Anthony Chenevix-Trench

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.