Jane Addis
Dining with wasps, fending off snakes and making maths a joy
JANE ADDIS, who has died aged 83, was the eccentric co-founder of the Merlin School in Putney and a highly effective teacher who selected her staff for being “good value at a dinner party”.
Her pupils included George Osborne, the financier Nat Rothschild and the actor Eddie Redmayne, and she devised imaginative schemes for teaching beginner’s maths two decades before researchers advocated similar techniques.
Jane Taylor was born on July 29 1934 into an outdoorsy Warwickshire family. Her father Geoffrey was a surgeon and an irascible England rugby star. Her mother, Isobel Lamond Lackie, had been a Scottish lacrosse international.
As a teenager Jane severely tested her father’s affections, accidentally running over and killing his dog and then reversing his Bentley into a wall. She was sent to Tudor Hall, Oxfordshire, where she loved lacrosse but achieved nothing academically.
A natural rebel, she hated the debutante scene and was already in love with “Ritty” Addis, her brother’s best friend from Rugby School who joined the Colonial Service as a District Officer in 1954. The 19-yearold Jane accepted his proposal and they began married life in Malaya.
From the start it was eventful. On one occasion, she noticed a deadly Blue Krait snake sticking out of Ritty’s sock as he climbed a fence. Disregarding the danger, she flicked it out with a twig, probably saving his life. Their children, Richard and Willa-jane, were born before the family were posted to the Gambia and more adventures.
When a ferry was left on its cable halfway across a broad, fast-flowing river, making it impassable, Ritty dived in to retrieve the vessel, unaware that the river was infested with crocodiles. He escaped unscathed.
Back in England, they moved to Warwickshire when Ritty began working for Courtaulds. Jane Addis coped calmly with several dramas, including her husband falling headfirst on to rocks at Lulworth Cove from where Willa-jane dragged him unconscious and bleeding.
She was equally sanguine when Richard became a trainee monk in his late teens then, following a passionate encounter at a party, changed tack, becoming a successful gossip columnist.
Jane Addis trained as a teacher in Birmingham. On moving to London she became Head of First Year at Colet Court, the prep school for St Paul’s. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Conservative MP, was a pupil. “She was strict, funny and slightly scary, with a posh voice and whiff of this Kiplingesque colonial background that intrigued us,” he recalled.
Seeing a gap in the pre-prep market, Jane Addis co-founded the Merlin School with Sir Alford Houstoun-boswall, the property developer. She would invite prospective teachers to dinner. “She always wanted inventive teachers, not people fussing about neat handwriting,” recalled one parent.
Jane Addis developed her own maths system, known as Merlin Maths, bringing the subject alive by using batches of coloured strings suspended from the ceiling.
Her quirky manner and outspokenness polarised people. She openly admitted that she found many girls “snivelling little creatures”, and always tried to dissuade parents from “ruining their children’s lives with individual music lessons and endless practising”.
She doubted the existence of dyslexia, telling parents that the best cure was to laugh more and run about. She insisted on eating outdoors and claimed that wasps were harmless and should be ignored, not always with happy results.
Widowed in 2007, Jane Addis moved to a flat in Shepherd Market, where she played bridge and was an indefatigable theatregoer, always happiest with her children, Richard, former editor of the Daily Express, and Willa-jane, who taught at Merlin. They survive her.
Jane Addis, July 29 1934, died January 4 2018