Nicholas Bomford obituary: Harrow headmaster

Times

8 hours ago

Early in 1990, Nick Bomford, then the headmaster of Uppingham, was seated at lunch next to a colonel of Marines who happened to be an old boy. Both agreed they had enjoyed their careers but had reached their ceiling. On his return home that evening, however, Bomford found a letter waiting from Sir Robin Butler, the cabinet secretary — and the chairman of the governors at Harrow.
Bomford's wife, Gilly, had bet her husband £50 that Eton or Harrow would one day come calling. He had happily accepted, being certain, as he wrote in his memoir, The Long Meadow (2013), that 'wild horses would not drag me to either'.
He had formed an 'unfavourable impression of Harrovians' but soon came during his eight years as Harrow's headmaster, from 1991 to 1999, to regard his earlier belief as entirely unfounded. Indeed, by the end of his tenure he had concluded his charges were 'almost without exception … charming, stimulating and talented young men in whose company it was a pleasure to live and work'. That assessment reflected no little credit on the decent, quietly effective Bomford, whose sympathetic personality let the pupils' own qualities emerge.
Bomford was asked to build on the work of his predecessor, the former rugby international Ian Beer, who had reinvigorated Harrow after some years in the doldrums.
Although not without strength of purpose himself — against opposition in the staff room, Bomford pushed through an increase in the number of GCSEs each boy would take — his more gentle character, giving all to the task in hand, was well suited to a necessary period of consolidation.
He soon came to master the private language and quirks of a school, founded in 1572, that still derived its milk supply from its own herd of cows. During school hours, he made sure to wear his mortar board when out and about, so that he could return the doffing by boys of their own straw boaters. Passers by 'looked on in amazement at our antics'.
Not that he was afraid to break with tradition. He solicited more funds for scholarships, appointed the school's first psychologist and its first female 'beaks' (teachers). Bomford also oversaw the restoration of the school library and the construction of its first purpose-built theatre, the Ryan. Benedict Cumberbatch, then a pupil, gave early notice of his abilities in a performance there of The Browning Version, written by Terence Rattigan, himself a Harrovian.
Bomford's counterpart at Eton, Eric Anderson, once noted that the real headaches for a headmaster were caused not by the boys but by the staff. The truth of this was borne out in 1998, when a master was found to have embezzled £35,000 from parents who had paid for a school trip he had organised to east Africa.
After being arrested, the man was formally sacked by Bomford. 'Harrow will pay!' was his Parthian shot on leaving the headmaster's study. Bomford regretted not being quick enough to reply that the school had already done so, having had to settle with the travel company. The teacher was subsequently convicted at trial, despite his claim that such dishonesty was rife among his colleagues.
Bomford wrote to The Times to express his full confidence in the integrity of the beaks. Yet while he proved adept at dealing with the hazards of his post — the entourage, for example, of the Crown Prince of Thailand, and a parent crawling across Bomford's study on their knees to fill the master's pipe — he became less enamoured of the modern, target-oriented approach to running a school. In his valedictory speech, he said his aim in retirement would be to take his cue from Izaak Walton: to study, be quiet and go a-angling.
Nicholas Raymond Bomford was born in the family farmhouse in 1939. His forebears had worked the land in the Vale of Evesham, Worcestershire, since the 16th century. His parents, Ernest, known as 'Hercs', and Pat had met when his mother, who came from a more prosperous background, had been a temporary secretary at the farm.
At Kelly College, Devon, to which Bomford won a scholarship, he was regarded as something of an oddball since he played the violin and listened to Gilbert and Sullivan. Nevertheless, he also enjoyed country sports, and while at Trinity College, Oxford, where he read history, captained the university rifle club. He was also selected several times to shoot for England.
After taking the Oxford team on tour to Kenya, he stayed on for a time. Short of money, he approached the ministry of education, which placed him in a primary school. So began his teaching career. Back in England, he taught for a time at Bedales junior school, which took much the same approach to discipline as did its senior counterpart. When pupils threw stones at him, they were admonished on the grounds that history masters were hard to find.
He then lectured at Britannia Naval College, Dartmouth, enjoying opportunities to sail the coast of Devon and Cornwall. Bomford moved on to Wellington College, where he was to be a housemaster for six years.
In 1966 he married Gillian Reynolds, who survives him with their two daughters: Kate is a lecturer, and Rebecca a child therapist. In retirement, Bomford was a governor of Sherborne Girls School and chairman of the Usk Rural Life museum in Monmouthshire.
In 1977, he was appointed head of Monmouth School where he maintained its academic standards while bringing to bear, when required, a civilising influence. On one occasion his secretary told Bomford that there was a call for him from a pub called the Duke of Beaufort. He soon intuited that the voice on the line was the real thing. His Grace had telephoned to complain that two members of the school's cadet force, out on exercise, had helped themselves to the bottles of beer that his ghillie had left cooling for him while he fished. The miscreants soon found themselves learning how to compose a letter of apology to a duke.
In 1982 Bomford became headmaster of Uppingham in Rutland. He considered his chief achievement there to have been the doubling of the numbers of girls in the sixth form. One characteristic of his headships was the support that he gave to school libraries, with Uppingham being no exception. Bomford also offered a job to a notably energetic Australian temporary teaching assistant, but Hugh Jackman chose to pursue his dream of being an actor.
Nicholas Bomford, headmaster, was born on January 27, 1939. He died on June 21, 2025, aged 86