Major Geoffrey Langlands
Headmaster, wartime commando and ‘quintessential Englishman’ who taught maths and old-fashioned virtues at elite schools in Pakistan
MAJOR GEOFFREY LANGLANDS, who has died aged 101, was a doughty schoolmaster who “stayed on” in Pakistan after colonial rule ended in India; he taught arithmetic and old-fashioned British values on the remote, mountainous Afghan frontier until he retired at the age of 94.
“The Major”, as he was known, fought during the Second World War as a commando; was kidnapped by Waziri tribesmen and survived his adopted country’s turbulent early history, including three Indo-pakistani wars – during one of which he formed a defence militia recruited from among his school’s cooks and gardeners.
His pupils included princes and chieftains and future prime ministers and generals – to whom he always spoke in later life with the same schoolmasterly manner. He was dubbed by The New York
Times “the quintessential Englishman of old, a living relic of the Raj”; yet he had an unremarkable physical presence; it was his popularity, his twinkly-eyed doggedness and his quietly astute grasp of Pakistani affairs that enabled him to survive the region’s often deadly political undercurrents.
Geoffrey Douglas Langlands was born in Hull on October 21 1917. He had an impoverished and sad childhood. The younger of twin brothers, he was orphaned at the age of 12. His friends and family paid for him to attend King’s College, Taunton. On leaving he enrolled as a teacher at Coombe Hill House preparatory school in Croydon. In the evenings he took classes at Birbeck College, where he read Mathematics.
At the outbreak of war, Langlands volunteered to join the Army. He began his military career with the Somerset Light Infantry, before he was drafted to No 4 Commando. As a sergeant serving under Lord Lovat – whom he later described as “a real Scottish warlord, who unlike these Afghan warlords, was highly disciplined” – he took part in the disastrous amphibious raid on Dieppe in 1942.
In 1944, after serving three and half years as a commando, he was selected for officer training and dispatched on a three-week voyage in a troopship to the Indian subcontinent, where he was to spend the rest of his life. On joining the Royal Garhwal Rifles he was told by his commanding officer: “Either you will be killed violently by Japanese, or by some disease.”
On the eve of Independence in 1947, Langlands witnessed the communal bloodletting that accompanied Partition. He found himself stranded on a train in no-man’s-land, where he helped to prevent Hindu troops under his command from being butchered; he came under fire from Muslim gunmen, and farther down the line he saw Sikhs attacking a mosque.
He chose to serve with the Pakistani army while things settled down. He did not anticipate staying long: after six years spent selecting and training would-be Pakistani army officers, his contract came to an end in 1953 and he intended to return to teach in Britain. However, the then commander-in-chief, General Ayub Khan, persuaded him to stay on.
Langlands took up a teaching post in Lahore at Aitchison College, a school known as “the Eton of Pakistan” where the British had educated the sons of India’s tribal royalty. He remained at the school for 25 years. He taught mathematics and English, and was appointed a housemaster and then as the headmaster of the junior school.
Langlands was a muchloved figure. During the 1971 war against India he drilled the college’s servants into a sort of Home Guard. It did not last long: when an Indian plane zoomed overhead, he said, “they hid under the banyan trees”. He introduced summer treks for senior boys and boasted that he had covered more than 3,000 miles on foot in Pakistan’s mountains.
It was at Aitchison, among his pupils, that he met many people who would later rise to influential positions. He claimed to have coaxed Imran Khan, the cricketerturned-politician, into paying more attention in class. Later, when asked about his former pupil’s conservative religious politics, he replied: “The less said the better”. An American ambassador to Islamabad once observed that Langlands had taught half of the government.
In 1979 Langlands helped to found Razmak Cadet College in the lawless border tribal area of North Waziristan. For 10 years he served as the principal of the college, which was built inside a fort and surrounded by some of the area’s most bellicose tribes.
In 1988 a local chief, who had taken part in a byelection and lost, kidnapped Langlands in the hope that he might have the result overturned. Langlands’s captors took him to an outlaw village, where he met the kidnapper’s parents who laid on “a rather good dinner”. They insisted on taking a souvenir photograph with him. Later they invited Langlands to join them for target practice.
Tribal elders secured his release after he had spent six days in captivity. He was reported to have emerged from the incident as coolly “as if he was returning from a routine staff meeting”. General Zia ul-haq, Pakistan’s military ruler, advised him to return to England. He declined.
In 1989, at the age of 72, he took on the job of headmaster at the newly founded 80-pupil Sayurj Public School at the tip of the country in the isolated valley of Chitral, high in the Himalayan range of the Hindu Kush bordering Afghanistan.
Hemmed in by soaring snow-capped peaks, Chitral is cut off by snow from the rest of the country for four months each year; but through his mildly authoritarian manner and emphasis on self-discipline, Langlands managed to increase the number of girls and boys from 80 to 900; the school became a by-word for academic excellence, with some of its pupils going on to university overseas.
Langlands met with prime ministers and military rulers, whom – as part of his perpetual mission to raise money for his school – he would greet with the words: “Now what I want from you is one million rupees.” He became a something of a fixture on foreign dignitaries’ tours of Pakistan. His fan club included many Britons, some of whom held a fundraising cricket match in 2010 at Chelsea where a British Army XI represented Major Langlands’s school. The band of the Coldstream Guards struck up at tea.
Chitral largely escaped the violence that wracked the surrounding region for over a decade after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Langlands ignored several warnings, friendly and unfriendly, to leave the area. Locals were indignant when it was suggested that their most venerated guest might need a bodyguard.
In his nineties, the frail, tie-wearing, blue-blazered, blue-eyed and silvery haired Langlands led a parsimonious life that amused visiting foreign correspondents: he woke at 5am to the BBC World Service news; an hour later his bearer served him a breakfast of porridge from Quaker Oats, two poached eggs and two cups of Lipton’s tea. Apart from cheese with Carr’s Water Biscuits and baked beans on toast, he enjoyed a single tot of whisky on Saturday evenings. He deemed the local brew of the neighbouring Kalash people to be “very ordinary table wine”. His salary: £40 a week.
Langlands’s small bungalow was overrun by a creeping tide of dusty books, pots of pens and maths texts. He was often seen reading the previous year’s Spectators with a magnifying glass. He spoke in a slow, crisp English that was occasionally punctuated with “Achha, Achha” [Hindi for “Yes”].
After his retirement he continued to raise funds for the school, whose name was changed to the Langlands School and College in 2006. His old pupils arranged a small flat for him, where he lived on in the immaculate grounds of his old school, Aitchison.
In June 2015, however, two years after passing the baton to Carey Schofield, a British writer brought in as his replacement at Langlands, he made a surprise return visit to the school to stage an extraordinary “coup” against her while she was visiting London, declaring that local people were unhappy at her management style and even getting her visa revoked by Pakistan’s ministry of the interior.
But the school’s board of governors emphatically threw its backing behind Carey Schofield, saying she had inherited a “Herculean task” in reforming the school, that she enjoyed “wide credibility in Chitral among parents, students and the wider public”, and suggesting that the 97-year old Langlands was not fit to take over again.
Carey Schofield eventually resumed her duties after the school’s entire staff travelled more than a thousand miles on a rickety school bus to lobby Langlands to drop his opposition. “After we told him about the realities of Miss Carey and all she has done for the school,” one member of staff was quoted as saying, “he realised he had done a very wrong thing and wanted to help make things right.”
Though fiercely loyal to Pakistan, Langlands remained a British subject, saying: “My values are British. I speak to the poor and to rulers in the same manner. But I do not want to go back [to Britain].”
In 1983 he was appointed MBE for services to education in Pakistan.
Langlands was unmarried.
Major Geoffrey Langlands, born October 21 1917, died January 2 2019