Michael Fontes – Tribute to Joe Bain  in Winchester College Chapel, 5 November 2011

In the early 1970s I taught a div in the middle of the school. Once a year I used to set the boys, as their week-end task, to write an account of any event where they had felt themselves in the grip of a strong emotion of some kind, fear, anger, delight, whatever. The titles often reflected staging posts in the boys’ lives, “My Russian Oral Examination’, or ‘The Day my Appendix Burst,’ and one year a very small Chinese boy in Freddie’s wrote one with me title ‘The day Mr Bain came to Lunch’.

Joe was my House Tutor in Kenny’s and the boys and I were richly entertained by his humour and often deeply grateful for his erudition.  We felt free from any danger of platitude, and became used to vigorous feelings vigorously expressed. Joe was capable of transforming with a quip or a story even the most scaly of social occasions. Joe’s stories were often pretty rotten but he was very funny telling them. At the new boys’ tea party in 1977 he told one about a dog accused of biting a postman. It seemed to me more urban myth than news item, but Joe said he’d read it in the day’s paper. The postman came to court and claimed he had been badly bitten. The dog was led in and wagged its tail and smiled at everyone. Several people appeared as character witnesses for the dog, saying he was a friendly dog of an amiable disposition, not given to biting postmen, or anyone else for that matter. The judge found in favour of the dog and reproached the postman. As the judge was leaving the court, seeing the nice dog at the side, he stopped for a second to pat it on the head, and IT BIT HIM. It bit him. Julian Taylor’s father was so overcome he spilt his tea everywhere and had to sit down for several minutes.

Joe enjoyed presenting himself as the champion of the modest don oppressed by the machinations of rascally headmasters: reports, timetables, meetings, marks. One of Joe’s greatest friends was,  of course, Peter Longhurst, the sometime Head of Economics at Stowe. Peter was quick to turn anyone in authority over him into a sort of pantomime villain. There used to be a gardener here at Winchester who looked so grumpy that the boys nicknamed him Lurking Grudge. In Peter the grudges lay near the surface; he was at once so vulnerable and so politically incorrect that, according to Joe, all the black boys at Stowe held him in the highest affection and regard. I was at various times Head of the Winchester Economics Department—known to Joe as ‘that nest of ferrets’ — and I met Peter at meetings; it was a little while before I recognized in him the hero of Joe’s imitation, an imitation which was, complete with traffic signals, strangely catching. When Joe brought Peter to dine in Kenny’s, Peter, who had been a ping-pong international, issued his famous challenge to the boys to beat all comers, handicapping himself by playing with a biscuit-tin lid instead of a bat.  When Peter lost – he said this was a first – he blamed me for lubricating him excessively with drink and Joe for laughing too much for skilled play to be possible.

Another hero, whose wit and wisdom larded Joe’s conversation, was his cousin Eric, a Welsh farmer. Joe continued to report Eric’s sayings to me, long after he had himself left Winchester, and the one which pleased us most concerned diabetes in old age. Joe suffered from this condition and was, therefore, an expert in its treatment, When Eric contracted it too, Joe was startled to hear that he’d been prescribed a particular drug. ‘But don’t you find it has terrible side effects?’ he asked Eric.  Eric replied: ‘Too old now for side effects’.

Joe liked anything which exalted the humble and  meek and put down the  mighty from their seat.  He enjoyed making the pompous and the pretentious the butt of his humour. In his company one had the agreeable impression of growing younger, because he was so ready to indulge the playful, impish, prep school side of his own character. I think this Father Ted side explains his delight in clerihews. He loved the lese-majesty they committed on famous people. Here are two of his favourites:

On Liszt -

Liszt’s wrists were more supple,
When he ‘d had a couple.

On Alfred de Musset -

Alfred de Musset
Called his cat Pussay.
His accent was affected,
But that was only to be expected.

Newspaper misprints came into the same category: ‘When making a soufflé you must be sure to resist the temptation of peeing into the oven every two minutes.’

Joe was not entirely at ease with the myriad inventions of the mechanized world, and my family enjoyed the moment when he telephoned for help because Priscilla was away and his washing machine was playing up. When we got there it had been boiling Joe’s smalls for several hours, and Joe laughed as much as we all did as each nether garment retrieved was found to have stretched to at least three times its original dimensions.

Joe kept information technology at a safe distance too. I remember his amusement at hearing that our Headmaster had declared that any report written on what we then quaintly called a ‘word processor’ was ipso facto a bad report.  Joe irritated the technical avant-gardists in Common Room by saying that he fully agreed with the headmaster – this was a first too – such reports gave the impression of having been written not only on a word processor but by a word processor. We were all conscious as he said it that Joe’s own reports were deeply illegible: I met few boys or parents who could read them.

Joe’s great production of Fidelio with Angus Watson showed not only what a fine director he could be but how musically sensitive he was, particularly to 19th Century music; most  music written before about 1750 he would dismiss scornfully as ‘square notes’. What some people didn’t know was how well he played the piano. He often stayed late after lunch and we would perform songs together. He loved Schumann songs particularly, and English songs, settings of Shakespeare, Houseman, and Thomas Hardy, by Quilter, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, Finzi.

I never knew Joe practise much. Even on the few occasions when we performed a song in public we never rehearsed. As a sight reader he was fearless, passionate, and astonishingly accurate; he didn’t worry about his own mistakes or mine – he didn’t ever comment on my German, for instance -  nothing  was allowed to impede the onward flow of the music.

I remember one evening in Kingsgate Street when he said “Let’s go home and do Tristan.” As it was already 11 pm and Tristan lasts four and a half hours, I wondered what this might entail. It  turned out that Joe wanted us to perform the whole of the second act.  He started with the hunting horns in the forest and we went through the love duet, Marke’s long aria of reconciliation, right through to the end, without stopping for breath, for an hour and a half. I was Tristan, Isolde, Brangane keeping watch, the King. Joe sustained the onward flow of the music through clouds of tobacco smoke. Nothing could have stopped him and not many could have matched his intensity. Opera in our time has known few such moments.

On another evening Joe arrived with a tape recorder and a pupil who knew how to work it, and wanted us to record at sight all the 69 songs in the Beggar’s Opera. He was reading it with his div and wished to give them some idea how the songs went. He hadn’t left much time for us to find out how the songs went ourselves, though they aren’t difficult and some were familiar…

Although we had particular favourites among the Schumann songs, I think we derived most pleasure from two Finzi songs,  Lizbie Brown and Proud Songsters.  In both of them Finzi uses crunchy harmonies and rhythmic variation to borrow Hardy’s countryman’s clogs. In Lizbie Brown the music stops and starts as the poet asks and then answers his own questions, and we enjoyed each other’s sense of rhythm as we tried to keep it exactly together. Proud Songsters  was remarkable for the extraordinary chorus of birdsong which Joe would draw from the piano – the song starts with a sort of piano sonata.  When we finished, as the tension started to ease, I would look out for a slight involuntary shake of the shoulders which was how I knew that Joe felt we had touched something of the beauty of the song.

I*m sure those two songs were Joe’s favourites as well as mine. When he retired from Winchester, the house gave him a great party. It was Christmas and we took my grand piano into the boys’ communal hall and we lit a fire.   Every boy in the house did a turn of some kind for Joe, who played the piano for the songs and accompanied the instrumentalists. Sandeep recited his translation of  Ba Ba Black Sheep into Tamil, specially made for the occasion; we had a silent film in which an extravagant actor, Murrough O’Brian, played out the events described by a series of captions unveiled by his stony-faced stooge, Tone. Dons came and went, to join in the organised fun, and to pay tribute to Joe. Liz Archdale, the Matron, sang Falling in Love Again an  octave below  the Dietrich norm, and Joe and I gave the world our Lizbie Brown.

However, we always kept Proud Songsters for ourselves, as perhaps a little too fragile, too personal, to share, though we never discussed why. I still can’t think of it today without recalling Joe’s astonishing evocation of the birds.  He is gone now and I am too old for side effects, so I only have the words, but they remind me of Joe, and they are apposite here because they are about the miracle of creation.

Proud Songsters

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
In bushes
Pipe as they can when April wears,
As if all time were theirs.
These are brand new birds of twelve-months’ growing,
Which a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingales,
Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
And earth, and air, and rain.