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John Reader
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A Tribute written by Peter Whittle.
Reprinted from an article in the Beckside in 1974

A significant part of John Reader's work in shaping Ayton School has been in sharing his own experience, sometimes at a quite profound level, with pupils and staff. Characteristically, his stories of what happened to him when he was a boy at Saffron Walden, stories told often on the first evening of a new school year to cheer up the newcomers, were told against himself. "Religious Reader" was his nickname for a time, at Walden, because he had declined to fight a boy on a Sunday, and incidentally because the boy was bigger than himself. Headmasters have the responsibility of fashioning a character for their schools; John Reader has done his work very much from the inside through a quiet and humble involvement of his life, and that of Mary, with the life of those who have passed through the school in the two periods of service that John and Mary have given to Ayton.

The exercise of looking back in an attempt to trace influences and developments is a fascinating one. Helen Goom, a contemporary of John and Mary's, writes: "John came to Ayton before the war, and before Stanley Carr became Headmaster. There were some staff changes at first, but there was a strong stable core of well-established teachers, including Leonard Stapleton, Herbert Dobbing, Bernard Coates, John Wallace, Ruth Harwood, and Evelyn Nicholson. John was the first of a group of younger men and women who were to stay until after the war was over, and who, good teachers all, added their youthful zest and skills to the experience of the older established staff. Under the leadership of Stanley Carr, they formed a team whose stability would be the object of envy to the majority of heads in recent years.

Was it the consciousness of the value of working as part of a team that made John Reader as Headmaster balance his staff appointments so that in the General Inspection of 1961 the school could be congratulated on the stability of its staff? Another contemporary from the days during the war, Dorothy Shewell, makes the point that "John stood somewhat apart from the rest of the resident men at this time because he was the only Friend amongst them. He therefore had a foot in the Meeting as well as in the school and we tended to think of him as more part of the Establishment than the rest of us. We respected his firm religious convictions, which gave him a stature which some of us felt we had not achieved. He was a rock amongst our philosophical swirlings and eddyings."

Again, in the sixties, there were rather more Friends on the staff at Ayton than there were at other Quaker schools, and it is still the case. It is reasonable to suppose that this was part of John Readers’ policy for the school, to find people of like mind at the deepest level to staff the school, and incidentally to bind school and Meeting closer. Leonard and Marjorie Stapleton felt that the strong links between local Friends and the school had been forged by John Reader.

It is only when one is engaged in such a review as this, however, that it becomes apparent that the staffing of the school might be deliberately weighted in this way: no such division or distinction as Dorothy Shewell records could be remarked upon now. Staff meetings, under John Reader's chairmanship, have become increasingly Quakerly in their conduct - as indeed has all the business of the school, including the School Forum of pupils and staff - but though the membership of the team may have a Quaker bias, it is the working together that has been a lasting concern of John Reader. Ayton school staff can meet every day in recess as a single staff, and in various ways, the ground staff, welfare, office staff, those who work in the kitchen or in the classroom have been allowed to realise what their common task is: the right working of the school. Since both John and Mary Reader knew the school so intimately from the inside, their efforts to support a growing staff have been remarkably effective.

When the Readers took up the Headship of Ayton - John as Head with Evelyn Nicholson, Mary as Mistress of the Family - they lived very much in the centre of things. The present staff dining room was John Reader's study. Across the hall was their family sitting room, the rest of their home on the first floor, and dormitories above that. One morning their breakfast was interrupted by the appearance of a girl's leg through the ceiling above the table; a loose board in the dormitory above had been taken up for the practice of what was known as "Myrtle worship" - a short-lived Fourth Form amusement. There was never any remoteness about being headmaster, nor has Millfield House been further from the centre of gravity of the school. During their first service at Ayton, John Reader's home was in 'B' dorm, and in the old Nissen hut, which is now in the Millyard. If the physical proximity has been less close for them, as for most of the resident staff, the quality of their involvement with pupils and staff has not diminished. Nor has their contact with the village, for there, too, from the earliest days, John and Mary have been very much in touch.

Whether John's interest in James Cook began when he first came to Ayton is not clear; his chairmanship of the Captain Cook museum committee and his revival of the Postgate schoolroom as a museum that celebrates the life of James Cook is perhaps better known outside the school than in. It was through John Reader that A. K. Cumbor's work for the Cook museum was recognised by the presentation of a plaque made by Nicholas Dimbleby; his own reward seems to have been the immense satisfaction he seems to have gained from his study of Cook's life. Certainly in matters of Biblical study John Reader's scholarship is remembered by one member of the local Meeting from a time during the war when he led a study group on Amos and some of the other prophets. It is not scholarship that makes one an Elder of the Meeting at the age of twenty-six, but John's ministry in Meeting has always been most acceptable, and his work as an elder - where he was joined more recently by Mary - has been of great value.

The link between the Harbottle family and the school goes back to the beginning of the century, but in John Reader's time there was something of friendship in it, too, especially with William Harbottle, who lived in Crook Cottage. There John Reader was on calling-in terms, and he was ready to introduce new members of staff to this old village family if they needed wood and craftsman like advice, as John too had doubtless received them when he was new to Ayton. John was a keen sportsman in a very active way in school, and extended his energies to a youth club in the village, held in the hall that is now the bakery in Newton Road . Mary's art class on a Monday evening has only recently ceased, after goodness knows how many years. John's interest in electronics extends from the days when the word was never used: he repaired the wireless sets of housekeeper, matron, and turned his talents as a handyman to the service of elderly ladies in the village. Their interest in music, drama, photography; John's concern for good workmanship in wood and Mary's good taste in her work on the committee responsible for the furnishing of the school; all these interests have their roots in the practical expression of skills, and these skills have been fostered in other people who have worked and studied in the school. The photographic record of the life of the school, including the cover of the current prospectus, has been largely the work of John Reader. Mary has been a faithful member of choral. The work of fitting up the stage of what is now the gym (then the School Hall) was John's, and his influence in the design of Rosehill has been considerable. One suspects that what is known as "the school policy" of husbandry and re-planting trees and shrubs in the grounds has been the work of one man.

It was Stanley Carr who introduced the Readers to the Lake District , and it seemed natural to them to share their pleasures there. When John forsook football and hockey for rock-climbing the mountaineering group soon grew, and the Easter term became a time when one looked forward to the weekend at Glenthorne for walking and all degrees of climbing. Maurice Wilson, Oliver Spence, Peter Dyson, and Alan Lindford joined the party as guides year after year. For many members of staff and school this was a time of great warmth and fellowship; but it was in reality only one occasion among many in the school year when members of the school, staff and students, were enabled to feel at one. "Long walks" were not a Reader invention, but their repeated occurrence, against increasing pressure from the timetable, has been a measure of what John Reader felt to represent something of intangible but real value in the life of the school.

Leonard Stapleton, looking over seventy years of the school's life, sees John Reader's influence as one that brought Ayton into the mainstream of residential education. With Evelyn Nicholson as co-head, John Reader saw to it that the Sixth Form grew, that academic standards improved and, above all, that Ayton moved forward with the tide of educational change. He never lost sight of the school as a community, as an institution rooted in the past, supporting a present body of people, young and older, where the tensions and the opportunities of residential life and work needed present remedies, present care. In his survey "Friends' Schools in the Seventies" he was able to see a good deal of the workings of the other Quaker schools, and to share his insights with us at Ayton; we, naturally, felt it only right and proper that the Friends' Education Council should have asked John Reader to carry out this work.

Seen from close quarters, Ayton has changed remarkably in the time that John Reader has been directing the school; the changes might seem less remarkable from outside except in the matter of buildings. The policy of "Discuss everything, change nothing," unless taken cynically, has been John Reader's, and it has had this effect: that staff have felt free over the years to speak in staff meeting, to talk with children, to put forward ideas and schemes of all degrees of importance, knowing that they will be taken as seriously as they were intended, and that they will be brought to the consideration of staff and school committee. Then, when the time was right, change has come. In this way, the school has gone forward, remaining small enough for its members to know clearly the direction it is taking, and to be grateful in particular for the wisdom and care of John and Mary Reader.

Peter Whittle

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