R.W. Harris, master at Wolmer’s, 1940–1943
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R.W. Harris, master at Wolmer’s School, 1940–1943
The Independent of 1 July 1999, in its obituary of R.W. Harris (Ronald Walter Harris), recorded that he taught at Wolmer’s School in Jamaica from 1940 to 1943.
Harris was born at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, on 19 August 1916, and educated at Bradford-on-Avon Grammar School and Bristol University, where he was Rome Scholar and took a First in History. At Wolmer’s he met and married Lesley Fox (married 1941; she died 1995; one son, one daughter). He then taught at Uppingham (1943–45) and had army service in 1945. From January 1946 he was Head of History at the King’s School, Canterbury, and from 1954 Master of Studies, retiring in 1981. The Independent called him perhaps the outstanding history master of his generation, and named textbooks including Political Ideas 1760–1792 (1963), Absolutism and Enlightenment (1964), and Romanticism and the Social Order (1969), and a later biography, Clarendon and the English Revolution (1983). He died in London on 17 June 1999.