St Edward's Rhubarb - 2018

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31 ST EDWARD’S r hubarb
O B I T U A R I E S
Adrian Saunders (1958-2017)
maths retake. How could a student be
expected to deliver answers to a science
paper when the rubric wasn’t crafted in
ancient Greek? It was duly translated,
the pedantic prose crafted to flow in an
immaculate iambic pentameter, and how
much more beautiful and useful it now was.
Except that not everyone saw the same
beauty. And this was perhaps his greatest
sadness, and like a drug that never quite
satisfies, he always strove to escape from
the triviality of life, even though he loved its
excesses and its extremes. He needed to
be loved, even adored, and perhaps most
of all, understood. He would hold court
surrounded by those who held the moment
with him. They were often his students; the
younger and fresher a mind the better, but
woe betide those who could not keep up. His
quizzical look was the first sure sign that all
was not well; ultimately all it would take was a
dismissive shake of the head and an imperious
tut to the heavens and his court would be
changed. Not understanding was allowed; not
keeping up was the greatest failure of all.
It was the Dragon School where he
developed his love of teaching. It suited him
well; a preparatory school with a public
school common room, housed within the
city of Oxford, where he always somehow
felt at home. It was here he met many of
his eclectic friends, and between them
they taught some of the children from
the finest families England had to give.
Private tutorship for the aristocracy meant
holidays spent in Italian luxury; anything that
reminded him of a golden age.
His move to St Edward’s cemented his
love hate relationship with Oxford. As
with everything he did, he threw himself
into school life; one day he would be found
wearing his CCF officer’s pips as one of
Her Majesty’s most uninformed, unlikely
and unkempt officers, another preparing his
brightest for Oxbridge, and always, always,
trying to impart knowledge to those in
whom he knew it would germinate and
grow. His theatrical and thespian outputs
grew as he sang, acted and directed his
students to ever greater success; although to
this day no one can recall if he ever refereed
a single game. His humour followed him
everywhere and he was as happy writing
and directing Who Stole the Tarts as he
was with Shakespeare or Aristophanes’
finest. And like his life, his bar bill knew no
natural boundaries. It was always active and
frequently in debt as he gave to others much
more than he could ever possibly afford.
He was English to the core, and yet even
though his life was always one of steeples,
gowns and incense he ultimately found no
solace in a land where religion had become
nothing more than hollowed out churches,
with only a meagre congregation starved of
all but the scantest blue-rinse. The beauty
and sincerity of Jerusalem was not enough
to hold him, and he sought his religion
elsewhere; his mind needed to be challenged,
but also at rest, and he found this with the
complex calligraphic beauty of the east. Here
were stories to challenge the greatest that
Christendom ever had to offer; the menacing
harems of the Ottomans, the conquests of
the Seljuck Sultans, the collapse of Coptic
Christianity; and all the while surrounded by
the mysteries of the Pharaohs.
He was always reading, and as such there
were books, thousands of books, unhelpfully
heavy and always in the wrong place, collected
over a lifetime of searching in shops that most
of us would never know and far less have
the opportunity to visit. A classical library in
Cairo that belonged in Turkey was just one
of the worldly problems that followed his
mind around the geography of the ancient
world. Of course, they were never written
to be easily understood by the modern mind;
his grasp of language covered Latin, Greek,
French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Turkish, Anglo-
Saxon and Coptic. Most, his many friends
would wryly observe, were of little use when
trying to fix a cistern in Devon.
And it was Devon he always came back
to, because that was where, ultimately, his
family whom he loved more than anything,
still were. His trips became more frequent,
but never long enough for those of us still
here. His life in Turkey had become complete
and it was there that he found his peace.
He left life as he had lived it, shrouded in
the texts of a different age, and within them
was carried down the steps of the Isa Bey
mosque in Selcuk. He was placed in the
ground with great gentleness, and will now
be forever on the road to Ephesus. From his
grave one can see the Seven Sleepers and Mt
Pion. We loved him so much but as he told
us, the old Gods pass, and our time must be
with the living.
On 3rd June 2017, Adrian Christopher
Stuart Saunders (Teacher of Classics
and History, 1986–1990). The following
obituary, written by Sacha Tomes (C, 1983-
1988), was sent to us by Adrian’s sister:
There was always a cigarette, sometimes
even two. It was never a delicate act but a
deliberate vice; a deep inhalation, sucking the
very life out of them, and them ultimately
out of him. Every cigarette had a story, a
narrative, or a history that he waved in his
hands using them as a baton in his orchestra
as it played out the chronicles of time. Once
they had delivered that momentary high they
would be bent over and crushed, a deliberate
smothering; there was no time for idle
chatter and a slow burning light, time needed
to be made for more, as intense as before,
and it needed to be now.
His imagination lived in a different age,
most alive when with the Ancients and
Greats. His intellectual dexterity, that
was ultimately rewarded with an Open
Scholarship in Literae Humaniores to
Brasenose College, Oxford, was perhaps
first evident when sitting his 5th ‘O’ level
Adrian Saunders