whom we remember at our Patronal Festival. But first among them stands Frederick Rowlandson Snell We are here today because of what he created; we are seated in a chapel which he rightly saw as the heart and centre of Peterhouse, a school not merely constructed of granite quarried here on the estate, but "Conditur in Petra", rooted in rock, the rock of the Christian Faith.

"Let us now praise great and famous men, and our fathers that begat us."

A man of fortitude, faith and vision

This is a thanksgiving service, an occasion - as Fred himself required it to be - of joy not sorrow. But joy and thanksgiving for what? For a long life, lived out on three continents - yes. For the successful career of a great schoolmaster - yes. For a marriage that lasted 62 years, and for four children and 7 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren of that marriage - yes.

But that is not all. The joy and the thanksgiving are because, first, Fred Snell was a man of fortitude.

By fortitude I mean an inner strength which can stand firm amid the changes and chances of this fleeting world. Soon after Fred left Winchester, the War Memorial Cloister there was completed - its wording composed by his old Headmaster, Montague Rendall. Listen to the words which you can go and read in that cloister: "Thanks be to God for the service of these five hundred Wykehamists, who were found faithful unto death amid the manifold chances of the Great War. In the day of battle, they forgot not God, who created them to do his will, nor their country, the stronghold of freedom, nor their School, the mother of godliness and discipline... Thou therefore for whom they died, seek not thine own, but serve as they served, gentle in all things, valiant in action, steadfast in adversity.

I like to think of Fred recalling those words at Michaelhouse, as the toll mounted of 150 old boys killed in action in the Second World War; or when UDI was declared here during his Rectorship, and the country faced an unknown and unsettled future; or while he was Provincial Secretary , the Bishops of this Province while another war raged, and when soldiers and civilians, schoolchildren and schoolteachers had their lives broken or ended. Fred Snell was, by temperament, by training and by faith, a man of fortitude, in peace and in war.

And he was also a man of faith. His strength of character, his convictions, his long service to his fellow-men, all stemmed from a Christian faith which he was fearless in proclaiming, and which he shared with Margaret until his very last days. Each Speech Day here and at Michaelhouse that Faith lit up the Rector's words.

And from that faith came the vision. In our School Prayer, we thank God for the "faith and vision" which brought this school into being. It was the result of the vision of a man for whom music and culture were important, as well as games; for whom the best traditions of the English Public School were to be adapted and adopted and firmly planted in the soil of this country; for whom the pressing need in the early sixties was to make this school multi racial, which he did, and to establish a fund to enable black children to attend this and the other independent schools of Zimbabwe, which was achieved through the efforts of Dr Bob Williams, our chairman.

Frederick Rowlandson Snell was a man of fortitude, of faith and of vision. Towards the end of his life, Fred Snell could look back to when he was the age of the boys in this chapel, surveying some 70 years of achievements. I hope the boys here, when they look back from the second half of the 21st century, will be able to remember this day, and recall the inspiration they received, and the lessons they learnt, and the vision they may have glimpsed - largely because of this man of fortitude, faith and vision.

We give thanks for the life and work of Frederick Rowlandson Snell, and we commend his soul to God in the words of the Russian Contakion for the Dead, which he himself requested should be sung today.

AJM