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Philip Smiley was a classics master at Ampleforth for 39 years from 1949 to 1988, and was for many years Head of Classics.
He belonged to an academic family: his father was Professor of Greek at University College, London, his mother lectured in Latin at Liverpool, and his younger brother Timothy Smiley (D48) became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. He arrived in St Dunstan’s House in September 1936, only a year after its foundation under Fr Oswald Vanheems. On leaving in 1941, he went up to Oxford to read Greats, having won the prestigious Marjoribanks scholarship to Christ Church. He gained 1st class honours in Classical Mods, but his studies were interrupted by the war after a year. His war service was spent in the Navy, joining as a rating but becoming a lieutenant when the Admiralty made use of his command of languages to send him as Liaison Officer aboard a frigate of the Free French Navy, with which he served in South Africa, India, Hong Kong and Italy. He did not return to Oxford until 1947, when he added the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Verse to his credentials for a brilliant academic career.
He decided to become a schoolmaster rather than try for a university post, preferring, he said, to teach the young before their minds were set. In1949 his former Headmaster, Fr Paul Nevill, appointed him to the staff. Returning to Ampleforth was not his first choice, but in those days his Catholicism was an insuperable barrier to working in Anglican establishments such as Winchester. Asked how he reconciled his socialist princples with teaching at a Public School, he would defend his position by invoking the redistribution of wealth from rich parents to poor scholars like himself.
He joined a Common Room that boasted men of great brilliance, two of whom exerted an abiding influence on him. One was James Macmillan, a gentle figure of immense authority, who taught mathematics but was deeply read in philosophy. Stimulated by each other’s company, their philosophical walks became a regular feature of their lives. Philip brought with him the excitement of the post-war revolution in Oxford philosophy, and older readers will remember his articles on Wittgenstein and on Logical Positivism. His aim was not advocacy, however, but to jolt his audience out of the then widespread attachment to a supposed ‘philosophia perennis’. From these articles there grew his popular Logic course for General Studies, whose beneficiaries agreed that however dim you might be when you enrolled, you emerged much the brighter.
The other figure was his own teacher Walter Shewring, a fastidious scholar of great distinction. For him, as Philip put it, talk of ‘the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome’ hid a morass of parochialism and false attitudes, and his pupils were invited to pick their way through them by acquiring good taste and through rigorous criticism. Philip followed Walter’s standards in his own teaching. He mastered every aspect of his subject and expected only the best from his pupils, adorning their efforts with his famous red pen. But he had an innate sympathy with the young, and his ‘May I have your attention, please?’ on entering the classroom was put more as a suggestion than a command. And he was a wonderful teacher of the youngest classses, for whom his armoury included puzzles, palindromes and magic squares. Another form of light relief was his weekly English class, of which one member wrote: ‘He exposed us to Eliot, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen. I suddenly found myself fascinated—what a contrast; a term earlier all poetry had seemed repellent. Shortly after that I wrote my first poem’. He is now an established published poet. More generally, but in a similar vein, many of Philip’s pupils would cite him as the single most important formative influence on their development.
His own tastes were largely those of the18th century. Handel was the supreme composer, preferred even to Bach ‘because he knew when to stop’. Byron, Gibbon, Swift and above all Dr Johnson were his literary heroes. It is no coincidence they were all sworn enemies of humbug and cant: Philip himself was a regular contributor to Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner. Besides his passion for lucidity and hatred of pseudery, his other characteristic attribute was an insatiable curiosity. It took him down such byways as the origins of Mormonism; the phenomenon of Speaking in Tongues; the English Public School (‘that oddest of human communities’); and the Old Amplefordian John Polidori, Byron’s doctor, whose tale ‘The Vampyre’ created the vogue for Gothic horror. Much of this material found its way into his celebrated lectures to school societies, and thence into articles in the Journal. The same scholarly curiosity fuelled his love of travel. For a man who never learned to drive, he travelled adventurously round England and overseas, taking in such unlikely tourist destinations as the Yemen, Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia.
The wittiest of conversationalists, he loved to preside at the Common Room bar, relaxing in the company of his colleagues. But he valued too the privacy of his tiny cottage in the village, and his long solitary walks across the moors. Though his life was austere in most ways, he loved eating out. The Good Food Guide valued his reports so highly that he was invited to become an honorary inspector, deciding on borderline candidates. Those familiar with his school reports will not be surprised that when in 1972 the Catering Times ran an article entitled ‘Come in, P. O’R. Smiley, your number’s up’, asking what an hotelier should do if he suspected that Philip was coming for dinner, the suggested answers ranged from hiring the local vicar as wine waiter, to feigning bubonic plague.
An undemonstrative bachelor, he was nonetheless pleased to discover that he had acquired a family in the shape of his four nieces. One of them spoke at his funeral:
‘To us children, Uncle Philip was an intriguing figure; we wondered how anyone could bear to stay in bed till midday on Christmas morning. He would arrive from foreign parts, sporting a dashing red or pink shirt, entertaining us with wonderful stories about the Bad Boys at the college. At tea he would tuck into my mother’s chocolate cake, and our eyes would widen as it disappeared with extraordinary speed. On my last visit to the nursing home I took one of those cakes, cutting him a large piece and putting the rest in his room for later. But he sent me back three times to get ‘just one more slice’. My boys have happy memories of taking tea with him at the Assembly Rooms in York, enjoying his instruction to ‘Have whatever you want’, and sharing his love of food and the Simpsons.
‘The war had a profound effect on Philip. He worked alongside miners from the North East – ‘men who had never tasted butter’. Meeting people who lived in poverty formed his political views, and he embraced the welfare state and the NHS with a passionate lifelong commitment. After the war he became a pacifist. When the Red Arrows visited Ampleforth, he would announce ‘I’m a member of the Peace Pledge Union’, and get on a bus to Scarborough to go to the pictures. But though left wing in politics he was conservative when it came to religion. He liked the sacramental aspect of Catholicism, including the old Latin mass, but had little time for anything ‘touchy feely’. When the sign of peace was introduced, he dispensed with ‘Peace be with you’ and would shake hands formally, muttering ‘Pleased to meet you’.
‘His last years were circumscribed and trying, as Parkinson’s disease exerted its grip, but he still found joy in books and in the company of friends. He was deeply grateful to the people, particularly my parents, who made it possible for him to remain in his cottage and make the decision to move to a nursing home in his own time, allowing him to retain the autonomy he prized so highly. And in that difficult time, there was richness. I remember his delight when my sister Mary-Clare cut his hair, or when my sister Rachel shared with him the warmth of being hugged. He found a new closeness, and would talk of the way that friends like Margaret Forsythe and James Macmillan’s daughter Mary Grotrian had taught him what real Christianity meant.
‘He loved poetry and satire, Homer and Homer Simpson. Satire mocks folly, but in doing so it upholds the good and the true. Philip had an absolute sense of the good and the true. He laughed at the ridiculous but celebrated the good and the God he found in those around him.’
This obituary was written by Timothy Smiley with extensive quotation from the funeral addresses given by Bernard Vasquez and Sophie Smiley, and from Ian Davie’s tribute in the Ampleforth Journal Autumn 1988 on the occasion of Philip’s retirement.
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Deaths
