John Dancy

Last week, Professor John Dancy died. He was head master of Lancing 1953-1961, being succeeded by Sir William Gladstone; he was head also of Marlborough and of the education department at Exeter University.

He was not an altogether satisfactory head at Lancing; but he was an example of an almost (do I mean totally?) extinct breed: the Scholar head master. He wrote an elegant commentary on the Maccabees; George Kilpatrick, in the preface to his own edition of the Greek New Testament, included him in the dozen or so names of those who had been particularly helpful.

Dancy was a classicist, Mods and Greats, and an open-minded teacher; how he would have survived teaching in our present age, in which paedagogy is regarded as essentially the ruthless and relentless indoctrination of the young in the dogmas of the Zeitgeist, I cannot think.

Cuius animae ...