JIM GOLLAND
"He was my friend, faithful and just to me."
I write to mourn Jim Golland and briefly to praise his many virtues. Others will no doubt enumerate his many successes and achievements.
In all the twenty years we worked together we never once had a cross word. This was surely due to Jim’s kindness not my own.
We differed on matters of political belief but we both agreed to leave that outside of school and instead concentrate on all the multifarious tasks of teaching boys the skills and sensitivities of the English tongue and literature.
His energy was prodigious, a constant reproach to me. His extraordinary successes in gaining open awards to Oxford and Cambridge, in drama and school magazine production were a legend throughout Harrow schools.
Jim was not a back-slapping jokester but he had a lovely, quiet sense of humour and a sharp wit. We had at one time an impressively able and knowledgeable boy, Brian Gilbert—now producing films like ‘Oscar Wilde’. Jim, in magazine production, as elsewhere, was a perfectionist and won the ‘Best School Magazine Award’. He was surprised, then, just as the proofs were about to be sent to the printer, when a boy ran up and said, "Sir, we’ve found a typographical error." Jim asked what it was. "Sir, we’ve put ‘Brain Gilbert’ instead of ‘Brian’." Jim thought briefly. "Leave it," he said. Lovely.
Jim was an exemplary liberal teacher and Head of Department. He was, instrumental, I suspect, in my promotions, during the course of discussions in the Head’s office. He was generous in his praise and lavish in the encouragement he gave to everyone.
He introduced ‘Log books’, thick volumes in which the boys could write almost anything that interested, worried, pleased and amused them. We got some wonderful writing but we have no record now as the boys kept them for their future enjoyment. I think this was the principal reason for the very high pass marks the boys constantly achieved in ‘O’ level English Language. We learn by doing. (The boys loved them.)
The last time I talked to Jim, apart from the excellent ‘Back Stage Reunion’, was when he and Joan came out to see Patty and me at Patty’s Book Fair in Gerrards Cross and we had lunch together. Later Jim took me out to admire his gorgeous new car and we talked for some time, chiefly about the passage of time and of what concerned us both: old age, illness and death. I can’t make up my mind whether this was natural or ill-judged.
Jim was my good friend. I wish we could have seen more of him. I loved him. I wept when I heard of his death and couldn’t speak to Joan on the telephone.
As a literary expert, perhaps Jim would appreciate the little epitaph I’ve chosen for him as my own last words—Shelley’s lovely tribute to Keats in the lines from ‘Adonais:
"Awake him not! Surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill."
Gerry Lafferty and Patty.