Anthony Chenevix-Trench (10 May 1919 – 21 June 1979) was a British schoolteacher, classics scholar and alleged child sexual abuser. He was born in British India, educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, and served in the Second World War as an artillery officer with British Indian units in Malaya. Captured by the Japanese in Singapore, he was forced to work on the Burma Railway.
He taught classics at Shrewsbury, where he became a housemaster, and taught for another year at Christ Church. He was headmaster of Bradfield College, where he raised academic standards and instituted a substantial programme of new building works. Appointed headmaster of Eton College in 1963, he broadened the curriculum immensely and introduced a greater focus on achieving strong examination results, but was asked to leave in 1969 after disagreements with housemasters and an unpopular attitude to caning, which became the subject of a press controversy after his death.
Following a one-year break during which he taught for one term at the prep school Swanbourne House, he was appointed headmaster of Fettes College, where he succeeded in greatly increasing enrolment and in reforming the harsh traditional atmosphere of the school. He died while still headmaster there.
He is the subject of child sexual abuse allegations detailed in numerous articles and an episode of the BBC radio documentary series In Dark Corners by Alex Renton.
Early life and family
Anthony Chenevix-Trench, born at Kasauli in India on 10 May 1919, was the youngest of four sons, the older ones being Christopher, Richard and Godfrey. His father was in the Indian Civil Service. In the first few years of his life the family visited Britain and other countries, returning to India in 1922 where his father worked as part of a three-man commission in the picturesque city of Udaipur making recommendations on the vexed issue of land reform in the Rajput state of Mewar. Anthony was to spend three years in India, living in traditional colonial luxury with a staff of twelve including an English nanny and an Indian ayah, riding with the Mewar state cavalry on his pony while wearing a lancer's uniform tailored down to his size, and moving to the foothills of the Himalayas to avoid the heat of the summer.
Education The family returned to England in 1925, moving to Somerset in 1927; Chenevix-Trench attended school for the first time in Westgate-on-Sea in Kent. He had already been introduced to classical literature by his father, reading Herodotus at the age of six. His mother Margaret would always read to the children – who by now included all four brothers and Philippa Tooth whom the Chenevix-Trenches looked after while her parents remained in India – at bedtime, including G. K. Chesterton, Kipling, and Greek and Roman myths. Towards the end of his life Chenevix-Trench described how this had inspired him, and said that "the words still sing in my mind like music".
At age eight he was sent to board at the prep school Highfield in Hampshire, where the headmaster Canon W.R. Mills was described as "a hard taskmaster in Latin". Chenevix-Trench was a contemporary there of Ludovic Kennedy, whom he helped with Greek prose composition, Anthony Storr and Robin Maugham; all three of these were later scathing of the headmaster's extensive use of the cane on his young charges. In his early years there, Chenevix-Trench spent more than a year away from the school due to lung congestion, suspected rheumatic fever, and problems with sleepwalking. But he quickly resumed progress, writing prose and poetry described as "highly polished" for the school magazine, and being successful at boxing, though he was too small to excel at most of the team sports. He was popular through sheer enthusiasm rather than physical prowess, and in his penultimate year founded an unofficial school club in which boys would crawl about in the school's lofts in their pyjamas – the subsequent myth was that he fell through the headmaster's own ceiling and was thoroughly caned on the spot. Despite all this, Chenevix-Trench won a scholarship to Shrewsbury School while still aged twelve, and was a prefect in his last term at Highfield.
At Shrewsbury at the time, H.H. Hardy was headmaster, described as a "strict disciplinarian" who maintained the school's "rich Classical tradition, sporting fanaticism, fervent house loyalties, robust discipline and unseemly squalor". Chenevix-Trench was small for his age, but charmed both teachers and other pupils with his wit and enthusiasm, took part in a wide variety of sports, and continued to excel academically, winning a host of prizes. He became a house monitor at age sixteen, and head of School House the following year. Francis King, who was a thirteen-year-old in his first year at the school at the time, described Chenevix-Trench as "a supercilious, capricious and cruel head of house". The majority did not share this view, and Robin Lorimer, Chenevix-Trench's best friend at Shrewsbury, observed that Chenevix-Trench was merely upholding a rule then in force that even the most trivial mistakes by younger boys must be punished with four strokes of the cane by the monitors, but did not gloat over the effects. By this time Chenevix-Trench had already gained a Classics Scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, at age sixteen.
He was housed in Peckwater Quad, and rowed in the college's Second VIII. He greatly appreciated his surroundings, writing home that "Oxford in sunshine is a dream city – made to be seen in summer". He was elected to the Twenty Club, an exclusive Christ Church debating society, but he did not join the Oxford Union or the Oxford University Dramatic Society, for reasons of cost and time commitments respectively. His tutors for Honour Moderations were Denys Page and John G. Barrington-Ward, said to be "one of the best Latin prose scholars in Oxford", who was also a crossword setter for The Times. Chenevix-Trench twice narrowly failed to win the coveted Hertford Prize for classicists, but in Mods he achieved twelve alpha grades out of fourteen papers, resulting in an easy First-class in Latin and Greek literature. Before his third year at Oxford began, the Second World War broke out, and Chenevix-Trench signed up for the Royal Regiment of Artillery (believing it likely to be more cerebral than an infantry command)—his oath was witnessed by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Military service
Chenevix-Trench started his military career as an officer cadet at Aldershot, taking the technical and organisational teaching seriously but the remainder less so: "In these pre-Dunkirk days, work finished at five o'clock and everyone went home for the weekend." On 1 March 1940, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. When volunteers were requested to be replacement officers for artillery units in India, he stepped forward, remembering his happy childhood days there. In Bombay, he joined the 22nd Mountain (Indian Artillery) Regiment, and took charge of an artillery battery. His linguistic skills were immensely valuable in overcoming poor communications within the unit (he mastered the basics of Urdu to make it possible for the officers to communicate with their men), though the culturally diverse nature of the unit, half Muslim and half Sikh but with British officers and signallers, continued to cause problems.
The regiment, made up of four batteries, was stationed in Singapore, the most important British naval base in the Far East. Each battery was made up of 180 men with four British officers; Chenevix-Trench's battery was the 24th (Hazara) Mountain Battery, which had recently been re-equipped with 6-inch howitzers. By the time Japan attacked Malaya in early December 1941, Chenevix-Trench had been promoted to battery captain, and the battery was hundreds of miles further north in Jitra near the Malayan border with Siam, supporting the 11th Indian Division in defence of the Alor Star airfield. They were soon forced to withdraw in the face of the Japanese offensive, and then became part of the general retreat southwards through Malaya as the British forces risked being outflanked by Japanese amphibious landings. Massive Japanese air superiority put an end to the British naval counter-strike by sinking the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, which had been sent to attack the Japanese transport ships.
The battery commander, Edward Sawyer, described Chenevix-Trench as having been "a tower of strength" in the rearguard action. By 26 December, the unit was fighting at Kampar, halfway back to Singapore. Chenevix-Trench was further praised for his battery's role in defeating the first Japanese amphibious landings at Kuala Selangor, but the retreat continued, and by the end of January 1942 the regiment was back in Singapore, supporting the 28th Indian Infantry Brigade in its defence of a sector of the island's shore west of the causeway linking it to the mainland. The 85,000 British and Commonwealth troops in Singapore surrendered on 15 February. One of the Sikh artillerymen in Chenevix-Trench's unit was not much impressed by the physical appearance of the Japanese, asking, "Sahib, how came we to be beaten by those bastards?"
Chenevix-Trench was a prisoner of war (POW) for three and a half years, first at Changi Prison and then working on the Burma Railway, where he lost an eye and suffered kidney failure.Philp, Robert (1998). A Keen Wind Blows. James & James. p.97. The twenty-four British officers and signallers were separated from their Indian troops – whom the Japanese had hopes of subverting to their cause – and initially lived in fairly tolerable conditions. Chenevix-Trench learned more about India's ethnic and political divisions, read Homer's Odyssey in Greek and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and compiled, bound and decorated an anthology of English poetry. Conditions changed in April 1943 when the POWs were used as slave labour on the railway. The track had to be forced through impenetrable jungle, in appalling conditions and with malaria, dysentery and beriberi constant: Chenevix-Trench suffered all three. Medical supplies were non-existent, rations at starvation level, and the sick forced to work until they died. Chenevix-Trench saved many lives through inspired pseudo-medical advice and hygiene discipline. He saw one of his fellow soldiers impaled against a tree with bayonets for attempting to escape, amidst many other horrors. When a cholera epidemic struck, the British did not have enough fuel to build funeral pyres for the victims, so were forced to bury them in shallow graves. Heavy rains came and washed away the soil from over the graves, and one morning Chenevix-Trench and his fellow prisoners emerged from their camp amidst rows of protruding bones clad with rotting flesh.
Despite it all, he kept up his classical studies, and gave talks to his fellow prisoners about Greek literature. He was also remembered as a man who took mortal risks to barter for the food that might keep men alive a few days longer. For his parents, almost all of 1942 passed without a word, before learning by an official telegram that he was a prisoner of war; they continued a constant stream of letters, most of which reached him and gave him great comfort, even though his postcards in the opposite direction were censored or injected with random text like "tell Susan not to worry". Susan was fictitious, but by 1944 she did indeed not need to worry about him; with the railway completed, he was back in Singapore, with enough leisure to learn both Persian and Mandarin, as well as "cooking, gardening, bridge and poker". Thus, with the added inconvenience of starvation rations once again, he lived out the rest of his war.