Today, many years after my retirement from Umso, I am still greeted as ‘My Prince’, ‘My Teacher’, ‘Sir’, ‘Meneer Prince’ , ‘Meneer Teacher’, even sometimes ‘Meneer Prince My Teacher Sir’, when I appear or reappear in the village. (Many who do so ever hopeful that their school education could somehow be transformed into sustainable employment … )

In 1976 he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for twenty-three years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978-83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983-9; Master (a Chinese friend, a stranger to English terminology, once murmured, "Downhill all the way"). Although Driver spent several decades living abroad in England, his early life in South Africa always remained a key focus in his writing and he was an active participant and supportive presence in the local literary community. He will live on in his written works and the memories of family and friends.He was described within his valete, which appeared in the October 1989 edition of The Berkhamstedian as “the first of the ‘modern’ headmasters of Berkhamsted who recognised the need to get out and about- forging international links, teacher swaps, the introduction of scholars from other continents, contributing to the work of the Headmasters’ Conference and many other public engagements and visits abroad. All these activities have brought the name of Berkhamsted to the forefront, sometimes in places where it was little known before, as well as enriching the life of the School in many ways.” In addition to his career in education, Jonty has been a senior lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia since 2007. He has had numerous novels and volumes of poetry published including A Messiah of the Last Days (Faber) and Before (a collection of 22 poems, published by Crane River).

Some Schools. John Catt Educational. 30 November 2016. ISBN 9781909717978. (About the five schools at which Driver worked) It was really through this sequence of poems that I came to know Jonty well. We had met through a shared love of haiku. He had been perhaps over-generous in writing about my own attempts at the genre. He never of course lost the teacher’s desire to encourage nor the ability to do so. But when I read Requiemfor the first time I saw the chance to do something creative with it. Jonty had explained that Brahms’ German Requiem,a much more “secular” requiem than the liturgical texts usually set, had been the inspiration for him. It seemed obvious to me to wrap music around the poetry. So I asked the cellist Guy Johnston, then a recent winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year, to weave a Bach cello suite “around” Jonty’s poetry. It was one of those happenstances in response to which you could hear a pin drop, as an entranced congregation of hundreds in Westminster Abbey oneSunday eveningpaid rapt attention to both music and text, and found in them a depth of spiritual encounter that was as moving for them as for the author and Ann, his wife of almost fifty years to whom he was so devoted. When, later, I suggested that Jonty himself be asked to read lines of Shakespeare at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Nelson Mandela in the Abbey, he was both thrilled, honoured, and humbled. In 1976, he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for 23 years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978–83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983–9; Master, Wellington College, 1989–2000). [2] [6] Writing career [ edit ] Driver is married with three children and eight grandchildren and stays is East Sussex with his wife.It used to be said that all of us think we know about education because we have all been to school; Some Schools, very attractively produced (a handful of misprints) by John Catt Educational, should enthral any reader for that reason; it will convey to anyone what teaching is really like with its difficulties and its joys. The strongest impression I had from it is that any parents reading it would be truly delighted to have someone with the qualities of Jonty Driver overseeing the education of their children. CJ Driver will be missed by so many for a rare combination of straight talking, deep learning, and transforming friendship. Through it all, he offered a distinctive and rare example of the very best sort of leadership, the kind you cannot learn from books but is engraved in flesh. His passing surely prompts us to give great thanks for this and to hope for political and educational leaders who also possess such courage, insight, and grace.Amen, old friend. Jonty’s first teaching job was at Sevenoaks School, where he eventually became housemaster of the International Centre. After posts at a comprehensive school in Lincolnshire and as a research fellow at York University he held the post of headmaster of the Island School, Hong Kong, for 6 years. From 1983-1989 he was headmaster of Berkhamstead School and from 1989-2000 he was master of Wellington College.

The Man with the Suitcase: The Life, Execution and Rehabilitation of John Harris, Liberal Terrorist. Cape Town: Crane River. 2015. ISBN 9780620668521. but this is the first time the sequence has been published independently. The third pamphlet is THE SLAVE-BELL AT DOORNHOEK, a painting & a poem, and the fourth THE CHINESE POEMS, This is all narrated in an easy but expressive jargon-free style with a great deal of humour, much of it directed at the author himself and a picture emerges of someone whom we can unreservedly admire and not only because of his opposition to apartheid, something the author barely mentions. Jonty Driver is not only an idealist, as I said, but one whose idealism is tempered by an underpinning of pragmatism. The cookie is set by CasaleMedia. The cookie is used to collect information about the usage behavior for targeted advertising.To the last years at Wellington belonged perhaps one of his finest works, Requiem, a beautiful sequence of poems in which some of his most consistent themes, memory and exile, the power of family and the landscape among them, found consummate expression. Among the heroes of the struggle to defeat apartheid, many stood tall but none perhaps physically taller than CJ Driver, known to many as Jonty.