J. M. Keith "Laddie" Finley
25.2.27 - 29.11.10
Keith Finley arrived at the School in the mid 1950s as one of a group of younger masters who made a lasting impact on all whom they taught. Some moved on quickly, but Keith continued to make a massive and challenging contribution to the life of the School and its pupils until taking early retirement, some thirty years later.
Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1927, Keith was brought up in Carlisle, where he attended the Grammar School; leaving in 1945 to do his National Service in the Royal Navy, as a signalman aboard minesweepers. He went up Sidney Sussex Cambridge in 1948, to read English and Theology, where his major impact on University life was on the athletics track. He won the University 100 and 200 yards sprints every year and was elected President of the Athletics Club in 1951. He was part of the combined Oxford & Cambridge team of 1949, including Bannister, Brasher and Chataway, which beat Harvard and Yale, and he also represented Great Britain in the International Student Games.
In 1950 he had clocked 9.9 seconds for the 100 yards at Fenners (the same time that McDonald Bailey posted in winning the UK Championship that year). On his election as President, Varsity commented that his first innovation was to introduce gymnasium classes for athletes - what a different world! How much faster might he have run, had he abandoned smoking, already a regular habit which he was never to kick?
After Cambridge, he taught English at Berkhamsted and Retford Grammar School, before coming to St. Albans to teach Divinity and English. His immediate impact might best be described in a quotation from Stephen Hawking's biographers (Michael White & John Gribbin):
"Much remembered and highly thought of was a master fresh out of university ... who, way ahead of his time, taped radio programmes and used them as launch points for discussion classes with 3A. The subject matter ranged from nuclear disarmament to birth control, and everything in between. By all accounts, he had a profound effect on the intellectual development of the thirteen-year-olds in his charge, and his lessons are still fondly remembered by the journalists, writers, doctors and scientists they have become today."
He was determined to challenge his pupils to intellectual debate and was keen to introduce them to the topics that fascinated him, whether theological, philosophical, political, or even practical. He was genuinely concerned about the separation between arts and sciences. The debate between C P Snow and F R Leavis, as well as theological issues raised by Robinson and Bonhoeffer, featured strongly in his classes of the early 60s. Eventually the title of his lessons evolved from "Divinity" to "Every One Thing"; better reflecting their broader nature.
Always seeking alternatives to the conventional, his sense of service to the community led him to develop social service alternatives to the CCF - an early example of volunteer outreach to the wider community.
Outside the classroom Keith was an enthusiastic coach, not only of athletics but also of rugby, and he was particularly involved in theatre. He will be most remembered for the his productions of the Latecomers, the Winslow Boy, Peer Gynt and Enrico Quarto, and as assistant producer of Julius Caesar, the cast of which included both Mike Newell and Stephen Hawking - no division between arts and sciences there?
He also appeared with three other masters in Christopher Fry's Sleep of Prisoners, produced by Dik Tahta in the Abbey's Lady Chapel. His enduring theatrical legacies to the School however were to push his pupils to visit London to see ground breaking plays by Osborne, Pinter, and Wesker, and to conceive the amphitheatre in the Orchard, "Finley's Folly", which was built with the headmaster's active support and remains in use more than 40 years on.
But, despite his passion for Moira Shearer, he failed to convince any of his pupils that The Red Shoes was the best film ever made.
Beyond the school gates he was an active lay preacher and he enjoyed playing his oboe in the St. Albans City Orchestra and with the School when he had the chance. He can be heard in the Pastoral Symphony from the Messiah in the recent CD of the 1958 Carol Concert. After retirement he served as Lib/Dem Local Councillor in Park Street for many years and volunteered in the Oxfam bookshop. He also saw all three of his grandsons join the school.
For at least one generation of pupils, however, he will best be remembered as a man who took full advantage of not having to teach to a prescribed curriculum, and who sought enthusiastically to challenge us to think for ourselves - the essence of good teaching. Ringing in these ears still is one of Keith's mantras of the time:
"Have yuh not read yuh Popper yet laddie?"
David Canning (OA 1961)
Julius Caesar, 1959