Tony Trott
Gifted English teacher who inspired generations of pupils including Jonathan Coe and Lee Child
TONY TROTT, who has died aged 90, spent his entire working life, apart from a stint in the Navy, as an inspirational teacher of English at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, for all but the first two years as head of department.
Many of his pupils went on to stellar careers as writers, broadcasters or academics, among them the novelist Jonathan Coe, who remembered that Trott “had a gut conviction that literature was the best possible way of understanding your fellow human beings, and therefore the world itself.”
Sir John Grimley Evans, the specialist in geriatric medicine, who was taught by Trott in the 1950s, credited him with changing the course of his life: “He started talking about poetry, and new worlds opened up. I was a disorganised adolescent, in danger of dropping out, and Tony turned me around.”
Anthony John Trott was born on August 1 1926 in West London, the son of Hinton and Winifred Trott. After Ealing County Grammar School he went up to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he read English in the era of Basil Willey and the combative scholar F R Leavis. He felt ambiguous about Leavis, admiring him but thinking he was a disruptive force. Several of Trott’s sixth-formers detected a more generous and openminded version of Leavis’s approach in his literary criticism.
Trott did his National Service in the Royal Navy, and was determined not to be an officer, considering that he was not “officer material”. He was sent on an aircraft carrier to Malta, where he enjoyed the Navy club, playing the piano, singing Noël Coward songs, telling jokes and going to operas.
On his return he took a PGCE at Cambridge and was interviewed for the lectureship at Swansea University which went to Kingsley Amis and inspired Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim.
Trott’s appointment to King Edward’s in 1950 was his first and only job. Some young teachers might have found it a daunting institution. Founded in 1552, it was then a direct grant grammar school, though retaining the idiosyncratic terms and customs normally associated with a public school. The main hall, called “Big School”, was used as a location in the 1986 film Clockwise. The list of old boys includes J RR Tolkien, Field Marshal Slim and Enoch Powell.
Trott, who favoured natty threepiece suits and exotic shirts and ties, had considerable thespian gifts and quickly immersed himself in school drama, acting in staff productions and producing at least one play a year. The second of two productions of Murder in the Cathedral was the first to import girls from the sister school across the drive. Becket was played first by Grimley Evans and then by Kevin Lee, later the award-winning playwright Kevin Elyot, a lifelong friend.
Trott met Doris Coulman when she was ironing costumes for a school production, and they were married in 1957. The night before he proposed to her, he was nervous, drank too much and fell asleep on the Tube, waking up at the terminus. The couple were active members of the Labour Party, but from the start he had settled easily at the historic school, finding the common room “very amenable, very attractive, very friendly” and feeling no desire to apply for other jobs. “I wanted to teach the stuff I wanted to teach,” he said.
He could be very funny. Addressing a London dinner of the Old Edwardians in 2003, he regaled his audience with four decades’ worth of anecdotes including one from the 1950s which involved a boy rigging masters’ filing cabinets with small explosive charges.
He was a humane and sensitive mentor, notably to less self-confident “scholarship boys” from humbler backgrounds. Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), which Trott proofread, was loosely modelled on his experience at the school in the 1970s, and captures his unease at the place.
Another pupil, Jim Grant (now Lee Child, writer of the Jack Reacher novels), recalled Trott’s spirit-lifting interventions when he felt “adrift and demoralised”. For Bill Oddie, the birdwatcher, a pupil in the 1950s, he was “the quintessential mentor”.
On one occasion in the 1970s Trott was studying Auden’s “Lay your sleeping head, my love …” with an Olevel class. One of the boys had unearthed the fact that Auden was gay, and noticed that the poem contains no gendered pronouns. “Are we studying a homosexual love poem, sir?” came the question.
There was a pause, before Trott said: “Well, this is how it is. Some chaps fall in love with girls; and some chaps fall in love with other chaps. And that’s really all there is to say about it.”
He brought his flamboyant sense of theatre to lessons, and disliked writers who were self-indulgent, sloppy or verbose: these, in his view, included Shelley and Dylan Thomas. He loved rude stories and had a small boy’s streak of mischief and irreverence.
Outside the classroom, Trott was a good middle-order batsman and a reliable umpire who coached the Second XI. He played the piano daily and had a passion for Mozart opera, reading miniature scores and hearing the music in his head. The Trotts spent their holidays travelling across Europe by train, particularly to Italy.
He was a committed Christian, as a young schoolmaster attending the high Anglican church of the Ascension, Stirchley, where his friend Michael Parslew’s father was parish priest. He rarely discussed religion, but once told a friend that he thought the best explanation for human psychology lay in the doctrine of Original Sin. From his retirement at the end of the 1980s until his final illness he volunteered for the Samaritans.
During the 1960s he co-edited three scholarly editions of Pope and edited one of Webster’s The White Devil. In 1992 he published a lively history of the school, its title, No Place for Fop or Idler, taken from the magnificently grandiose school song.
Tony Trott is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.