I’m writing this as Michael’s funeral is taking place at Tewkesbury Abbey. I’m retired to Jaipur in India and couldn’t fly over but I need to pay my own tribute to the other teacher – the first of course was Tony Trott – who changed my life. So changed it, in fact, that here, in desert Rajasthan, I spend my life writing a book on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and the way he takes theatre audiences on journeys into truth. Mike would have liked that. Indeed, 50 years ago he inspired the idea and it stayed with me.
Memories of him, at least for me, all emerge from his passionate evocation of the capacity of literature and theatre to hint at meanings and transform lives. Even when I last met him, at his final home near Worcester in 2018, he was still talking T S Eliot and Peter Brook, and he was living near his beloved Malvern Hills where I remember, on Christmas Days in the seventies, he would retreat to read Donne’s poetry as far away as possible from any field full of folke.
He was first my teacher in 4A. English, which he and Tony were to take over my life – it was my worst subject. I hated it. Dreadful post-war schoolmasters, during my first three KES years, had built in me a loathing of those battered inkstained Nelson copies of Julius Caesar and Macbeth. My first English preps in Shell G in 1974 were to learn by heart a range of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium the nine gods he swore’ came first, an enlightening experience for a confused 11-year old sitting in his shared bedroom just off the Soho Road.
Michael Parslew could instantly see that literature meant nothing to me. He asked his new class what books we had read in the vacation. It seemed nobody had read anything (except David Willetts of course, who had demolished the whole of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham). Mike disappeared and came back ten minutes later bearing two boxes of books, a copy for each of us of Robert Graves’ I Claudius (now there’s a lay of ancient Rome!) and of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. They weren’t his favourite books, in fact he was no great novel reader, but he sensed, and he sensed right, that their range and different vitalities would uplift and inspire us. They did and, for one or two of us, they set us on a journey where literature would begin to turn us into the people we were perhaps meant to be.
That was the first day of 4A. Move on a couple of years and it’s the first day of A levels in the Divisions year. Arriving at Room 159 we find Michael has arrived early. He is standing with classic Parslew poise, jacket (purple corduroy with two belts) off, shirt sleeves (bright yellow ) rolled up and tie (green and pink floral) unloosened, chalk in hand, held comfortingly in anticipation of holding his cigarettes in the coming break, and putting the finishing touches to a perfectly calligraphically transcribed Nocturnal Upon St Lucies Day on his blackboard. As we entered, he looked at us with a glaring putdown of our chatter and casualness. This was, to quote one of his favourite Shakespeare scenes, lawful business that we were about, a sacramental moment when Michael Pasew would parse a poem. He began, every stress, rhyme, rhythm marked, metre defined, alliteration and assonance gently underchalked, metaphor and simile distinguished, flow lines gradually adumbrating evolving emotional inferences. God, was it motivating! In six subsequent years at Cambridge and three years university lecturing in literature in Delhi, I never found anyone else who could do this with such relish, aplomb and, frankly, reverence. We enjoyed it so much that we asked him to do it again so, two days’ later, he gave us a Parslew-parsing of Shakespeare’s Full many a glorious morning have I seen. He made us feel the world becoming ours.
If poetry was in his lifeblood, drama was in his very being, or ‘becoming’ as he would prefer to think. I didn’t join the drama society – Handsworth was too far away from Edgbaston to get to school through the summer vac rehearsal period without the Special Bus. But I did see every Parslew production and particularly his run of powerful Shakespeares from 1972 – 1974, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Tempest. I won’t review them now, though I did so at the time for the Chronicle, so poorly that Tony Trott had to re-write all my pieces. But there are memories still in my head of those productions, powerful despite the pretty grim schoolboy acting talent, with a scattering of KEHS, that Mike had to work with. There was the extraordinary, dark non-realist set for Twelfth Night which embraced Mike’s subtle, saddened, sometimes bitter, tragicomic reading of the play. There was the sunshine happiness of As You Like It with, so hard for Mike, a refusal to let that happiness be overcast by Jacques cynicism’ or be deflected by Touchstone’s debunking nonsense. (Jacques was probably the most Parslovian character in Shakespeare with occasional emanations of Thersites.) And there was an unforgettable opening to his Tempest where the whole cast formed a storm- beaten shipwreck without set, props, music or sound – a writhing, screaming, pleading human pyramid of helpless challenge, movement and collapse, the whole cast gradually falling away to reveal a still and silent stage-centre Prospero with a Miranda suffering with those she saw suffer. Mike knew that The Tempest was, for him anyway, the world’s greatest working of theatre and he managed to show it even in a school show.
He could act as well as direct too as we saw when we traipsed off to the Aston Arts Lab to watch him in Waiting for Godot. To our surprise he played not the slightly nose-in-the-air, faux intellectual, Vladimir, who would love to try his hand at parsing a poem or two, but the down-to -earth, turnip-scoffing Estragon. Mike loved that play and taught it to us brilliantly for A level. Sometimes in class he would randomly ask ‘what are we doing?’ and we were all expected to reply ‘we’re waiting for Godot’.
Mike had attitude, and got fired up by things he didn’t like. He would mock colleagues by introducing their voices into plays as we read them. So the adorable Charlie Blount became Richard II and the unadorable Canon Rev Ronald Geoffrey Lunt became Lear. The Sapientia rendering of “Blow wind” was another lifechanger. And, even though it was already the seventies, he was dismissive of the fall of civilisation which had arrived with the paperback book. Mike was always carrying a hardback with him, often the latest critical work by the academic Wilbur Sanders who had taught him at Cambridge. When I saw Mike last he was sitting in his living room with a new hardback biography of John Clare on his lap, loving the anticipation of a new book, new knowing, a new way into the world.
But he loved Four Quartets most. Eliot’s words were always with him. It’s become a cliché now to quote the end of Little Gidding at funerals but it would be right for Mike Parslew because he seemed to me to chant them every day of his life:
“And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
Go, Mike
Paul Smith (1974)
Michael Parslew, who died peacefully at his home in Worcestershire on 30 October 2024, was a colleague and close friend not only during his tenure as English Master from 1966-1973, but thereafter until the present.
During those years we sat together, the satirical duo, in the staff common room when his sense of humour lifted my spirit.
Such was the impact of his teaching skills that Jim Grant, aka Lee Child, held him in such high regard that he recently wrote a letter of appreciation to Michael, not least for the hospitality provided by Michael and his wife Pat.
After 1973 we wrote regularly, especially during the Pandemic, and although his microscopic handwriting vexed me, I had many laughs at his lampooning of Boris Johnson.
In virtually every letter he made nostalgic references to KES; but his severe old boy withdrawal symptoms diminished when he was delighted to be asked to edit The Gazette (a bonus for which was attending as a guest at Speech Day).
In his subsequent teaching career elsewhere, Michael found senior management frustrated his desire to expand the importance of Drama in the life of a school. So he left the profession, taking ownership of a bookshop, together with Pat, which afforded a welcome outlet to his frustrated entrepreneurship.
To his daughters, Jane and Rachel, our deepest sympathies are extended.
David Ganderton (Former Staff 1964-74)