His name was (hopefully still is) Patrick Nobes
And he taught me English between the ages of ten and thirteen. Like so many of the great teachers, at the time he wasn't always a favourite. A keen disciplinarian, he had any number of enthusiastic punishments for those of us who failed to comply with his demands. He expected standards of work and attention to detail that I can honestly say I was not called upon to produce again until my A-Levels. It was not enough to understand the structure of a sentence, Nobes would be equally interested in the iambic meter and the function it had in how our work flowed. There existed a considerable list of words that we were not to use under any circumstances and nearly twenty years later I still avoid them for the most part. His marking came with the nuclear option- too far a deviation from his standards meant the work was simply struck through. No further explanation was required- the piece would have to be rewritten. He insisted on fountain pens being used irrespective of whether you were (as I am) a left-hander. We wrote with pen and ink and given the choice, on the rare occasions I don’t simply type something, I still use pen and ink. He was irascible and intractable but we tolerated it.

The reason for this was- put simply- he was a truly brilliant individual. The depth of understanding he brought to any aspect of English was astonishing. He was never ever wrong on any subject he professed himself sure of- and you could be sure that we tried to find him wrong if we could. His wider understanding was remarkable as well. If called upon to cover for any other subject- from chemistry to Latin, he would stroll in, take the briefest of glances at what had gone before and continue if it was the subject he had taught all his life. He instigated a school wide public speaking and poetry competition for which their were no exemptions and when I meet former schoolmates, we all concede that however much we hated them, none of us have a fear of speaking in public, mainly as a result of it. There were enough theatrics to his own performances to fire the imagination as well. Read throughs of various texts would be accompanied by the voices of all characters. Fascinating asides about the history surrounding the piece would be dropped into the recital. He excelled and in turn taught us to excel because that was the only way he knew.

And he had a dog called Thrillington.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 17 Mar 2011, 16:50, Reply)