James Sabben-Clare
Winchester headmaster who ran the school with a light touch and had a flair for theatre and music
JAMES SABBEN-CLARE, the former headmaster of Winchester College, who has died aged 75, was one of the most gifted schoolmasters of his generation; outwardly reserved and afflicted in his youth with a stammer so pronounced that his teachers hesitated to question him, he shone as a classical scholar, author, actor, sportsman, carpenter and cabaret artiste.
His appointment to the headship in 1985 after several years on the Winchester staff was never likely to be easy. But he established himself through quiet intellectual authority, personal integrity and reliability. It was said that Sabben-Clare could put more good sense on to a single sheet of A4 than anyone since Tacitus.
He ran the school with a light touch. Although unflappably in control, he recognised the quality, power and independent-mindedness of his staff and allowed them free range.
In an age of increasing academic competition, he maintained the school’s place near the top of the league tables, even though (or because) a quarter of the timetable was free of exam teaching. His own wide interests maintained the example of educational breadth and culture set by his predecessor, John Thorn.
Sabben-Clare’s cool mind was matched by a warm heart. He always had time for his two children, of whom he was enormously proud, and was unostentatiously generous both to his staff and to outsiders.
The head of a special school a dozen miles away was astonished one day to receive a knock on his study door and to recognise the headmaster of Winchester, who had dropped in to deliver a cheque for £750.
He was firmly against corporal punishment and was quick to abolish it as head. In schools sometimes referred to by their opponents as secular monasteries, he appointed a number of women to the staff and encouraged cooperation in drama and music with St Swithun’s, the local girls’ school.
James Paley Sabben-Clare was born on September 9 1941, the son of Ernest Sabben-Clare, himself a distinguished headmaster of Leeds Grammar School. James won the top scholarship to Winchester and was a scholar at New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Mods and Greats and was elected a Visiting Fellow of All Souls.
With the world at his feet he decided to become a schoolmaster, first at Marlborough and then, from the age of 27, at Winchester. He spent the rest of his career there as head of Classics, second master and then as headmaster.
He wrote a textbook on Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a translation of Aesop’s Fables (a copy of which was printed in-house and presented to the Queen Mother) and a History of Winchester College. when he was a member of its academic committee, it had been said that other members, concentrating fully, came to the wrong conclusion while he, with half his mind elsewhere, came to the right one.
His family included several generations of actors and he had a deep love of the theatre and of music. He enjoyed directing school plays and on one remarkable occasion took over the role of Prospero at short notice on the illness of the boy playing the part.
But his forte was comedy, whether as an ugly sister in the school pantomime, as a late-night cabaret artiste at the Southern Cathedrals Festival or (his party piece) doing his dinosaur impression. This involved his leaving the room and re-emerging with slow, deliberate steps, sharp sideways movements of the head, lizard-like eyes and the flickering of an enormous tongue.
He was a superb writer of lyrics for all occasions and in all styles. A party of Americans doing Winchester in half an hour was written up as a barn dance; and Winchester Cathedral’s sophisticated Tippett/Tournemire festival programme as a calypso.
Performing in the Southern Cathedrals Festival show, he gently targeted the cathedral clergy. In Olympic Year he invented the Ecclesiastical Games, in which the Bishop was entered for the Feeding of the Five Thousand “and he’s going in the Ten Thousand as well”.
During the year of strikes in 1979, he imagined a national clergymen’s strike: “It is our aim to bring this government to its knees.”
A governor of several schools while he was a headmaster, he continued after leaving Winchester in 2000, notably at Oundle School and the British School of Paris. But his major contribution was to join the steering committee of four which set up the Prince’s Teaching Institute. This organisation grew out of the Prince of Wales’s desire to provide the best education for pupils of all backgrounds across the country by inspiring their teachers with a love of their subject.
Summer schools attended by Simon Schama, Tom Stoppard and other speakers led to an expansion of the programme which has now involved and enthused 5,000 teachers and headteachers and, through them, half a million children. He became passionately absorbed in this project and was closely associated with it for 15 years. When he was forced to give it up Prince Charles saw him privately to express his gratitude.
Sabben-Clare also contributed generously to local activities, finding the time to chair the governing body of his local primary school, to be on the committee of the Dorset Historic Churches Trust and to teach Greek to a local girl who has now completed a degree course in Classics.
He owed much to his wife, Mary, whose intelligence, sense of fun and generous hospitality made a huge contribution to Winchester life. Their courtship in the summer of 1969 included a marathon drive to Scotland to attend the wedding of a friend, during which the normally orderly and logical Sabben-Clare forgot the keys to his parents’ house in Leeds where they were due to spend the night and decided to drive on to Edinburgh.
On arrival at 5am, attempting to put the car into reverse to park it, he managed to pull the gear lever out of its socket. They made the wedding with a minute to spare and got engaged two weeks later.
His wife survives him with their son and daughter. James Sabben-Clare, born September 9 1941, died March 8 2017