Evans Memorial

Remembering Patrick Evans
Ned Groth, Autumn, 2022

(Author’s note: This biographical remembrance is based on documents and personal communications, including a yearbook, class newsletters, letters from Patrick, my own recollections, a few anecdotes from classmates, and encounters with Patrick over the years. My goal, as always, is to create an honest and loving portrait of our former master, as we knew him. While I’ve striven for factual accuracy, I take full responsibility for any errors. –NG)

When our class started out at Darrow, in the fall of 1958, we had a marvelous Latin teacher, one of Mr. Heyniger’s incredible hires, Fred Wheelock, who had literally written the book he taught us from. But Dr. Wheelock retired after two years, so in September 1960 we had a new Latin teacher. Once again it seemed Mr. Heyniger went “outside the box,” and hired someone not obviously qualified whose primary talents were a passion for teaching and the ability to “connect” with his students.

That new teacher, of course, was Patrick. Patrick John Oxford Evans, to be more precise. And “new” he was. Patrick had (been) graduated from Oxford University in the UK the spring before. An aristocratic Brit, he was taking a year off after college to see our part of the world, living in the USA before going back home, finding a job and settling down. It was our good fortune that he and Mr. Heyniger somehow found each other.

Patrick’s home-away-from-home for his sojourn in the US was Neale House, where he was an assistant house master, occupying the basement apartment facing Hinckley. In addition to his classroom duties (the yearbook says) Patrick coached the “B Squad” soccer team; in snow season he helped Steve Swenson maintain ski team equipment, and drove groups of students over to Bosquet’s and Jiminy Peak for recreational outings. He cheerfully and energetically led a Hands-to-Work crew, regaled us in the dining hall. He had a British girlfriend, Penny, who had come over here with him for the year; she found a secretarial job in New York City and would often come up for weekends. We all found her BBC accent (that must have been it) utterly captivating.

The picture above, from the faculty page of the 1961 yearbook (complete with ink blotch from Patrick’s fountain pen when he signed it for me), is the only photo we have from his year among us. There was no photo of the “B” soccer team, and he evaded the camera in his many other roles.

So our images of Patrick from that year are almost all our memories, especially of him in the classroom. Like the blind men in the parable with the elephant, we each seem to have held onto different aspects of Patrick’s pedagogy. John Ho called him a “jolly good teacher,” and we all agree on that. He was expert on his subject and enthusiastic about leading us to share his admiration for the ancient authors. My own memories don’t extend much beyond the odes of Horace, which Patrick adored and taught us to love (and to translate). My recollection probably has been shaped by the fact that he signed my yearbook “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” Peter Gorday remembers reading Virgil, Cicero, and that he “ground us through Caesar’s Commentaries, passage by passage.” Having pursued the Classics more seriously and longer than most of the rest of us did, Peter opines that Caesar’s “fairly easy Latin” and tales of war and conquest helped young males in the British public school system “learn manly virtues.” We found Patrick a kindly and good-natured teacher with a charming accent and a few upper-class British eccentricities, which Peter calls “delightfully enchanting.”

Carl Braun emailed me that he had a good story about Patrick, but then neglected to send it, so I nagged him…and nagged him. Finally got it, and it’s such a good story that I’m just pasting it in here in Carl’s own words.

“Latin was/is my all-time least favorite subject…I tried to memorize just enough to get by…As I recall, our class was held in the early afternoon and I would try to engage Evans on any topic I could to avoid Latin – as one of the smaller kids in our class, I was impressed with his size and athletic ability…and enjoyed listening to his proper English accent - I tried often to get him to explain Cricket and his response was always it’s too complex to explain…

“I tried to engage him about a Rhodes Scholarship (I think he was on one when he attended Oxford) but again he began with our Latin assignment.

“However, Mondays were somewhat different – Evans would begin the class sharing with us his weekend escapades (I was impressed with all the adventures he tried) - while I can’t recall many of the details, one Monday he showed up all banged up with cuts, scrapes and Band-Aids all over his face and hands – and he began to tell us what an exciting Sunday he’d had “Swinging Birches.” Seems he’d read how you could grab onto a birch tree that was bent over by the weight of a new snow fall – shake the snow off and suddenly, if you had selected the correct size birch, you would end up going for a ride thru the air and come back down as the birch bent back over to let you off…well, Evans apparently didn’t select the best birch as on the way down, the birch cracked and sent him crashing thru other trees on the way to a crash landing…I decided that Swinging a birch wasn’t going to be on my bucket list.”

While some other first-year masters were heckled and teased unmercifully by the students, as far as I can recall Patrick was not subjected to any hazing. Peter recalls his “somewhat rumpled sartorial splendor,” a fondness for plaid shirts and solid-color ties with tweed jackets and blue jeans. He had an adventurous spirit, was comfortable being himself, and was easy to like.

His single year of teaching completed, Patrick took Horace Greeley’s advice and went west. Dick Kohler, Darrow ’61, had a brother who owned a ranch in Wyoming, where Patrick got a summer job, then he explored a bit of the western states. Then it was back to London and “real life.”

Starting in 1968, I began writing an annual newsletter for the class, and reached out to former teachers as well. The school had an address for Patrick (or his mother) in London so I was able to contact him, and he participated enthusiastically in the initial news sharing. By 1968, he was working for British Petroleum, starting in London in 1962, and from 1964-68, stationed in Paris. He said he’d enjoyed “holidays” all over the continent, with skiing in the Alps a particular highlight. He had married; his wife, Maggy, was French, and they had bought a 16th-Century farmhouse in the south of France “to where, perhaps after a few more years’ work, we shall undoubtedly retire.”

In that long first letter, Patrick wondered, almost sacrilegiously, why we had all needed to learn Latin (he found French far more useful now). And he reported that he and Maggy would soon be leaving for Central Africa; his next posting for BP was in Bujumbura, Burundi. Over the next dozen years or so, Patrick sent me Christmas cards, with brief letters thanking me for the news of Darrow colleagues and sharing bits of his life. They spent three years in Bujumbura, where his territory also included the Congo and Rwanda; it was a time of great turbulence in Africa, of emergence and violence. A couple of years later, they were in Helsinki, still working for BP, with no news but an invitation to “come visit.”

By Christmas of 1975, Patrick and Maggy were back in London, and he had moved from BP over to Guinness, the stout company. He still was spending a lot of time overseas, but remained based in London, while he and Maggy took most of their holidays in Provence. They now had a daughter, Sophie, born about 1975.

Patrick made it to New York once or twice in his travels, but I was living in Washington at the time, and we failed to connect. In spring 1978, I took a trip to England and France, and Patrick invited me to stay with him in London. Maggy and Sophie had already left for Provence for the summer, so I missed meeting them, but I visited with Patrick in their home just off Hampstead Heath. We had dinner at a nice French (what else) restaurant, and the next day Patrick, his mother and I drove out to Woburn Abbey, one of those “stately homes of England” that had become a tourist destination, in this case at least partly because the expansive grounds had been turned into a wild animal park. I took this photo outside their front door at 7 Heath Close.

Patrick entertained me with stories about his work life with Guinness Overseas. He had spent a few weeks recently in the Caribbean, and was heading next to Saudi Arabia, where his job was to persuade Arabs to drink a non-alcoholic stout (really). He found that challenge “fascinating.” He asked for (and I later sent him) an address for Ron Emery, who in those years was teaching English in Jeddah; I don’t know if they ever got together there.

The 1979 Christmas card brought news of their next posting – in Jamaica! Patrick was in charge of the Caribbean and Latin America region for Guinness for the next two years. I then lost touch with Patrick for a while, but in 1987 I called Guinness in London to get his new address – in Libreville, Gabon. I sent a letter; Patrick wrote back to say that Sophie, 12, was going to boarding school in England, and “I’ve forgotten all my Latin.”

In the mid-1980s, as my life got fuller with a new marriage, children and a demanding job, I stopped writing newsletters, and I lost touch with many of my friends from Darrow, including Patrick. In 2003, as I was rebuilding my network of Darrow contacts via email and our class website, a search of international phone directories found an address for him in Provence. I sent a letter, and got a nice one back. From that point on, Patrick was on our email list, and now and then would respond to news we circulated.

I invited former faculty to our 50th reunion in 2012. Patrick really wanted to come, but he and Maggy had already made other commitments for that weekend. Still, he resolved then that he did want to see Darrow again, and planned to come the next year. And he did, attending reunions weekend in 2013. That was the year Nancy Wolf retired, and I and several others from ’62 were there, and delighted to reconnect with Patrick, who wrote later to say he had a most enjoyable time. He had not been back in 52 years, but found the place both changed and unchanging.

By then, of course, Patrick and Maggy had long since made good on his prediction of retiring to Provence. Despite a long-standing invitation to come visit them there, I never made it, nor I think did any of his other Latin students.

This summer, Darrow got a note from Maggy, informing us that Patrick passed away in July of 2019. We have no further details. He would have been 81.

Although he touched our lives just for one school year, Patrick had an impact on us, as Darrow and his students there had on him. The connection was firm enough that we stayed in touch, off and on, over almost six decades. From a distance, he seems to have had a well-lived life, filled with some genuine adventures, and a loving family with roots in two countries. We extend our sympathies to Maggy and Sophie, and our sadness that he’s gone. Requiescat in pace.