To Serve Them All His Days

Michael Collins Persse was one of the greatest schoolmasters of his time. For an astonishing sixty-three years he was on the staff of Geelong Grammar and resident at Corio—from its centenary in 1955 to 1993 as master, from 1960 Head of History, and from 1994 until his death as curator and archivist. In the finest tradition of the bachelor schoolmaster, he lived and breathed his school. His other distinction, and a source of great pride and joy to him, was as History Tutor to the Prince of Wales during his two terms at the school in 1966. David Checketts, the Prince’s aide-de-camp at the time, is widely quoted as saying, “I went out with a boy and came back with a man.” This time in Australia led to not only a special affection for the school and the country but a deep and enduring friendship between Michael and the Prince, who described him as “a national treasure”. Michael referred to his relationship with the Prince as a conversation that had continued for half a century.

Faith, friendship and family were at the core of Michael’s life. His father, Dudley Burton Parry de Burgh Persse, was a charismatic, gregarious, good-looking grazier. His mother, Margaret Anne (Janette) nee Collins was a clever beauty, more reserved than her husband. She had read philosophy under A.D. Lindsay (later Lord Lindsay of Birker), the Master of Balliol, and like her sisters had been presented at the Court of King George V. In 1971, by deed poll, Michael would add Collins to his surname, in homage to his mother’s family.

Both Dudley and Janette were descendants of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, no fewer than eleven of them having emigrated to Australia between 1819 and 1918; and not a convict among them. Michael had a lifelong aptitude and passion for genealogy. His collection of essays, Every Tree, Rock, and Gully (2014), edited with Penelope Alexander, is proof of this; especially its last sentence, “Alfred the Great said God gave us relations to be our natural friends. To me fifth- and even sixth-cousins can still be very close.” Michael traced his descent from Charlemagne, Robert the Bruce—even Muhammad. A splendid name among a galaxy of forebears is his five-times-great-grandfather, Neptune Blood. In recent years, Michael uncovered a good claim in 1670 by his ancestor, the Very Reverend Dudley Persse, to the (Percy) earldom of Northumberland.

In December 1862, Michael’s great-grandfather, De Burgh Fitzpatrick Persse, left Moyode Castle in County Galway, the family seat (since the seventeenth century), for Queensland. Three years later, he bought Tabragalba near Beaudesert and, over the next forty years, another ten properties from the Channel Country to the Burnett: Palparrara, Connemarra, Tally-Ho, Buckingham Downs, Lake De Burgh, Hawkwood, Yerilla, Eidswold, Boolgal and Culcraigie.

Meanwhile, in 1846, William Collins was born at Mundoolun, the first white baby to be born in the Albert River District. By 1900, William and his brothers had acquired 7 million hectares in Queensland and the Northern Territory. In that year, the year of his marriage, William leased and later bought Nindooinbah, whose homestead the architect Robin Dods extended to become a huge, exotic and very comfortable country house.

In 1930, Tabragalba’s Dudley Persse (De Burgh’s grandson) and Nindooinbah’s Janette Collins (William’s daughter) married and in 1931, after a yearlong honeymoon in Europe, their eldest child, Michael Dudley de Burgh Persse was born, in Toowoomba. Michael liked to say he was conceived in Provence.

Life at Eskdale West, a 3200-hectare cattle property near Esk, bought in 1931 by Janette, was comfortable—the house designed by Kenneth McConnel, with a tennis court and pool—and traditional; almost feudal. There were a cook, maid, gardener, cowboy, stockman, governess and nurse. Michael, his brother Jonathan and sister Jane had a happy bush childhood with a wide yet exclusive circle of cousins, kin, and other well-established pastoralists. He would always call himself “a country boy from Queensland”.

Although, like his democratic father, Michael always greeted and treated everyone equally, he retained a respect for hierarchical order. The idea was lampooned as a bid to found a “bunyip aristocracy”, but one suspects that Michael had some sympathy for the proposal in 1853 of the early statesman W.C. Wentworth to create a hereditary upper house in New South Wales. (Michael thrice wrote a brief biography of Wentworth: for Oxford University Press in 1972, and for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Oxford DNB—a magisterial piece of work.)

As children, they had ponies, and later horses (never bicycles), and took part in all the cattle work—mustering and dipping, especially in the summer. He once wrote that if he achieved a memoir, he might give the Australian chapters, or the book itself, the Wordsworthian title Meadow, Grove and Stream. Alas, this was not to be, but the Oral History Unit of the National Library has no less than twenty-five hours of a series of interviews with Michael about his early life. Those twenty-five hours only took him to the age of twenty-three.

At Toowoomba Preparatory School Michael came under the influence of the first of a trio of exceptional long-serving headmasters, the monumental, wise and candid Norman Connal, who revived the school over three decades. Michael was the Dux of Prep in 1945 and won the Fairfax Medal for the boy who had best served the school. In 1946, he was sent to board at The King’s School, the oldest in the country, then flourishing under another remarkable headmaster, the striking, firm but kindly Denys Hake. Despite the King’s ethos of “healthy hardiness”, the gentle, cerebral Michael thrived, collecting prize after prize. He was awarded the Broughton and Forrest Exhibition and was made a foundation member of The Twelve Club. He was dux of the school in 1948 and 1949 and school captain in 1949, and for the first term of 1950. In his last year, he was given a class to teach—as he had, aged thirteen, in Toowoomba.

Five years at Balliol College, Oxford, followed. It was a formative time, brilliantly captured in Michael’s book Scholar Gypsy: An Oxford Friendship (2012), essentially a tribute to Sir Andrew Hills, a young baronet, with whom Michael formed an intense, platonic relationship before Hills’s death, aged twenty-one, in 1955, in a traffic accident in Oxford. At Balliol, Michael made many abiding friends, among them James Fairfax; as he did with four generations of James’s great-uncle, Hubert Fairfax’s family. The links could have run deeper. James’s father, Sir Warwick Fairfax, told Michael late in life, and out of the blue, “The greatest mistake of my life was not to marry your aunt” (Michael’s maternal aunt, Dorothea Collins).

Armed with an MA (Honours in History and Theology), Michael joined the staff of Geelong Grammar School on a two-year trial. Having resolved to take Holy Orders, he took leave in 1958 to complete his studies at Westcott House, Cambridge, but although his Anglican faith remained central to his life, he decided that teaching was his true calling and returned to Geelong.

The third and most influential of Michael’s mentors was the great J.D. (later Sir James) Darling, headmaster of Geelong from 1930 to 1961 and himself a disciple of William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and Sir Frank Fletcher, legendary headmaster of Charterhouse. By 1955, what had been a good school was an exceptional school; and in Michael, Darling had an admirer, observer and chronicler. Michael wrote of Sir James, “His greatest service at Geelong lay in the education of boys to a sense of responsibility for others and to a sensitive awareness of the needs of the world in which many of them were to play leading parts.”

One boy with a leading part to play was the Heir to the Throne, and after some discussions, which began with the Duke of Edinburgh and Sir Robert Menzies, Geelong Grammar was chosen as a suitable interregnum from the Prince’s public school, Gordonstoun, which the press liked to portray as a fusion of Colditz and Sparta. Except for a trip on the Britannia to Libya when he was six, Prince Charles had never left Europe before; but he was soon settled at Timbertop, the school’s outpost in the foothills of the Australian Alps, where Grammar’s fourth form spent a year of academic work supplemented by a range of pursuits, including cross-country runs and long hikes. The aims were, as Michael put it, “to reawaken the spirit of adventure latent in adolescent boys, to develop independence, self-reliance and a sense of community, and to restore something of the ancient harmony between man and nature”. Charles, as he was known by every­one, skied, ran, hiked and helped with the rankest menial tasks. Contemporaries remember him, as head server in the chapel, hobbling about the sanctuary with blisters after a weekend hike—giving potency to his motto, Ich Dien.

The school had another task—to prepare the Prince for Cambridge—and so he was tutored by correspondence, by telephone and personally at the main campus in Corio by his tutors in French, English and, crucially, History. Michael had spent time with the Royal Family at Sandringham earlier in the year and established a trusted friendship with both the Queen and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. And so with Charles, deepened by shared experiences such as a visit in May to Anglican missions in New Guinea. There was soon a relaxed frankness between tutor and student. On his last night at school in July 1966, as the Prince read his paper on the reign of Charles I to the Historical Society, Michael had no hesitation in disputing his pupil’s explanation for the king’s wearing two shirts to his execution. As he bid farewell to his classmates, he was given a rousing “Three cheers for Prince Charles—a real Pommie bastard”.

On his return to Britain, the Prince was awarded a distinction for his optional, scholarship paper on “The Age of Cromwell”. The Secretary of the Examinations Board told the Times that the Prince’s performance was “extraordinary, especially when you consider he was digging about in Australia and that kind of thing beforehand”. Geelong’s headmaster, T.R. (Tommy) Garnett, wrote to the Times, “Prince Charles did indeed dig deep while he was here—into History—and it is no surprise to us that he ‘shone’.” Michael had done his job.

Michael would serve under seven principals. A prodigious correspondent, he committed, decades ago, to writing to each boy and girl in the school for their birthday. This extended to old boys, parents and, of course, kith and kin. He handwrote, in fountain pen, some 3000 letters a year and no one received less than 100 words. Even the Queen enjoyed his Christmas circular; urging him, on her last visit to Australia, to keep sending them.

Michael’s debut as a writer was his magnificent script for the school’s grand centenary pageant, Their Succeeding Race, produced in 1957 by Dr Darling and Ken Mappin. From 1966, and for the next twenty-six years, he was editor of the school magazine, The Corian. He contributed to the Old Geelong Grammarians’ Light Blue and was the author of a concise yet elegant history of the school, Well-Ordered Liberty (1995). Michael was co-author (with Justin Corfield) of Geelong Grammarians: A Biographical Register (1855–1913), the first volume recording every Grammar student since foundation.

There was an other-worldliness about him. Melbourne Cup Day may have become “the race that stops the nation” but not Michael. At 2.35 p.m. on November 3, 1959, an unprecedented number of the Sixth Form Europe 1300–1600 class sought permission to be excused but Michael, in the interests of Luther/Erasmus/Calvin, sailed on, oblivious, and found, when he had exhausted the subject, his pupils’ need to be excused seemed to have passed.

Past students recalled, “a tall young fellow [in 1959] with an Oxford accent, in long white shorts, trying to teach us Australian Rules football on a wet and very muddy Cuthy oval. Later, more in his element teaching history”; and a few years later, as “the only master we had who called us by our first names, and avoided corporal punishment”. In 1980 in the library, just before recess, he was remembered for saying, “Now class, I would like you all to leave quietly, it seems Mr Osborne needs his sleep.” And at the end of recess, “Jim, I think it’s time for your next class.” At lights-out (in 1965) he would read, by torchlight, to the Cuthbertson dorm Tolkien’s The Hobbit and C.S. Lewis’s Voyage to Venus. But what made him exceptional was “the unique and remarkable capacity to calm even the most uncouth, rowdy student—to ‘gentle’ them—just through the quietness of his voice and the authenticity of his attention to this particular child”.

He also adopted a practice which became a ritual—rather like James Hilton’s fictional hero, Mr Chipping (who, by a quite remarkable coincidence, also served his school for sixty-three years)—of regularly inviting groups to his rooms at successive Dovecotes on the Corio campus—lined with shelves bursting with books, tables teeming with papers and pamphlets, correspondence and curios. Mr Chips served cake; Michael usually made do with Tim Tams and Tic Tocs.

Courtly, tolerant, wise, precise, with a phenomenal memory, a love of history and learning, and a genius for friendship, Michael was really the representative of a kinder, gentler age, but his deceptive energy, relentless engagement and ineffable charm over six decades made him somehow the embodiment of the school. His role as tutor, mentor and friend was recognised in 2015 with the conferral of an MVO, in the personal gift of the Queen, “For Services to The Prince of Wales”. The Prince himself invested Michael in a special ceremony at Admiralty House, Sydney, in November of that year. In 2017, he was honoured with an OAM, “For service to secondary education, and to history.”

Michael leaves a palpable legacy. The Michael Collins Persse Archives Centre was established in 2005 (munificently endowed by, among others, his great friend James Fairfax), and the following year Michael became one of three inaugural Old Geelong Grammarian Fellows. He was an active member of the Geelong Grammar Foundation and the Honorary President of the Biddlecombe Society, recognising those who had committed to providing a bequest in their wills to the Foundation.

The Michael Collins Persse Scholarship was established in 2016, giving a chance to students who could not otherwise attend the School. The Foundation raised over $830,000 and the School contributed a further $500,000. The Michael Collins Persse Scholarship fund had more than $1.8 million at the time of his death, and funded the first four Michael Collins Persse Scholars in 2018.

From the vast holdings of the wider family at the turn of last century, little remained for the immediate family, but what has remained in family hands was special. In 1965, after Eskdale West was sold, Shady Tree, at Buderim, became home. Dudley and Janette Persse bought it from Lady Lavarack, widow of Queensland’s post-war Governor, Sir John Lavarack. The house was largely rebuilt by Robin Gibson and John Blanshard and an outstanding garden created by Michael’s parents, which—with help over four decades from Lindsay Gerchow and Yves Daniel—Michael, Jonathan and now their nephew, Anthony Robinson, made part of Australia’s Open Garden Scheme.

Michael is survived by his brother, Jonathan, also a distinguished and much-admired former schoolmaster (at their alma mater, King’s); by the four children of his sister, Jane, who died in 2001; and by most of the 12,000 students he taught, some of whom are now in their eightieth year. Despite increasing physical frailty, he managed to meet his favourite student for the last time on the Prince of Wales’s visit to Queensland for the Commonwealth Games in April. Later that month, after foot surgery, Michael witnessed the commissioning of the school’s first female and first Australian-born head. As his surgeon put it, “If we can get you to a prince, we can get you to a principal.” Both prince and principal were as delighted by his presence as thousands of others before them.

Michael might have rather liked the Prince to have the last word. In his foreword to Michael’s collection of obituaries and tributes, In the Light of Eternity (2011), he wrote of Michael: “His immense contribution throughout his lifetime to scholarship and humanity will long be remembered, and will no doubt act as an inspiration and a beacon to those who follow in his footsteps.”