Taylorian

Valete

Staff Leavers

comedic and conversational output will be sorely missed in the Department and amongst the wider SCR. Every institution needs its stalwarts who know the school inside out, and for the last twenty years JMSR has been part of the lifeblood of Merchant Taylors’. Jon has forged long-lasting personal friendships with many colleagues, particularly from the many years that he lived on the School site. Jon leaves MTS after twenty years of loyal service and it is hard to believe that he really is leaving us, but he intends to stay in education working as a consultant and I am sure that we will continue to see him in both a professional and social context. We wish him the very best of luck for the next stage of his career. Mr R.P. Bailey

the preparation for these events and the chance to work with some of the School’s most talented actors. Away from MFL and Communications, Jon has been a Walter House tutor throughout his time at MTS and has always enjoyed being Master-in-Charge of Tennis. Jon helped professionalise the tennis set-up with specialist coaching year-round for the boys, and it was under his tutelage that MTS pairs enjoyed success at the Independent Schools Tennis Association Championships at Eton, with MTS pairs winning the U15 Thomas Bowl in 2010 and 2015. Indeed, the President of the ISTA, who had worked at my previous school, assured me before my arrival that Jon would be an excellent colleague to work with and his endorsement proved correct! Jon is a consummate raconteur who loves

to entertain a lunch table or informal social gathering with amusing tales of colleagues’ misfortunes, politicians’ misdemeanours and general human idiosyncrasies. His ability to impersonate colleagues is astounding and wince-inducingly accurate (I fear that he has got me off to a tee but I have mercifully not heard it). Jon enjoys the cultural and gastronomic life of London and he is always ready to offer recommendations to colleagues and newly-arrived language assistants, who were invariably impressed by his suggestions. This perhaps remedied the consternation that he normally caused when he regularly asked them how to translate untranslatable concepts or idioms into French, German or Spanish, or when he would deliberately bamboozle them with his own unofficial linguistic neologisms that would cause apoplexy at the Académie Francaise or the Real Academia. His

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Taylorian 2023