A French Master, Four Objects and an Auckland Phone Book

That was his introduction to French, and to Eric Dehn, who that same week turned out to be his housemaster too. I tried the method at home on Sunday. I pointed at the door and said, “La porte!”, and the youngest left through it.

Dehn had form as a performer. In March 1953 School Life, a journal of the US Office of Education, printed excerpts from his report on a year teaching French and English at Louisville Male High School in Kentucky. His pupils, he reported, “never really ceased to be amazed at my pronunciation of class or tomato”, while their French was “occasionally seriously prejudiced by the presence of undetected bubble gum”. He also gave 116 talks that year. I gave one talk to the PTA, about the tombola, and needed a lie-down.

Tozer, by his own account, was not an attentive pupil at first, and dropped French after what he remembers as a poor showing in the fourth form. In 1958 he passed seven O-levels out of eight and heard the news by telegram from his housemaster, at a summer youth camp in Exmouth. After his A-levels in 1960 he was advised that a language would help his university applications, so he went back to school for one more term and passed French O-level. La porte had stayed open.

Teachers like that do not stay in the timetable. Another Old Bristolian, Kevin Mallin, remembers meeting Dehn and another former master, Mike Booker, many years after leaving, and having chats. Dehn went further. He visited New Zealand in 1967, found Tozer’s name in the Auckland phone directory, and visited his home.

This week I spent forty minutes trying to find the email address of the eldest’s form tutor, using the school website, the parent app and a WhatsApp group of thirty-one parents. I am on page four of the app.

Eric Dehn found a former pupil on the other side of the world with a phone book and the letter T.