Shropshire Magazine

Mr Arthur Dyball pictured in front of Bedstone Court and (inset) sporting his schoolmaster’s gown.

Neil Thomas meets the most fitting of fixtures at Bedstone College

As a boy I loved reading James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr Chips, the rather moving story of a diffident schoolmaster, widowed young and ‘married’ to his job, whose only ‘family’ are his fellow teachers and the generations of students in his care.

I never thought, though, I’d ever meet Mr Chips’ real-life equivalent. After all, the novella, written in 1934, now seems so old-fashioned and the story – despite excellent screen portrayals from Robert Donat, Peter O’Toole and Martin Clunes – is slightly creaky. 

Such a character couldn’t exist today, surely? 

Enter, Mr Arthur Dyball.

When staff and pupils return to Bedstone College for the new school year this month, Mr Dyball will be starting his 51st year at the south Shropshire independent school. 

In fact, all but a few months of a teaching career that began in 1958 have been spent at Bedstone. What’s more, since the school was founded only in 1948, Mr Dyball is woven into the bulk of its history. 

Unlike Mr Chips, Mr Dyball comes across as by no means shy. He has plenty to say on a range of subjects. To spend three hours in his company, as I did, is to gain a fascinating perspective on the changing fashions, mores and values that shaped the second half of the 20th century and the early years of a new millennium. 

“I don’t care for the easy familiarity of today,” he says with a smile. “I don’t think perfect strangers should address one another by their Christian names. People should be afforded the courtesy of being addressed by their title, which was certainly the way that I was brought up.” 

It is an interesting point in an age when every business meeting, email exchange, phone conversation – often with people you are encountering for the first time – is on first-name terms. 

Mr Dyball recalls school nicknames like ‘Peck It’ for a master with a large nose, ‘Bulldog’, and ‘Dibs’ for a teacher called Dibble, that speak of a rather more innocent age, when humour gently mocked rather than aggressively debased. 

There was tradition, and respect for authority. “There were ructions if a child was not available to carry the visiting Bishop’s suitcase,” he recalls, with a warm smile. 

Mr Dyball pictured by the school’s impressive stained glass windows.

Rarity

Then there are changing attitudes to employment. To find someone working for the same employer for 50 years, like Mr Dyball, is an increasing rarity as people switch firms, careers, towns and even countries, in search of advancement. 

“I remember Mother telling me: ‘When you get hold of a job, you damn well keep it.” I felt when I came here that I had found a wonderful job and so I concentrated on keeping it,” he explains. 

As a boy he attended the 800-pupil Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, Sussex, before reading history at Cambridge followed by study for an education degree at Oxford. 

“Having attended a very large school myself, I wanted a small boys’ boarding school in which to teach, and Bedstone was the advertisement that caught my eye,” he recalls. 

Travel to Bedstone for a man without a car was far easier in 1958 than today, since the small village had its own railway station. As a scholarly young Londoner, out in the sticks for the first time,  he admits: “I wasn’t sure what I had let myself in for. Most of the children were from a different cultural background than I had known and there was a certain sheltered naivety about them.”

To say the school was his life in those early days is something of an understatement. Teaching history by day and in charge of a boarding wing after school and at weekends, he was essentially a ‘surrogate’ father to a group of boys away from home for the first time. He was clearly a pretty accomplished father figure, for he was a junior houseparent for 29 years. 

“Some would be homesick, which was only natural, and one kept a close eye on them. You try to teach them that school is a world of opportunity and once they got into the routine, formed friendships, played organised sports, they settled down and it was often, then, the parents that found the separation difficult. 

“However, quite a few of our parents were in the services, travelling around to different postings and their sons often discovered that school offered a stability and continuity in their lives that they hadn’t experienced before. 

“In some ways, the further away the parents are, the less homesick the child for getting home; if mother and father are abroad, it is not an option and is therefore not thought about. 

“It’s less of an issue today anyway because mobile phones and emails mean contact can be regular.” 

After 10 years of this somewhat cloistered existence Mr Dyball bought a house near the school in 1968. 

“My mother was there and it was a bolthole,” he says with a smile.

In 1971, he left the rural idyll of Bedstone altogether for a post in a state school in Shrewsbury. 

“I thought it was something that one ought to do to widen one’s teaching experience,” he recalls. 

Different

However, he found he missed Bedstone and returned a few months later. It was, however, to a very different school. In his absence, Bedstone had started to admit girls, one of the first independent schools in Shropshire to go co-educational. 

“Children of heads always used to be pupils at the school and the head at the time had daughters. If he had had sons, it might not have happened. 

“The first intake of girls was only about a dozen in total and the majority were rather tomboyish, as I recall. You could see benefits to it straight away. It improved the boys’ behaviour, particularly as far as language was concerned. Socially, preparing young people for the outside world, it is an advantage. 

“It certainly has a softening effect. Girls tend to be more caring and often you would find a homesick little prep running to the head girl at break for a hug.” 

What of the downsides to co-education, though? Mr Dyball smiles. “Well, teenage love can be a distraction to study.” 

Talking of love, how is it that there has never been a Mrs Dyball to share the life of an intelligent and drily humorous man?  

“There were one or two I was interested in but they slipped through the net,” he says good-naturedly. “The opportunities to meet many young women weren’t really there in my circumstances.”

Unusual

In fact, when his mother died Mr Dyball was left in the unusual circumstances of having no family whatsoever. “I am the only child of only children, so no siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins,” he says. 

He is, though, far from alone, for the affection in which he is held at Bedstone appears to be universal. He actually retired from the classroom in 1992 but has continued in a variety of roles to make an active contribution to school life. As lay chaplain in charge of worship, he picks the hymns and lessons and gives the addresses at several services a week, a job he has done since 1988. 

He is a pivotal figure on sports days as time-keeper. “I wield a pretty mean stopwatch,” he says with a chuckle. “On that day I’m probably more important than the headmaster,” he adds with a beaming smile.

He looks after the impressive cabinet full of shields and trophies, which celebrate Bedstone’s academic and sporting prowess. 

However, the role that probably makes him most beloved of the pupils is as keeper of the school tuck shop. “I keep the supplies up and make sure we don’t run out of KitKats.” 

He is also held in high esteem by the staff. Director of admissions, Mrs Claire Reid-Warrilow, says admiringly: “Mr Dyball has an amazing memory of events at the school, of who does what and who has been here and when.” 

He eschews travel and holidays, spending most of his spare time at home, in a pretty village not far from Bedstone. 

“I’m rather bookish anyway. Why travel when you have imagination and books to transport you?” 

As a historian, he is a medievalist by tradition, though escapes with a Dick Francis or Agatha Christie and has enjoyed the Harry Potter books. 

“For me, they capture school relationships remarkably well.” 

He is also an avid stamp collector. 

Bedstone College has come a long way since Arthur Dyball walked through its doors as a 23-year-old freshly graduated teacher. Then there were 104 pupils, all boys aged 11 and above, all housed in the handsome 19th-century Bedstone Court. 

Now there are nearly 300 pupils of both sexes from three to 18 in pre-prep, prep and senior schools, accommodated in a range of buildings put up in the past 20 years, with Bedstone Court at the heart. 

Today the school goes from strength to strength under its progressive headmaster, Mr Michael Symonds, the latest of five under whom Mr Dyball has served. 

In a rapidly changing world, Mr Dyball is a reassuring constant. He is, however, no dinosaur, welcoming change for the better as well as lamenting it for the worse. He is computer savvy and enjoys the wide range of sports he can watch on television nowadays. 

However, on certain points he is a stickler. “I’m a schoolmaster, not a teacher,” he insists. 

Perhaps he is cherished for representing certain post-war values, loyalty not least among them, that are becoming rarer by the year. Just one of the reasons why, at 74, no one at Bedstone thinks about saying ‘Goodbye Mr Dyball’.

Rapt pupils learn about the Battle of Hastings from Mr Dyball.