Roger Wakely (retired in 1994 and 2000)

Roger retires from teaching this year (1994) after thirty-one years service on the staff at Haberdashers'. After graduating at Oxford in the nineteen-fifties, Roger worked for six years in industry, first for ICI and then for GEC where he worked in Education and Training. This later experience led him to consider school teaching and in 1963 he made the transition.

He is fond of contrasting the complexity of our present appointments system with the disarming simplicity of his own experience; a single phone call, an interview with Tom Taylor, and that it seems was that.

The extent of Roger's contribution to the School since that appointment is truly extraordinary. At various times he has been Head of Careers, Head of Practical Design, Head of Science and Industrial Fellow. In addition, for a number at years he organised the middle school X periods and sixth form subsidiary subjects, and ran the School tennis club. Roger's most enduring achievement at Haberdashers' has been in the Careers Department which he took over in 1966 and led for sixteen years. In that time he transferred it from the periphery of school life to the central position it occupies today.

Above all this, Roger is a schoolmaster who has communicated clearly and incisively to generations of young physicists his deep knowledge and love of his subject and, particularly, its practical applications. He has a keen intellect and a clarity of thought and expression that make him formidable and even feared. He always set the highest standards both for himself and for others but for those who penetrate the hard outer shell there is warmth and wisdom: I have found it a pleasure and privilege to work with him.

We are fortunate that Roger is to continue as the School's Industrial Fellow, fostering the link between education and industry that has always been his special interest. However, retirement will allow him more time to devote to his family, his music and his garden.

(Roger continued at school in a part-time capacity as Industrial Fellow until 2000)