WHEN SIR Terry Pratchett, the bestselling author who died last week at the age of 66, began writing his series of fantasy novels, he cast his mind back to an unlikely place for inspiration – his old school days in Buckinghamshire.
It can now be revealed that the creator of the Discworld series, who sold 85million copies of his books worldwide, named a number of his characters after teachers at John Hampden Grammar School, in High Wycombe, which he attended between 1958 and 1965.
The teachers have been identified for the first time, along with a previously unpublished story Pratchett wrote for the school magazine at the age of 17.
Most fans of Pratchett’s Discworld series, set in an imaginary world on a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants, which stand in turn on the back of a giant turtle, will recognise the character of Evil Harry Dread from The Last Hero, the 27th novel in the series. What few will know is that he was named after, and partly inspired by Harry Ward, headmaster of the school between 1958 and 1983.
A year after Mr Ward began his long reign, a young Terry Pratchett joined the school. Pratchett later told a newer generation of teachers there that he was once chased by Mr Ward and accused of stealing a volume of Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica that he had picked up after the head teacher had himself thrown it out as rubbish.
The writer had rather more affectionate memories of Stan Betteridge, a former history teacher at John Hampden, which may explain why he used his name in full, also in The Last Hero, as a member of the Guild of Historians in Ankh-Morpork, a city-state which serves as a parody of London or New York. The name of another teacher, Mr Stibbons, who taught tech- nology, appears as Ponder Stibbons, a wizard in the Discworld series. When Pratchett visited the school in the early Nineties he paid tribute to a long-retired member of staff who had inspired him. Pointing to a photograph he said: “She’s the one who picked out my homework story and started me off. And I can’t remember her name.”
During the same visit he entertained pupils with memories of making an omelette in a test tube and of discovering a wonderland of ideas in a bookshop in the nearby village of Penn, including a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Asked by one pupil where he got his ideas from, Pratchett replied: “There’s a warehouse near Rickmansworth.”
It was at John Hampden that Pratchett had his first piece of fiction published, a short story called The Picture which was printed in The Cygnet school magazine, in 1965, and is reproduced here.
Pratchett developed Alzheimer’s in his late 50s and became a campaigner both for more funding for research into the condition and for the right to assisted suicide, or, as he called it, assisted death.
John Hampden school is now planning a fundraising campaign in support of Alzheimer’s research and will name its library after the author.
And that English teacher who inspired his writing? She was in fact Miss Cambledick, a Discworld name if ever there was one.