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And now we remind you of an English cliche

Could actually be a British one, perhaps readers can tell us whether it spreads further:

Des Seabrook obituary
Blunt Lancastrian rugby coach who inspired his team to beat the All Blacks

This is back in amateur days of course. So, the day job?

His day job during the week was teaching geography

At Worth the geography bloke was also a (or the?) coach at Rosslyn Park. Really not sure whether it’s sporty types become geography teachers or there’s something they put in the water when training the geography teachers.

We have some NZ types here occasionally – same thing happen there? And there’s a Saffer or two, anyone else?

As just recently noted, it’s also the obits where the very English writing ends up:

he was rarely inhibited by sensitivity when it came to enforcing his will…….Perhaps at times he was a little too refreshing in his frankness…..A hip replacement did not deter him from taking up skiing, but he broke his new hip on a trip and was not tempted to go again.

Lovely stuff.

17 thoughts on “And now we remind you of an English cliche”

  1. If you go back to the amateur days, the range of training was very broad. So not just Geography.

    Brian Moore, Mike Gibson, Tony Neary were solicitors.
    JPR and Jon Webb were surgeons.
    Andy Ripley was an accountant with an MSc from LSE.

  2. Bloke in North Dorset

    Peter Winterbottom, possible the greatest flanker in the amateur era, worked on his uncle’s farm. He later went to work in the City.

  3. Diogenes- I remember a game playing London French, guy put his face where the ball was as someone tried to fly hack it, widened his smile by a few Cms. We were playing understrength by one. they had no replacements and two of them were A&E drs went off to stitch him up so 14 versus 12. Great game.

  4. Anecdotally not my experience. Our Geography teacher in 2nd year was a cheery little bloke, full of useful info but never into sport. Further up the school the Geography teacher organised fell-walking around the local hills on a Wednesday afternoon for us sport-haters.

  5. Anecdotally the other way to TG, my old school fitted the stereotype. Three teachers doubled up as PE and in the geography department – two coached rugby, one cricket, one gymnastics (the observant will notice one coached two sports). We used to ask one of the non-geography-teaching PE teachers how come this had happened and his response was “anyone can teach geography” but I think he may have been poking fun at his colleagues more than anything. One of them was an expert geologist so it wasn’t just because it was a subject for the intellectually challenged.

    A couple of them had travelled a lot as part of professional or high-level amateur sports careers in the past, so maybe there’s that. There was a time when secondary teacher training courses required trainees to learn to teach two or even three subjects, and that’s fallen out of fashion now so I suspect fewer teachers “double up” these days.

  6. I can never remember her name, but one of our non-sports teachers was an Olympic javelin medalist. It does seem to be a thing.

  7. Ah, Sheila Sherwood, long jumper and PE teacher. Odd, I was sure it was javelin and something non-sports.

  8. My geography teacher didn’t do sports lessons but she was a keen golfer. Hence one sunny afternoon at the back of 4 p.m.:

    Her: “You have your O-level exam tomorrow, what are you doing on the first tee?”

    Me: “The way I’m slicing, Miss, I’ll study a lot of geography in the next couple of hours.”

  9. Nawt wrong with someone who learned a game when young and enjoyed it, grew up and became a teacher ( at the time an actual academic achievement…) , and still loves a game so much he gets Good At It…

    Admittedly, most real teachers have a Hobby that’s more …armchair inclined…., but still….
    Shame is that nowadays the Hobby is more along the lines of Grievance Studies compared to simply enjoying old battlefield tactics centered around a leather bladder..

  10. They were still called the British Empire and Commonwealth Games when
    Vancouver hosted them, I was rather surprised when they did a big refurb at Empire Bowl a couple of years ago there wasn’t any talk of renaming it

  11. In my school days, all the sports teachers were full-time PE or science subjects (inc Geog) teachers

    Rowing was two Physics teachers

  12. At the moment there is, at least here, an undersupply of some teachers — Maths, Physics, Technology. So long as you can teach, you will get a job in those in minutes.

    If you are trying to get a job here as a PE or Geography teacher, however, then having an extra string to your bow makes you much more likely to be employed. So ex-internationals and sports coaches abound.

    I have no idea how long that has held.

    Traditionally All Blacks without qualifications often ran pubs. They could pull the seed money and drew in punters.

  13. Back in the day, the Rugby (Oxford and London Welsh) master taught Geology, the Cricket master (played for Surrey a few times) taught Greek and Latin (a really nice young Maths master was trying to get into the Middlesex team as an Amateur), the Hockey master taught History, the Swimming master taught Maths and Latin to the “D” stream; one PE teacher taught Art, the other one taught Woodwork (a junior Physics teacher who arrived 4 terms before I left was trying to get into the British Gym team), Cross-country was the junior Biology teacher (Thames Hare & Hounds), sadly I can’t remember who did Tennis and Squash where the school (but not I) was quite good but it wasn’t the elderly geography teacher. So not supporting Tim’s thesis: however one of my prep school’s geography teachers was trying to get into the local Football League Club’s first team despite the upper limit on player wages being lower than a teacher’s salary.

  14. “At the moment there is, at least here, an undersupply of some teachers — Maths, Physics, Technology. ”

    I suspect that’s a social invariant. It was true of my secondary school decades ago. I was haplessly “taught” physics by the chemistry teacher (who eventually asked for my help); the workshop teacher left to be a foreman on a construction site; in our last year the Maths teacher could spare me only two periods a week and had to junk one of the papers for which he was meant to be preparing me. Happily the maths teaching in earlier years had been outstandingly good and the two periods were used on Oxford-style tutorials for a class of three so it turned out pretty well except for the omitted material.

    Timmy could of course explain the problem – the lunacy of national pay scales applied uniformly across subjects. Effing madness.

  15. I might add: in the Spring of my last year at school we had a rugby fixture against a club side – it was going to be boys against men. So three of the teachers turned out for us. Good sports they were. We won.

  16. @Chester

    “At the moment there is, at least here, an undersupply of some teachers — Maths, Physics, Technology. So long as you can teach, you will get a job in those in minutes.

    If you are trying to get a job here as a PE or Geography teacher, however, then having an extra string to your bow makes you much more likely to be employed. So ex-internationals and sports coaches abound.”

    Good point. Pretty sure there’s some explanatory power in this.

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