Reminiscences: Donald Charles Stewart (pupil, 1945-1946)

I should say that my efforts at High did not advance the school’s reputation for academic excellence in the slightest; to the contrary. However, I think it is fair to say that my skills in swimming (most Manly boys swam well) and other sports including rugby union, water polo and athletics did help the school’s reputation in the sporting arena.

On one occasion, however, there was an unseemly brawl in a rugby match with our rivals Fort Street, which attained a deal of publicity and which I have always maintained I did not start. Despite my protestations of innocence, this did not endear me to the headmaster Mr Jas H Killip who thought the whole affair was ‘dreadful’. To say that Mr Killip had an influence on my life would be an understatement of immense proportion. Indeed, no boy who attended High while I was there failed to come under his influence and benefit from it.

‘The boss’, as we called him, was a stern disciplinarian who tempered justice with mercy, although I sorely tried him. I needed mercy, not justice, and he made allowances for the fact that I was fatherless and forgave me many trespasses, including running away from school with a Manly mate to go mining at Wallerawang, a coalmining town west of Sydney, threatening to cuff a homosexual mathematics teacher around the ears if he so much as laid a finger on me, and generally giving him more angst than any other ten boys at the school.

When I met ‘the boss’ later in life, I asked him why on earth he had put up with me. He said he had put up with worse boys, but I doubt that this was the case. He added that despite my appalling behaviour at times, I had always owned up to my misdemeanours and it was this that prompted him to persevere with me. I shall be forever grateful to him.

…. [Peter Clyne] He had been dux of Sydney Boys’ High School in his final year, indeed when I was at High myself, and had gone on to Sydney University where he excelled academically in the faculties of both arts and law. In law he achieved first-class honours and gained the university medal in his final year. I remember him at school; a small fat boy with his face forever stuck in a book, with, so far as I could tell, no friends and an interest only in study. The other boys teased and bullied him, but to his credit he overcame these cruelties and certainly gave better than he got in the school debating team which, as I recall, in his year won the coveted Hume Barbour trophy against all comers.

Clyne was simply brilliant. His flaw, and it was a fatal flaw, was that he was amoral. He really didn’t know right from wrong. It is a dangerous trait for a lawyer, especially a brilliant one.