Athol Williams

Athol Williams is a South African poet, applied philosopher and business professor based at Oxford University. In 2026, Williams was appointed Poet Laureate at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. Quotes Thank you. I’ve forgotten most of my early days as a child but I do remember going to Hereworth when I was seven – just before I turned eight … boarded there in the end of 1937 and I was there until 1941 as a boarder. It was not an illustrious school career at all. I left there and went to Wanganui Collegiate where I spent five years in Selwyn House, and became a house prefect and later a school prefect – was my greatest claim to fame. I left there and went on to the farm – we have a family farm and I worked there for two years. And one of the shepherds came up to me one morning and said “this place is not big enough for both of us, so I’ll be leaving.” And I said to him “I’ve beaten you to the trot. I’ve volunteered to go and fight in Korea.” At the end of that farming year I left the farm and spent a few weeks at home before going into barracks and training for the service that I was to do in the army. I was sent home from Korea after I had been there six weeks to do an OCTU, [Officer Cadet Training Unit] and in the process of doing the OCTU I got engaged. And when I went back to Korea I was waiting to be commissioned, realising that from the moment that I accepted a commission I would be bound to stay for a whole year before I would be likely to come home. So when a commission didn’t come up straight away because there weren’t sufficient commission vacancies, the time came when … an actually I was offered a commission and I said “no, I won’t accept that because it means I’ve got to stay a whole year”. And I’d been there long enough to know that I was going to be able to come home in nine months, and I wanted to get home to my sweetheart, which I duly did. And we got married in Hastings and we lived about twenty-five years out on the coastal farm, and we had two children … we adopted the first one, and then the other two were born with my wife. External links Category:Living people