Maj Langlands, teacher of Pakistan’s prime minister, dies in Lahore
Maj Geoffrey Langlands arrived in India as part of the British effort to ensure its orderly partition in 1947. He never left.
His subsequent career as a teacher followed the twists and turns of the new country of Pakistan where he was once kidnapped by militiamen and where he educated generations of political leaders, as well as taking tea with the country’s various military dictators.
When his death was announced yesterday at the age of 101, politicians, diplomats and leading businessmen were among those who paid tribute.
“Born on October 21, 1917 and affectionately known to all as ‘The Major’, we acknowledge the life of a soldier, teacher, gentleman, storyteller, mountaineer and humanitarian whose life was devoted in service to others and especially his adopted country Pakistan,” said a statement released by Lahore’s Aitchison College, where Langlands once worked and later lived out his retirement.
Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, is one of Langlands’ many former pupils. The teacher was on speaking terms with all of the country’s recent leaders, including Pervez Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif – each tapped for donations to his schools.
Haroun Rashid, a retired businessman who was a pupil at Aitchison from 1958 to 1969, remembered being taken on a 400-kilometre trek at the age of 13 that included crossing a mountain pass at an altitude of more than 5,000 metres
“Those experiences live with you for ever,” he said. “His entire life was dedicated to educating children in the widest possible sense, not just in the classroom.”
Mr Rashid is leading calls for a state funeral to honour a figure who became something of a national treasure.
Langlands arrived after serving with 4 Commando during the Second World War. He volunteered to join the British Indian army and stayed on after partition to act as an adviser to the new Pakistani Army.
Gen Ayub Khan, the military chief at the time, and later the country’s first military dictator, helped to find him a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Aitchison College, where the British had taught the sons of Indian royalty.
He won many admirers for his Mr Chips-style approach to instilling what Pakistanis believed to be British values of duty and punctuality in his pupils. He became known as much for always-shined shoes and pressed blazer as his motto of “do good and be good”.
So in the late 1970s when the education authorities needed someone to take over a new school in North Waziristan, deep in the restive tribal belt, they turned to Langlands.
“There were not any Pakistani teachers of note willing to take on that job,” said Mr Rashid.
The post came with unique challenges. On one occasion he was kidnapped by militiamen who wanted to overturn a disputed election result.
They believed that Gen Zia ulHaq, the president, would intervene if he knew the famous “Britisher” had been taken. Langlands was released after six days, an experience he later shrugged off as informative rather than traumatic. The election result stood.
In 1988 he moved to Chitral, in the mountainous, northern areas of Pakistan, taking over what became known as Langlands School and College.
He stayed for more than 20 years, taking the modest salary of £40 a week, and rising before dawn each day to breakfast on a bowl of Quaker Oats porridge followed by poached eggs – the secret to his long life, he said.
He was 94 when he finally stepped down, a process that was delayed by the stop-start search for a successor.
Friends said Langlands could not bear to give up his life at a school that had become renowned for its good grades, but he insisted prospective principals were worried about insecurity in an area hemmed in by Afghanistan on one side and by the Swat Valley, overrun by the Taliban in 2009, on the other.
“One of them actually wrote in his final letter that he thought Pakistan was supposed to be getting better and better but found out it was getting worse and worse,” he said in 2012. “But that is what has kept me here, the idea of getting my little bit better and better.”
That loyalty to Pakistan made him a popular figure in a country that has struggled with terrorism, sanctions and the rise of its regional rival India.
Langlands death was met with an outpouring of affection. “Major Langlands left us today after completion of his mission to enlighten Chitral with the light of knowledge,” wrote Ajmal Chitrali on Twitter. “His life gives us the lessons of patience, sacrifice and dedication.”
Thomas Drew, the British high commissioner to Islamabad, said: “Pakistan has lost a great friend and teacher of generations of its students.”