DOUG BROWN
Tribute to Doug Brown by David Aschman (SACS E1, 1965)
It is an honour to talk for a few minutes about this remarkable man, and the gift he gave to us. Doug Brown was my English teacher for five years, 1961 to 1965, and my class teacher for nearly all that time. The sixties were a glorious time to emerge into adulthood – a time for new thoughts, ideas, fashion, moralities and music - and we were privileged to be guided into this time by a man of energy, enthusiasm, intellect, flexibility of thought, humour, compassion and great humanity – Doug Brown.
How did he do it? Doug Brown ignited our young imaginations through words.
We never fully 'knew' or understood Doug Brown. He was always enigmatic and remote - a predatory figure striding down the corridor in his black toga, a man of passionate views - sometimes explosive in its expression. I will never forget his riveting rendering of 'My Last Duchess'... his monologue looming to fill all physical and emotional space as he approached down the empty, resonant corridor.
Consider a class at SACS some 50 years ago. It is the opening scene of Macbeth with the three witches. In a flat South African accented monotone, a dull boy reads:
1st WITCH: When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning or in rain?"
"No, no, no!" goes Doug Brown. "Imagine a bleak, cold, grey, rainy Scottish heath", and advancing on the boy, reaches out a long arm, and grasps him by the shoulder and then reads, in a high scratchy croak:
2nd WITCH: When the hurly-burly's done
When the battle's lost and won.
3rd WITCH: That will be ere the set of sun.
1st WITCH: Where the place?
2nd WITCH: Upon the heath.
3rd WITCH: There to meet with Macbeth.
1st WITCH: I come, Graymalkin.
2nd WITCH: Paddock calls.
3rd WITCH: Anon!
ALL: Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air,"
and we all, sitting in a sunny class room at 34 deg south, at the foot of a vast continent, shiver at the confusion, and glimpse the evils of naked ambition that is to unfold in far off medieval Scotland.
Under the austere stern gaze of Robin Whiteford it was men such as Doug Brown, Doodles de Kock, John Ince and others that were the real strength of SACS, and gave us the deep memories we have our teachers at SACS as human beings. It was through them that SACS exerted its huge influence on us as developing adolescents and young men. Doug Brown, Doodles de Kock and John Ince seemed to us to be deeply genuine men. Doug and Doodles relied on the individual's hidden and uncertain sources of creativity. Doug was more rigid in his enforcement of disciplined thinking and actions, but we never doubted his seriousness of purpose, and integrity.
Doug believed that if we could imagine that we were each capable of excelling, each in our own different way, we could each achieve something. He led us to feel and understand that the world was tractable, and that our actions in that world could be effective.
Sometimes he got it wrong. He once asked a boy, dreamily staring out of the window "What are you dreaming about, boy?" "Ships, sir" came the reply. "Ships? Ships? For Heaven's sake man, dream about something useful." Today that boy runs one of the largest tanker fleets in the world.
For Doug it was important that we were all included. Not only the good, or the strong, were to be encouraged and rewarded - he demanded that we each did our best, however good or mediocre that was. His values were democratic - he would include all. Doug led by doing - Spectemur Agendo - in the classroom, in school plays, and on the sports fields.
Many of us in standard six in 1961 remember how Doug revealed to us the sheer beauty of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Since Doug died on the day before the start of this month - October, it is apt that I choose now to read from "Poem in October" by Dylan Thomas. Here the poet celebrates his 30th birthday. Doug must have been about 33 at the time when he read it to us, affecting, as I recall, a slight Welsh lilt:
"It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood ..."
and the poet walks out of the sleeping town, on a road that takes him high above it. In the lyrical third stanza the words flow in a cascade of joy
" A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me. "
We listened, enraptured by the words, read to us by Doug, till the marvellous final stanza, where Dylan Thomas remembers the joy of his youth that can never be relived, and senses his mortality
...
" And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning."
Doug, we shall sing this truth, in all the years to come.
As youthful scholars 50 years ago, if we dimly grasped that you were bestowing on us this huge gift, that of imagining the world, and what we could achieve in it, we were then too young, too unknowing, to have voiced it to you. But now we know the value of this gift you gave us, and if, in years to come, we are to meet you on this "high hill" we shall say out loud to you:
"For all that you gave us, thank you, Doug Brown"
It is an honour to talk for a few minutes about this remarkable man, and the gift he gave to us. Doug Brown was my English teacher for five years, 1961 to 1965, and my class teacher for nearly all that time. The sixties were a glorious time to emerge into adulthood – a time for new thoughts, ideas, fashion, moralities and music - and we were privileged to be guided into this time by a man of energy, enthusiasm, intellect, flexibility of thought, humour, compassion and great humanity – Doug Brown.
How did he do it? Doug Brown ignited our young imaginations through words.
We never fully 'knew' or understood Doug Brown. He was always enigmatic and remote - a predatory figure striding down the corridor in his black toga, a man of passionate views - sometimes explosive in its expression. I will never forget his riveting rendering of 'My Last Duchess'... his monologue looming to fill all physical and emotional space as he approached down the empty, resonant corridor.
Consider a class at SACS some 50 years ago. It is the opening scene of Macbeth with the three witches. In a flat South African accented monotone, a dull boy reads:
1st WITCH: When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning or in rain?"
"No, no, no!" goes Doug Brown. "Imagine a bleak, cold, grey, rainy Scottish heath", and advancing on the boy, reaches out a long arm, and grasps him by the shoulder and then reads, in a high scratchy croak:
2nd WITCH: When the hurly-burly's done
When the battle's lost and won.
3rd WITCH: That will be ere the set of sun.
1st WITCH: Where the place?
2nd WITCH: Upon the heath.
3rd WITCH: There to meet with Macbeth.
1st WITCH: I come, Graymalkin.
2nd WITCH: Paddock calls.
3rd WITCH: Anon!
ALL: Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air,"
and we all, sitting in a sunny class room at 34 deg south, at the foot of a vast continent, shiver at the confusion, and glimpse the evils of naked ambition that is to unfold in far off medieval Scotland.
Under the austere stern gaze of Robin Whiteford it was men such as Doug Brown, Doodles de Kock, John Ince and others that were the real strength of SACS, and gave us the deep memories we have our teachers at SACS as human beings. It was through them that SACS exerted its huge influence on us as developing adolescents and young men. Doug Brown, Doodles de Kock and John Ince seemed to us to be deeply genuine men. Doug and Doodles relied on the individual's hidden and uncertain sources of creativity. Doug was more rigid in his enforcement of disciplined thinking and actions, but we never doubted his seriousness of purpose, and integrity.
Doug believed that if we could imagine that we were each capable of excelling, each in our own different way, we could each achieve something. He led us to feel and understand that the world was tractable, and that our actions in that world could be effective.
Sometimes he got it wrong. He once asked a boy, dreamily staring out of the window "What are you dreaming about, boy?" "Ships, sir" came the reply. "Ships? Ships? For Heaven's sake man, dream about something useful." Today that boy runs one of the largest tanker fleets in the world.
For Doug it was important that we were all included. Not only the good, or the strong, were to be encouraged and rewarded - he demanded that we each did our best, however good or mediocre that was. His values were democratic - he would include all. Doug led by doing - Spectemur Agendo - in the classroom, in school plays, and on the sports fields.
Many of us in standard six in 1961 remember how Doug revealed to us the sheer beauty of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Since Doug died on the day before the start of this month - October, it is apt that I choose now to read from "Poem in October" by Dylan Thomas. Here the poet celebrates his 30th birthday. Doug must have been about 33 at the time when he read it to us, affecting, as I recall, a slight Welsh lilt:
"It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood ..."
and the poet walks out of the sleeping town, on a road that takes him high above it. In the lyrical third stanza the words flow in a cascade of joy
" A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me. "
We listened, enraptured by the words, read to us by Doug, till the marvellous final stanza, where Dylan Thomas remembers the joy of his youth that can never be relived, and senses his mortality
...
" And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning."
Doug, we shall sing this truth, in all the years to come.
As youthful scholars 50 years ago, if we dimly grasped that you were bestowing on us this huge gift, that of imagining the world, and what we could achieve in it, we were then too young, too unknowing, to have voiced it to you. But now we know the value of this gift you gave us, and if, in years to come, we are to meet you on this "high hill" we shall say out loud to you:
"For all that you gave us, thank you, Doug Brown"