ROBERT Ivor Jones was the second Headmaster of West Monmouth School and under him the School attained an eminence that it had never reached before and will find hard to reach again. Though other factors contributed – some of his staff; an exceptional succession of able boys; the support of the Haberdashers – in no small measure this was due to his own qualities. He had panache. He impressed his style upon the institution in his charge. He was a great Headmaster.

He came to the School in 1913 and retired in 1942 on account of ill-health. He thus saw the School through the upheaval of two world wars, when the enlistment of so many masters inevitably threw a special burden upon the 'boss' as, in common with Millfield, but nowhere else that I have discovered, we tended to call our Head.

When he came to West Monmouth School he had already taught at Epsom, but at Pontypool he did not teach except the occasional lesson with senior boys preparing for scholarships and an occasional Scripture class, especially with the boarders of School House. These occasions were stimulating, discursive, some might say rambling. I remember one lesson that began with Isaiah and ended with soap.

We all had daily contact with him, however, at morning prayers in the Hall. To us new boys it was an awesome moment when Mr Watson reduced us to silence in a voice like that of a sergeant-major on the parade ground and asked the Captain of the School to notify the Headmaster that we were assembled. In he strode, severe of mien, gown swept behind his back with one hand, until he reached the platform, gazed round his young charges with a piercing glance, and at length addressed the prefect on duty with the words, "You may read". Only then did the tension ease.

Though he did not teach a form, there were occasional forays into the class-rooms. These could be terrifying to the indolent or unprepared, and unnerving even to others. I recall him addressing one flounderer in a Latin lesson with the imperative, "Decline cras". The unfortunate victim began "Cras, cras, cra..." to the titters of those who recollected that 'cras' was indeclinable. But usually he was in genial mood and would lift us out of the rut of the ordinary lesson to heights of which we were unaware. In the laboratories we were safe from these incursions. Science was to him a closed book, and he did not attempt to intervene.

There were occasional assemblies of the whole school, as when Frank Llewelyn Jones rigged up a crystal set to let us hear the new marvels of radio, or when he would introduce us young barbarians to classical music on that other new marvel, the gramophone. There was also, of course, the occasional summons to the 'office'. (By bad luck I was myself so summoned on my very first night as a boarder for being involved in a pillow fight after lights out). Those occasions were memorable not for their severity but for their solemnity. They left their mark in a spiritual rather than a physical sense.

R. Ivor Jones had been a good rugger player at Llandovery and Oxford, and it must have been a disappointment to him when he came to West Monmouth School to find that we played according to the Association code. It was all that we could hope to play on the sloping fields behind the School, but the local involvement in the Rugby code led to demands for a change, intensified when a former School Captain, Vince Griffiths, became a Welsh International. My recollection is that the leading spirit was Raymond Gower, fortified by his father, the vicar of St. James' Pontypool, who had been at Llandovery with 'R. Ivor', but the change was entirely to the taste of the Headmaster and he supported it strongly. It meant a new playing field near Skew Bridge. In our first match against Brecon we were beaten 80-0 but West Monmouth soon established itself as a nursery of Welsh rugger.

By the time I had left, but even while I was still there, the School had achieved notable academic success. At first it looked as though this would be in the field of medicine. We had a run of boys who took their first MB examination while still at school. R. Ivor backed this whole-heartedly, even to the point of suggesting that I might become a medical practitioner, forgetting for the moment the clumsiness of my hands. Edgar Parfitt and Gwyn Meara then suggested for a time that our future might lie with Modern Languages and the Humanities, but it was Harold Edwards who discovered our proper course Mathematics and Physics. He did not get a scholarship at Cambridge himself, but he showed us how to do it, and in the next few years five of us went up to Oxford. Two of us became Principals of University Colleges (Frank Llewelyn Jones at Swansea and Gwillym James at Southampton), one became a leading scientist at Farnborough and Woomera after winning the Junior Mathematical Prize (Harold Pritchard), one has benefited thousands by inventing a new hearing aid (A. E. Stevens) and one who in the course of a variegated career brought him into conflict with Prime Ministers and Archbishops, entered Parliament and held Ministerial Office.

I have written that R. Ivor was not markedly Welsh, but he had two of the characteristics of the Wales of those days. He was a Liberal and a Nonconformist, and he had a third gift that is associated with those two, the gift of speech. He used to speak for the Liberal candidates at Pontypool in the general elections and I remember one occasion (it must have been in 1922 or 1923) that he turned up at prayers in the morning after the poll, almost completely voiceless.

I could ramble on indefinitely about a man who meant so much in my own life, but I must close. I cannot do so without saying how much R. Ivor owed to the gracious lady, Edwina. She was a Cambridge woman with a mind as sharp and as scintillating as a diamond, in the days when women at Cambridge could get only 'titles to degrees'.

We boarders naturally saw more of her than the day boys, and we not only knew her as a gracious hostess at Sunday teas in her spacious drawing room which was a window on to a larger world, but we realised how much her support meant to him as a Headmaster. As it happens we saw more of their four charming daughters. Van, with whom in her widowhood Mrs. Ivor Jones lived at Richmond, was a disturbing influence to us adolescents when she used to parade on stilts outside our form-room windows. Later she and Merrill shared lessons with the boys in the lowest form before going to the Ladies' College, Cheltenham. They were a happy family, and so were we as a school. Growing up is a difficult process, and it can seldom be wholly easy, but we could not have asked for a kinder, more considerate, more understanding Headmaster than R. Ivor Jones who presided over the School's destiny for nearly thirty eventful years.