Concordia 2025

Concordia Winter 2024 Obituaries

Jack Blair OMT (2012–2019)

W hen I became Jack’s tutor in 2016, Jack was described to me as a quiet boy. Though initially I thought this to be true, over the course of those three years where I was his tutor I found that Jack had the loudest of thoughts. Jack suffered from a perfectionism that manifest itself as a reluctance to write anything at all. In Sixth Form, many of his teachers came to think of Jack as a boy who did not say much and wrote even less. It fell to me as his tutor to try to coax Jack into what I unimaginatively called at the time “playing the game” – revising for examinations, learning quotations shorn of their context by heart, in essence, what Wordsworth says we do when we analyse poetry: murdering to dissect. But the more time I spent with Jack, the more I came to discover what his many friends at Merchant Taylors’ saw: a boy with so much promise, so much perception, and wit, who had little time for the games we play calling it real life. Jack’s desire not to write did not come from any inability. It was the opposite. This was a boy after all who scored 100% in his Common Entrance examination. This was also a boy who, when I tried to persuade him to write his coursework on Schaffer’s Equus through two long days one Easter holiday, revealed a mind so rich in ideas that I came to realise he understood the work on a single reading better than I did. His difficulty came from prioritising a few ideas from the hundreds of colourful ones which presented themselves to him. In the end, once Jack had expressed things as perfectly as he would like, he again scored 100% on this essay. That essay was publishable. Though loved and lauded by his many friends, Jack did not appreciate the strictures of the curriculum and school

the RAF and journeyed whenever the opportunity arose to every far-flung region of the globe. He will have travelled further than most people in their lifetime, and he continues his travels now. David Gibbons (SCR 2015–2019) Ecuador, Estonia, Kuwait, Greenland, Oman, Singapore, Argentina, Jordan … every few weeks, Jack messaged me with ideas for flights to far flung destinations. Each time, it would lift our everyday lives with daydreams of foreign escapades. Sometimes the ideas made their way out of our chat and turned into improbable adventures. Like finding the world’s northernmost statue of Lenin, Or lying in the snow gazing in sheer awe at the magic of the northern lights unfold before our eyes, grateful that we’d caught them after a long night in the world’s northernmost bar. Or when a rural Bosnian grandma offered her granddaughter's hand in marriage in exchange for a bowl of tomatoes. Or when a Kyrgyz police officer, whose house in a stunning mountainous village we ended up staying in, dropped us off to see the grand national final of a sport that can only be described as polo played with a decapitated lamb carcass instead of a ball. It’s fair to say that in all these cases, Jack would be the one to take any risk that came his way. When I pointed out that there were no roads to go between towns in Svalbard, he confidently reassured me: “We can leave the town whenever, just need a gun Or diving into the biting sea on Kaliningrad’s less-visited coast.

life more generally. Jack was a boy who saw through the grand façade of examinations, and yet he was probably one of the most voracious readers in the school. He even showed me a website once which contained every book in e-version for free. Jack got through a lot of books before the website’s domain was seized by the FBI. I felt Jack almost knew too much, too early, and books had been his way to that knowledge. He was wise, but in a modernity which treats intellectualism with suspicion, wisdom can be a burden. At his funeral, a close friend of his, Max Kendix, told an anecdote which perfectly sums up Jack’s attitude to life and why plodding axioms like ‘play the game’ were never going to inspire him to rethink his philosophy. On the eve before one his A level examinations, Max found Jack in the school library with a book upon his desk. Having just finished it, Jack was basking in its glow. When Max asked him how the book pertained to his A level the next day, Jack explained it was not a book that had any relation to any examination he was going to sit. The book was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons . Jack was 23 at the time of his death. It is hard not to feel bitter when one thinks of his age, his talent, his mind and those of us he leaves behind. But there was something stoical about Jack and it is with the Stoics that we can take some solace. I once told Jack that the Stoics thought of lives not as lines with a series of events dotted along their linear course, and which could be cut short. They thought of lives as circles. Each life is perfect and complete – it is just some circles happen to be larger than others. Jack led a rich life. He read many books, and experienced many lives through them. When he left MTS, he joined

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Obituaries

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