Robert Birley

Robert Birley (14 July 1903 – 22 July 1982) was an English educationalist who was headmaster of Charterhouse School, then Eton College, and an anti-apartheid campaigner. About Birley He was an eccentric figure-half loyal member of England's ruling elite and of the Church of England, and half reforming rebel and idealistic visionary. As a young master at Eton, for example, he openly expressed his sympathy with the strikers during the General Strike of 1926, a position for which some people never forgave him... He was a conservative radical, whose nickname among the backwoods Etonian Tories was "Red Robert". He was not only a great teacher, but a great moral reformer. Before the war he had fought Nazism, and spent hours trying to argue me out of my incipient pacifist tendencies. After the war he worked to bring a new generation of liberal Germans back into a federation of Europe. Later still, in the 1960s, he fought to bring education to the blacks of South Africa, personally conducting classes in Soweto; and finally he did his best to humanize and civilize those great barbarian institutions, the English public schools of Charterhouse and Eton. Lawrence Stone, External links Category:1903 births Category:Educators from England Category:Academics from England Category:Anti-apartheid activists Category:1982 deaths