“Varooka” By Andrew Powell and John Miller

 In which we are reunited with a universally admired maths teacher who liked a flutter and continues to beat the odds.

It was not until many years after our last lessons with him that we learned that Peter Wright had originally graduated from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford with a degree in Modern Languages.  But he found that his passion lay elsewhere.  For Peter Wright was at heart a numbers man.  And when the unexpected retirement of a colleague gave him the chance to indulge this passion as a maths teacher, he never looked back.  He brought a sense of fun to maths, as he did to everything with which he engaged.  In particular, he loved to reflect on probabilities.  These characteristics came together in his habit of offering his colleagues odds on any number of different variables that made up daily life. I recall his glee at winning a small sum from a fellow teacher after making a canny punt on Carn winning the House Football cup at 5-1 against, in a year when Carn had only three players from the elite 1st XI; a safer bet would have been 2-1 on, that the putting competition would be won by the precocious  Alistair Down (who even then was a budding ruddy-faced racing correspondent); and history tells us that Miller did end up passing Common Entrance even if we must presume that the best odds offered at the time were even money. 

The event that brought together Mr. Wright’s sense of fun and love of calculating odds was the school General Knowledge quiz.  Every class had to sit this test on the last day of each term.   This test comprised 100 impossibly obscure questions contributed by various teachers (though the hand of Mr. Wright was much in evidence).  The test was universally dreaded precisely because its outcome was effectively arbitrary.  It denied highfliers the chance to excel and it challenged the less informed to perform at all.  Indeed, few would score even 30% the first time around, and we would be sent home for the holidays with a mandate to brush up on our “GK” in preparation for resitting the test at the start of the following term.   Mr. Wright’s reaction to this ritual examination was to “open a book” in the Common Room and take odds on which boy would get the most answers correct in each form.  On at least one occasion he stood to make a lot of money.  But more on this later….

Mr. Wright was a man of medium height and athletic build, with bright mischievous eyes.  There was a suggestion that his sporting prime was not long behind him. His tread was light, and a recent smile seemed to linger on his face, giving him a beatific air as he walked the Covered Way in his sensible shoes (likely Clark’s from Russell & Bromley). His defining feature was a quiff of fair hair, swept back from his broad forehead teddy boy style.  This was held in place by the era’s male grooming product of choice: Brylcreem.   Mr. Wright took his grooming seriously.  But he retained enough of the conservatism of some older contemporaries to regard the use of deodorant, still in its infancy, as an indicator of a suspect unmanliness.  Like most of his older colleagues, he wore the uniform of the 1950s, consisting of the same tweed ‘sports’ jacket and baggy (black or beige) trousers every weekday, keeping a single dark suit reserved for Sunday chapel. How regularly any of these garments saw the dry cleaner was open to question. His wardrobe spoke of a man living on a modest salary.  ‘But they do have the benefit of those lovely long holidays’ we would hear our parents say over the Sunday roast.

Varooka was the nickname we gave to Mr. Wright.   There was no justification for naming such a lovely fellow after a fungal foot infection that lurked in public swimming baths, sweaty changing rooms, and damp washrooms.  The root lay not in any characteristic of Mr. Wright’s, but in one of the bizarre nick-naming conventions of our secret language “Excuse Me Speak.”  This called for labeling a person or subject “so-and-so the such-and-such”, with some alliteration, assonance or rhyme preferred. JMM was, therefore “Miller the Muller” and Mr. Wright began as “Mr. Wright the V-wright.”  This was then contorted to Varooka.  The quirky spelling stuck, and quickly this superseded the less imaginative label of “Wrighto” that might have been attached to him until 1967 or so.   This mildly absurd evolution revealed the changing nature of modern humour in the late 1960s, rooted in the anarchic satire of the Goon Show and anticipating Monty Python.  But in retrospect, it was shameful that we applied such a moniker to this mild-mannered and generous-hearted man, who could have stepped from the pages of “To Serve Them All Our Days”.

Mr. Wright had a gift for making anything interesting.  Although he was a wonderful maths teacher, he had probably never mastered the mysteries of calculus or typographic number theory.  The most elevated maths qualification that he ever gained was the equivalent of today’s GCSE.   He made up for this lack of formal qualifications with irrepressible enthusiasm.  There remained something of the eternal child in his personality, which made him approachable and kept him patient beyond the credible bounds of most adults.  He even embraced Excuse Me Speak, when, after introducing us to the concept of the bar log, he wryly applied an Excuse Me prefix and coined the phrase “Billy Barlog.” 

It was, however, a result of our excessive indulgence in this nonsense language that Varooka did once lose his friendly cool.  Timothy Patten was the object of his wrath.  While ill-suited to the rough and tumble of gym football, Timothy was completely at home, and indeed excelled, in the maths classroom. He could not, however, resist the temptation to generate Excuse Me phrases at any opportunity. We consequently included in our syllabus such topics as “Larry Quadratics” and “Wigonometry”.  Then one day, as Mr Wright explained the properties of a solid in a way intended to give us clues as to what its geometric name might be, Timothy memorably and loudly declared that it was a “punkil-hedron”.  His tolerance having been tested to breaking point, Varooka was finally heard to bellow “Will you speak English in my lessons!”

Such flashes of temper were rare, but I am reminded still of the day Nigel Walker provoked Varooka beyond endurance.  Nigel Walker was a rather bumptious and unpleasant boy and in a later piece, we will have more to say about his flashy Omega watch, Single Lens Reflex cameras, car dealer dad, and general pretentiousness.  On this occasion, Walker’s recalcitrance had driven Mr. Wright to distraction.  Suddenly Mr. Wright clenched his fist and exclaimed “Walker, if you do not pipe down, I am going to use this [theatrical waving of fist] to wipe that smug smile off your face.”  In an instant, the ribald atmosphere of the classroom evaporated as we sat in a state of shocked silence.  We could not believe that the lovable Mr. Wright had seemingly transformed from Jekyll to Hyde, and even the usually insouciant Walker looked mildly alarmed. However, Mr. Wright could not suppress his good nature or sustain our suspension of disbelief for long, and after a moment of perhaps genuine vitriol, he gave a wry smile, acknowledging the absurdity of the tableau as he joined us in bursting into relieved laughter.

Varooka’s boyish enthusiasm extended far beyond the classroom, and he was the moving spirit behind much that was memorable at Carn Brea.  He wrote and directed the theatre productions, at home with both serious and satirical material.  The Phoenix asked a nameless small boy for his opinion of a production and was told simply, but with great insight, “Mr. Wright works so hard”.  Mr. Wright also demonstrated his affection for satire in his scripts for the teachers’ Christmas gala, performed after Boarders Supper.  Without his wry insight, I cannot imagine that the likes of Mr. Smith or Mr. Armstead would so readily have made fun of much they held dear.  The Gym competition, for instance, was performed one year entirely in reverse by teachers wearing masks on the backs of their heads.  In another scene the daily ritual of “Latin odds” was aped by a row of teachers dressed in ill-fitting school uniform and serially committing unforgivable errors of translation.  Most memorable of all was the tableau of Mr. Armstead, clad in a giant astronaut suit of silver foil, climbing in slow motion up the wall bars of the gym to mark the Apollo moon landing. The highlight of each year’s celebration would be the staff’s spirited rendering of a well-known song, imaginatively rescripted by Mr. Wright to incorporate the name of every single boarder. 

When not corralling a cast or supervising make-up, Mr. Wright would invent imaginative games.  These included an eclectic game of ‘tag’ called “King-He”, “crab football” played by players inverted on all fours, midriffs raised and backs arched, and the Original Race Game.  He would also introduce us to new sports such as putting, volleyball or horse-racing.   Horse racing was indeed, along with numbers, Mr. Wright’s passion.  Each day at breakfast he would pore silently over the pages of the Daily Mail that listed the riders and the form of the runners in the afternoon’s races.  It is not clear whether his daily schedule allowed time for a flutter at Ladbrokes in Bromley, but there is no doubt that his enthusiasm for the racing world was driven as much by the magic of the odds as by the thrill of the race.   At a time when gambling was viewed by some (like my father) as a sin, the saintly Mr. Wright was rumoured to have invented a  dog racing board game that was so gripping that even a local church congregation were hooked.  As bookmaker/fundraiser Mr. Wright reputedly had no trouble separating them from their money, all of course for a good cause.

In addition to being a fun-loving and long-suffering Maths teacher, Mr. Wright was Housemaster of Carn House. The school was divided into notional “houses”, on the model of Public Schools.  These houses had no physical presence, however, and were created solely to spur internal loyalties and rivalries of the kind that would historically have existed between war-time regiments.  Similarly, being a “house master” did not carry the responsibilities associated with that role at Public School. Mr Wright nonetheless looked out for Carn-ites.  Alistair Down recalls how he would often talk with Mr Wright about horses he liked. One Saturday afternoon Alistair’s favourite horse was running when he had to watch the 1st XI, but Mr. Wright said he would watch the race and come down to the field later. In the event the horse won and Alistair remembers how, instead of telling him straight out, Mr. Wright relayed the whole race jump by jump. At the climax Alistair gave a yell of triumph and jumped in the air.  The feeling of delight that he experienced as the result was revealed lives on in Alistair’s memory to this day and gets a mention in his recently published collection of racing articles.

My own memories of being the object of Mr. Wright’s concern are slightly different.  As master in charge, he was particularly watchful as we ran the gauntlet of golf fairways on the way to the games fields.  One day I had recklessly run out into the line of potential golf ball fire before the all-clear had been given.  Suddenly and shockingly I was brought down by a textbook rugger tackle from a sprinting Mr. Wright.  The shock was so intense that I wet myself.  Until this dramatic impact I had never for a moment associated Mr. Wright’s rather delicate (if speedy) running style with the game of rugby; it was as though I had been tackled by Kenneth Williams.

It was fitting that Mr Wright was tapped for the role of coaching the 2nd XI Football, not the 1st. He laid great stock by making a band of heroes out of what could easily have been a gaggle of also-rans.  He would even occasionally assist with the lower games to spot talent. In this too Mr. Wright employed his love of numbers and his boundless imagination.  When I was playing in the infamous Third Game, usually the repository of a group of boys who were academically strong but loathed team sports, Mr. Wright was co-opted one day to step in for our regular supervisor, Mr. Hoare.  To motivate us on a damp Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Wright alighted on the idea of “Handicapped Football”.  In this reinvention of the beautiful game, each player was assigned a goal scoring handicap:  a goal scored by the least talented player was given a value of eleven points, while a strike by the most able footballer earned just a single point.  When the final whistle blew, a fierce contest had the scoreline 49 to 45. As we left the pitch even the most inept players, who perhaps happened to have been hit by the ball on its way into the goal, were chatting enthusiastically about how their heroics had won the day - while also passing comments on what they had learned about Probability Theory.

This afternoon perhaps sparked JMM’s elevation to footballing stardom (even if he still finds probability theory rather challenging). The Phoenix records that it was the next year, after being promoted from the doldrums of the Third Game, and again under Mr Wright’s benevolent eye, that JMM made his school debut in the 2nd XI. Until reminded of this, fifty years after the fact, JMM had no memory of how he came to get this important opportunity. But it was likely one of many of Mr Wright’s small but thoughtful interventions.

Mr. Wright’s dedication extended not just beyond the school curriculum, but also beyond the school calendar.  Even in the holidays he would seek out opportunities to provide boys with unique learning experiences.  These included memorable canal trips, when he, Peter Davis, Pam Dauncey and some teachers from Hazlewood would take a small group of boys through the English canals on a converted narrow boat named Romulus.  The journals and photos that survive capture the idealized world of the Famous Five.  And when not on the canals Mr. Wright could occasionally be seen setting off to Denmark in his Mini Minor, to pick up or return one of the famously talented Danes with whose school we (or perhaps he) had arranged a (one-way) exchange program.  Today’s Facebook page includes a photograph of an anxious moment on one of these expeditions, as the Mini lies lame by the roadside with its bonnet open (this picture was sent in by Saren H Johnsen-who said Going back to Denmark I got a lift with Mr. Wright WHO was going in Summer Holiday in Sweden. Early morning in Holland his Mini broke down see pic here https://bit.ly/3Kv4bhq ) ..... At first glance, it appears that Mr. Wright might be on his knees pleading with this triumph of British motor car engineering.  But more likely he was unphased, having probably dismantled and re-assembled his pride and joy on several occasions just to see how it worked.

Although we knew him both in and out of the classroom, we knew little of Mr. Wright’s private life.  We were too self-absorbed to ask.  When he was not animating the classroom or the games field, or off on some school expedition, we presumed he simply returned, late at night, to his meagrely furnished room to prepare the next day’s lessons or dream up our next imaginative activity.  He was the reliable straight man off whom we projected the antics of Carn Brea’s more bizarre crew, and he remained changeless and timeless in our memories. 

He was in fact, however, no stranger to change.   He had lived through the war when the same age as his pupils at Carn Brea.  He had been the first generation of his family to attend University.  He had only come to Carn Brea as the result of another significant change when his former employer, Bickley Hall School, had suddenly closed in 1963.  No doubt that school had also espoused ideals similar to those articulated by Mr. Marshall in the Carn Brea brochure.   Yet when it came to the crunch, the chance to capitalize on the rapidly inflating value of suburban land trumped any loftier ambitions.  The owners sold the Bickley Hall land to property developers, and Peter Wright was forced to seek employment elsewhere.  Fortunately for us he found this at Carn Brea. 

I discovered all this when I learned that Peter Wright was still alive and tracked him down after we had already completed a draft of this book.  I also learned that far from staying tucked away in his room, he had left Carn Brea and circumnavigated the globe by container ship and train. He had taken a job at a Public School despite seeming to have a unique affinity with younger pupils.  He had even married, despite appearing to be the eternal bachelor, only to lose his wife to cancer.  Yet after reflecting on how little we had really understood of this man, I had to note that his days are now not so different from those at Carn Brea.  He attends daily morning prayers, picks up his copy of The Daily Mail, and returns home to study the racing form.  He perhaps puts in a call to his older brother or to Alistair Down to discuss a tip for the 3.30 at Chepstow.  Then after a nap he prepares to watch the race with a cup of sweetened tea in hand.  Until recently he would even tread the boards in local amateur dramatics productions.

Most important, we had always been right about one aspect of Mr. Wright’s character – the sense of mischief that he had indeed retained.   Thus it was that over a cup of tea he told me for the first time the story of the Great General Knowledge prank.  True to his sense of empathy, Mr. Wright had quickly recognized that the General Knowledge test irked the pupils.   In the Easter term of 1963, only recently arrived at Carn Brea from Bickley Hall, he had therefore approached the fearsome Mr. Marshall with a mischievous confidence, and an idea.   He asked if the venerable founder, then on the brink of retirement, would object to the setting of a spoof GK quiz, seeing as the day of the dreaded exam fell on 1st April that term. Surprisingly, the request was approved. Such was Mr Wright’s guile in the formulation of the paper that many boys struggled through it all without suspecting the subterfuge – and even today, when AKWP and AJS were presented with the paper without comment, they were similarly deceived by such questions as “Who was best man at the wedding of King Henry V?” “Which lines of longitude are parallel?” and “Who invented the Circumflex?”. 

History does not record what odds were given on the results of this test, and fifty years later Varooka was not to be drawn on the subject of his possible winnings. What is known is that all his contemporaries from the Carn Brea Common Room have fallen at life’s various fences, for the most part, victims of tobacco-related illnesses.  Meanwhile, the clean-living Mr. Wright is heading into the home straight. As he approaches his 90th birthday, he is beating the odds.


As we were literally adding the last keystrokes to this book, we heard the sad news that Peter Wright had died after a fall caused by a heart attack.  He was on his way into Church for morning prayer when he tripped at the last fence. His passing completes the list of those of his generation that are cited in this book and now gone.