I’ve been asked to speak about Merrick’s school days at Shrewsbury. He had a fine career there, open History scholarship to Oxford, swimming team, and a praepostor, the Salopian word for a school prefect.
He and I were in different houses, doing different subjects, but we became friends playing Eton fives. Partnering Merrick was a roller-coaster. He was a lefty in a court where the buttress favoured a strong left hand, good news. Less good was an occasional short fuse which seemed to go with his red hair. If he got cross, the ball could fly around wickedly, not always to our advantage. We were Shrewsbury’s 3rd pair – proud of that but alas it was a time when most school matches were for only two pairs!
On the football field Merrick was a fierce goalie. Opposing forwards were cowed as he bore down on them with a threatening mix of bright red hair and bright green jersey.
It was perhaps on the stage and in debate that he most enjoyed himself. Naturally thespian, he thrived in a public arena. In his last term he played a medieval Pope. The school magazine reported “Some will still remember Baker-Bates’ role as Captain Absolute in last year’s The Rivals. This time he had a part of a very different kind, and his Pope was a fine performance…his dialogue with Isotta was the most moving in the play”.
Merrick was a witty debater. He often won but when he once moved that ‘‘this house considers that man is progressing, not degenerating’’, he lost. This was presumably a sign of the times rather than his oratory.
In Shrewsbury’s Halifax Society he read a fine paper attacking the popular view of Machiavelli as an unprincipled cynic, arguing that if the man revealed the worst in Renaissance politics, the photographer was not to be blamed. Rather mischievously, the report added that “in meeting the need to provide some historical background Merrick solved the problem as only a historian could, by giving his audience a sharp broadside of facts and events, thus leaving in their minds that state of confusion which existed in Italy when Machiavelli was writing”.
Merrick had a great sense of fun. He had style too, even on his first day at Shrewsbury. For the Foreign Office archive he recalled arriving in a Rolls-Royce and his father driving straight to the Bursar’s office, opening a large suitcase and counting out five years’ worth of school fees in used notes!
One of Merrick’s (and my) Salopian highlights was the teaching of English by an astonishing master known as Kek, later to inspire Alan Bennett’s Hector in The History Boys. Much poetry was learned by heart and declaimed standing on one’s chair; Merrick rather enjoyed that! Above all Kek taught us what he called Spells, gobbets in many languages of prose and verse which could be heard as much for their sound as their sense, ranging from the sublime (such as T.S.Eliot’s ‘’End of the endless/ Journey to no end/ Conclusion of all that/ Is inconclusible’’) to the bizarre such as Nietzsche’s “I’m not a man, I’m dynamite”, the last word to be shouted out loud by the whole class. Bizarre indeed, yet Merrick and I were still quoting Spells to each other some 50 years later.
I wish I had time to recall how my friendship with Merrick developed later on, Oxford, Tokyo, LA, walking holidays, lots of good conversation, always much merriment. Suffice to say he was one of the good ones, a true Christian, living for others rather than himself, especially for society’s underdogs like prisoners and probationers, giving that most precious thing of all, his time. Without quoting the words Merrick lived by what Christ said “I was an hungred and you gave me meat…I was a stranger and you took me in…I was sick and you visited me…I was in prison and you came unto me”.
I think Merrick would have liked me to end with another of Kek’s Spells. It’s by his fellow Northamptonshire man, the poet John Clare –
I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as in a childhood sweetly slept;
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below, above the vaulted sky.
Nicholas Barber
