Frank Dixon B.Sc.
Frank Dixon
To
everybody, from the new scholarship boy to school captain, he was Pa
Dixon. This was an indication of that mixture of love and respect in
which Frank Dixon, our first headmaster, was held.
He was the perfect pedagogue. He was also paternal. Education has like
much else
in our society been a victim of Parkinson's Law and there is a tendency
for the modern headmaster to become a kind of managing director of a brains factory.
But not in Pa Dixon's day. He knew each pupil personally, his home back-ground
and his problems.
If I may I will recall two incidents, one at the start of my school career, one
at the end, which showed the kind of man and master Pa Dixon was.
Like many scholarship boys from the then mining community on the Forest I was
poor, and sometimes hungry. Pa took control of my scholarship money, and then,
kind man, arranged for me to have a hot lunch each day at the Bathurst Café.
(And the little old lady who ran it used to let me have a Chelsea Bun on the
house.)
Seven years and lots of lunches later I had the good luck to amass scholarships
and exhibition up to nearly £200, a frightening sum for those days. Once
again Pa became my treasurer. He marched me across to Lloyd's Bank and
showed me how to open an account and sign a cheque. Then he took me up the street
to Hastie, Son and Yeatman and had me measured to two suits, one navy blue, one
brown, chose spotted ties to match-and a strong pair of boots.
These are among my many personal recollections. Others who had the good fortune
to come under the care of this wonderful man will have their own.
Frank Dixon was born at Keighley, Yorkshire on May 7, 1871 and educated at the
local Trade and Grammar School and at London University. After teaching at his
old school, at Leeds and in the East End of London he came to Lydney as Science
Master at the then Arts and Science School in 1902. When the Lydney Secondary
School (now the Grammar, soon to be the Comprehensive) was formed the following
year he became its first headmaster and continued as such until he retired in
1932.
He spent the early part of his reitirement in Grange-over-Sands and then moved
to York where he died on December 20, 1951.
He devoted much of his retirement to his love of nature, contributing
to scientific magazines. His daughter Helen wrote of him:"It was
typical of him that at the age of eighty, partially paralysed and with
eyesight no longer good
enough to use a microscope, he kept himself happy for house transcribing
details of
Egyptian hieroglyphics.
"I cannot remember a time when my father was not interested in flora or
fauna, or geological specimens, of whatever part of the world he happened
to be in. He had a childlike capacity for wonder and delight which never left
him, even in infirm old age.
As I remember him he looked the pedagogue, bright eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses,
a neat, schoolmasterish moustache, a slight scholarly stoop, and manner that
was at the same time precise and kind, strict but benign.
I was surprised when I was reminded that he was chiefly a science man, a
naturalist of more than local fame and a biologist. My memories of him are
seeing him
come in and take over the class in almost any subject. Indeed the one definite
thing
I recollect him teaching us was how to pronounce the French vowel ‘u' by
pursing our lips around the end of a pencil and then trying to say ee. It
worked so well that years later in St. Malo I was complimented on my accent!
I thought
thanks to the pencil trick!
Again on recollection (and this piece is all pleasant recollection) his science
teaching had its effect on my boyhood. For it must have been Pa who put up
that framed verse in the entrance hall whose words I learned then and have
remembered
so well I can write them now without reference:"One impulse from a
vernal wood/Can teach you more of Man,/ Of moral evil and of good/Than all
the sages
can."
Ivon Adams
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