L'AFFAIRE BROWN

A playground haircut unearths some ponderous yet familiar issues for Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith on a haircut with serious repercussions

Irecently returned from a book tour of Australia. This trip involved a few days in Melbourne, one of the most charming of Australian cities, with its Victorian and Edwardian domestic architecture, its coffee house culture, and its stately public buildings.

In some respects, Melbourne is a bit like Edinburgh, and one of these respects is that it has a large number of long-established schools with all the tribalism that goes with such institutions. One example is Trinity Grammar, where a remarkable row developed during my Melbourne sojourn. It started with a haircut. But before the haircut a new principal had been appointed at Trinity.

This principal – a distinguished educationalist – had been chosen to turn what was perhaps a somewhat old-fashioned school into a modern highachieving institution. Examination results needed to be improved and new facilities added. That meant that money had to be raised.

The new principal’s arrival triggered the departure of a number of teachers, but one stalwart remained, and that was Mr Brown, a much-loved Mr Chips figure. Mr Brown was very popular with the boys, with parents, and with old boys of the school.

He had a reputation as a man who would stand no nonsense – firm but fair, being the general view. Brownie, as everyone called him, was regarded by many people associated with the school as embodying the traditions of Trinity, and its concern with producing balanced, confident young men. He was not the sort of man to focus exclusively on academic success.

There was a certain boy with long hair. This boy had been told on a number of occasions to get his hair cut. He had not complied, and when the day came for the school photograph to be taken, Mr Brown decided to take action, got hold of a pair of scissors, and gave the boy a compulsory haircut in the playground.

The days when teachers could do that sort of thing appear to have passed. The boy’s parents complained and although the issue was resolved from their point of view, it ended up before the school’s governing body. The decision was taken to sack Mr Brown on the grounds that his actions were not in accord with contemporary community standards. The sacking caused an uproar. The Old Boys’ Association immediately went onto a war footing and demanded the resigna- tion of the principal. The boys began to riot, calling loudly for the reinstatement of Brownie and refusing to wear school uniforms in protest.

The press took note of all this, of course, and soon I, along with just about everybody else in Melbourne at the time, became utterly engrossed in the issue. This, after all, had turned into a miniature affaire Dreyfus.

Wider ramifications of the haircut have been extensively debated in the Australian press. For some, the whole issue was an example of how we have lost our sense of proportion when it comes to dealing with children and their welfare.

Some supporters of Mr Brown took the view that schoolboys should be more robust and that nobody is harmed if teachers occasionally snip a few locks off their manes. Others felt that the cutting of a pupil’s hair was perhaps going a bit far, but that it was ridiculous to end somebody’s career on the basis of one misguided moment.

The anti-Brown faction did not agree: people in that camp said that schools have to modernise and that there is no room in a 21st century school for Mr Chips-figures, especially those with itchy scissor fingers. Yet others felt that the principal was himself the victim of a witch-hunt by people who disagreed with his plans to revise the school’s priorities.

I left Melbourne when the arguments were still raging. Both sides had engaged eminent lawyers. One haircut had parted society down the middle. The broader questions hang in the air: are we allowing mob rule to determine too many issues? Are people being punished out of all proportion to their failures or transgressions? Are we too fixated on academic results rather than character education?

One small haircut: several major, weighty issues, all of them pending – and all of them eerily familiar.

The boys began to riot, calling loudly for the reinstatement of Brownie