My Brother & I

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He became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, US, in the fall of 2009, and a fellow at the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat in March and April 2011. He also served as one of the trustees of the Beit Trust for many years. A bigger volume, STILL FURTHER, New Poems 2000-2019, is to be published by the Uhlanga Press, probably in 2021.

During and after his studies at Oxford he taught at several schools in England, including Sevenoaks School and Mathew Humberstone Comprehensive school. He then became principal of Island School in Hong Kong, Headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and Master of Wellington College. He was also a noted poet and writer, and held honorary teaching posts in literature and creative writing, as well as fellowships associated with writing programmes. He was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, United States of America, in the fall of 2009, and a fellow at the Hawthornden Writers" Retreat in March/April 2011. It is difficult to summarise a life such as Jonty’s, more so immediately after his death. The Jonty I knew was a man who spoke, wrote, and thought with uncommon sensitivity and moral clarity. To my mind, he is one of the finest poets South Africa has produced. He is now a full-time writer. He recently retired from being one of the six Trustees of the Beit Trust, which exists to help the people of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, in particular withFrom here, Jonty Driver gained his first headship, that of the Island International School in Hong Kong, here too ensuring the school’s rise to educational distinction. Jonty and Maeder Osler, owner of Hanglip Farm and founder of Toverview, were close friends, and were sharing accommodation in Cape Town when Jonty was detained. Maeder stood in for him as NUSAS president during his detention, and succeeded him in this position after his departure. They were able to renew their friendship in the 1990s, when Jonty was allowed to return to South Africa, and Jonty, his wife Ann, and their children became regular visitors at Hanglip Farm. In “The Man With the Suitcase”, Driver chronicled the life, execution, and rehabilitation of John Harris, an anti-apartheid activist who planted a bomb in July 1964 on a platform at Johannesburg’s Park Station, which exploded, killing one person and injuring 23 others. Harris was hanged by the Apartheid regime in 1965. What a mixmatch. The more so because the pictures in and around the hallway include examples of old stone engravings and stone age technology on Hanglip Farm by the earliest peoples on this land. The imagination boggles, if you so will.

Schooling at St Andrew’s College Grahamstown, with its traditional combination of muscular Anglicanism and Scottish-style military marching band, would one day find obvious fulfilment and echo in his leadership of Wellington College, where the sons and more recently daughters of the military continue to be shaped by the same vigorously Anglican spirit of self-sacrifice and service. in STANZAS, No 11. Two poems appeared in the magazine Theology, May 2018, No 121 No 3: "In a French Garden" and "The hymn of the Christian atheist". Master of Eton and, after his retirement, he went to the University of the Witwatersrand as Visiting Professor of Education. He had, between his stints at Charterhouse & Eton, been i/c the Jonty’s first teaching job was at Sevenoaks School, where he eventually became housemaster of the International Centre. After posts at a comprehensive school in Lincolnshire and as a research fellow at York University he held the post of headmaster of the Island School, Hong Kong, for 6 years. From 1983-1989 he was headmaster of Berkhamstead School and from 1989-2000 he was master of Wellington College.Jonty is survived by his wife Ann, his children Dominic, Dax and Tamlyn, and his grandchildren. My thoughts are with them and his many loved ones at this time. The advent of democracy made possible a return to the nation that had retained his name on a list of banned persons until the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other anti-apartheid organisations made return possible. In response to this completion of what was almost a biblical trajectory of departure and return for so many, he wrote voraciously, not simply evoking but immersing himself anew in the landscape that had been such a crucial part of his hinterland from his earliest years and which was nowsinging a song of freedom for him and his contemporaries not one of persistent misery and injustice. This all elicited his very best poetry. Whether in freer form iambic pentameter or sonnet or haiku, he achieved an ebullience on the one hand and a poignancy on the other that made his one of the most compelling voices writing in English in the period since the end of apartheid. At the time, Mandela had retired in some triumph after serving a single term as president of the supposed ’new South Africa’ – which I found hugely ironic, seeing that, not too long before, at a stage-managed provincial and local farmers’ union meeting, ostensibly about farm labour, I was singled out as a farmer in league with ‘the devil’. But I digress …

Jonty was due to leave in a few days, so I had to communicate urgently with Lindiwe Maliti, a member of the HOD team at Umso. This required a degree of rural agility in a context of bad phone lines and no cell phones, and then some logistical acrobatics from Lindiwe in the form of moving chairs and benches and rearranging classes so that a special assembly could be accommodated. Some Schools, a memoir covering the years 1964-2000 and Jonty's work as a teacher and headmaster in five very different schools, was published by John Catt Ltd in 2016 and is What strikes me most about Jonty’s death – like those of other friends and acquaintances in recent years — is how lives lived in so many different times and so many different places can be compressed and imagined into a single instance of grief and celebration, shared among family, friends and colleagues, both locally and abroad. Hospital poem) and "On Shadows". A letter to the Oxford Magazine, No 397, explained that "On Shadows" was dedicated to Ken Gross and Liza Lorwin; Ken recently edited a new edition of John STILL FURTHER, New Poems, 2000-2020, was published by the Uhlanga Press in South Africa and the UK in 2021. It is available from bookshops in South Africa, fromthe Africa Books Collective in the

The Friends of St Peter’s, Newenden try to introduce new and different fund raising events. They have invited CJ (Jonty) Driver to read extracts from his poetry and tell of his life at An Evening with Jonty Driver in St Peter’s on Friday, May 6 at 7:30pm. Five pamphlets, made in co-operation with Artwrite Ltd of Rye, were published in 2019/20: the first is IMAGE & IMAGE, Some Old Photographs & Twelve Unrhymed Sonnets. Six of the photographs

The translator and facilitator was a charismatic young teacher, Sizwe Dyasi, then a popular figure at the school and among the town’s young people in general. At the time, Jonty remarked: ‘That young man deserves a good future.” Whether or not this has come to pass is of course yet another story. Despite his demanding career as a teacher, Jonty remained a prolific writer, publishing 10 books of poems (most recently Still Further: New Poems ), five poetry booklets (the most recent one, A Winter’s Day at Westonbirt ), five novels (four still in print from Faber), five books of biography and memoir, and a book of verse for children.In 2000 Driver retired from Wellington and eventually settled with Ann in a delightful old cottage at Northiam, near Rye in East Sussex. The house displayed another of the paradoxes that were always present in his life: an unusually tall man fitting himself comfortably into a low-ceilinged cottage, as if he had clambered into a dolls’ house overflowing with books. Driver published five novels: Elegy for a Revolutionary (1969), Send War In Our Time, O Lord (1970), Death of Fathers (1972), A Messiah of the Last Days (1974), and Shades of Darkness (2004). For the One Only" was in the Spectator (March 10, 2018) and another, "An Old Man & His Wife", in the Spectator (November 2, 2018). "Manifesto" – a defence of the iambic pentameter - appeared