In The Old Gaytonian for 1974, edited by Roger Swinburn, former Harrow County Headmaster Dr. A. R. Simpson provides a rare personal glimpse as he was asked to write about retirement:
Me about me? And on the garrulous theme of old age and retirement? School Heads talk to and about others, never about themselves. They safeguard the mask of personal inscrutability; and their Scottish members are proverbially laconic as the high priests of this esoteric cult. They employ the shrewd long silence of the far-fixed eyes as the anvil of impact of the too brief word. Still, for all Old Gaytonians - anything.
Of course I can advise about this. As Britain is now shaping, first tour or cruise the world, second choose your spot, third clear out. Don't continue in the same old ruts or return to the same old platitudes of natal, youthful and largely dead associations. Seek freedom and reincarnation; and anonymity. Failing an ideal migratory tax-free life with one suitcase in the Medi, find the nearest British compromise - the best of one's Shangri Las in one; a compact locale of every kind of varied beauty and amenity with as diversely attractive a surrounding hinterland to match - all equable climate and no weather in a sun-trap ravine facing obdurately south with something of colourful Medi gaiety and abandon where a little milder recidivism be not unduly out of place. In short, where I am.
So, in Torquay here one's "health and happiness" (its motto) is indeed secure, and a cultured aesthete's dream made a living reality. No one asks who you were and what you did - they don't want you to ask them the same. You'd think they'd all escaped or couldn't go back. And escaped they have - but mainly from themselves. Even random encounters are shunned as potential infringements of one's privacy, and diminutions or surrenders of one's paramount freedom. Besides it is refreshingly pure polyglot British and even my own expensively acquired 20 years carat pseudo-Harrovian accent, with just the teeniest dash of Scotch, is but one grain in the sands of the polyethnic "tout ensemble."
Also, even in the seventies you're still very young by comparison. For the multitudes are the less fortunate tottering moribund, or the outright hypochondriacs or the chronic boulevardiers, self pitiers of every guise and size. Still, a boost and a bonus to one's own geriatric ego.
In the mini-apartheid cleavage too between the native and the resident there is a kind of Spartiatae and Helot relationship which in a true-blue conservative stronghold is not an unhealthy thing for the discerning intellectual in the take and don't give syndrome of sensible communal living. No stupid egalitarian nonsense here, or libbertarian either.
So come south, old man, and grow down in the country.
A. R. SIMPSON
Source: Old Gaytonian, 1974