Victor Samuel Prooth

I've just come across the blogs about my old colleague Vic, stirring (both senses) many recollections of my three years in his Department at Holgate, which I left in 1965. I want to record that, as well as being the astonishingly memorable teacher that his pupils have written about, he was also warmly supportive of his young colleagues. I won't say he was a model for us, as he was strictly a one-off; but he managed the tricky task of advising us very positively and yet encouraged us to pursue our own route. He led his Department just as he led his platoon in the Burma campaign: determinedly, cannily, a touch myopically, and from the front, Sten gun in hand.

He was a character - self-invented, self-propelling - straight out of his beloved Shakespeare, or some utterly unlikely personality in a Dickens novel. As a young man he decided he needed more of a name than mere Samuel; so he ascribed himself Victor, and set about living up to it. Any report or memo signed VSP became a declaration of human rights, or at least of his right to put you straight. As a teacher he was also the centre-stage actor who wrote his own plays and then explained what the play was really all about, testing you on it afterwards.

For decades he remained a good, demanding but staunch friend of mine; so I was deeply touched when his son Charles asked me to write a eulogy for Vic's memorial service. Vic would have ticked me off for being absent when the eulogy was delivered, but he always insisted that God was a permanent absentee, so VSP would have let me off that duty and sent me home to read my Shakespeare more carefully next time. Holgate's corridors would echo resonantly with this man for all seasons and reasons.

Michael Freeman