Roger Harcourt, who has died aged 85, was a highly unusual headteacher. His 30-year tenure at a struggling Hertfordshire comprehensive transformed it into a thriving school renowned for its Shakespeare productions.
Starting in the 1970s, and continuing for 20 years after his retirement in 2004, Roger led an extraordinary Shakespeare camp that brought hundreds of current and former students, of whom I was one, to a field outside Stratford-upon-Avon. There we watched every production of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s summer season, delivered seminars on the plays and staged street theatre productions.
On the camp’s 40th anniversary, the British Shakespeare Association took notice, awarding Roger an honorary fellowship for his work. Thanks to his infectious enthusiasm, generations of students from the villages and towns of East Herts left school with Shakespeare as a second language.
Roger was born in Enfield, north London, to Arthur Harcourt and Joan (nee Luckett), both teachers. A scholarship to the Perse school in Cambridge led him to study English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. After a postgraduate degree at Reading University, his first post was as a teacher of English at Glyn grammar in Epsom, Surrey.
In 1967, he became head of English at Gateway school, Leicester, then deputy head at Raynes Park high school. In 1974, at the age of 35, he became head at Ward Freman in Buntingford, described as “the worst school in Hertfordshire”, Roger told the TES in 2003.
Undeterred, he taught Gerard Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot, including to children in the lowest academic sets. He put on ambitious productions of Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen and Shakespeare from his classroom theatre, the Arden Room. His policy of never turning a student away brought him pupils who had been excluded from other schools – he developed a special bond with many of them.
Roger acquired a reputation as a maverick, but in many ways he was traditional. He met his future wife, Joan Gates, at a music summer school in 1965. They were married the following year. He had a fine singing voice and read aloud beautifully, including in his local church, where he was a warden and performed a Dickens recital each Christmas.
Around Stratford, Roger became a minor legend. The greengrocer allowed him to sit on his terrace and have a beer while he packed the camp’s daily lunch order. The owners of Riverside campsite let Roger continue to pitch his group of tents in a dedicated space long after the place became a caravan park. The staff at the RSC awarded him his own seat in the Swan theatre. (It is hard to imagine that any theatregoer has seen more RSC performances in the last half-century.)
Roger was an uncompromising teacher and leader. But he had a remarkable capacity to recognise talent in students who often did not see it in themselves. Anyone who responded was rewarded with a bottomless well of attention and encouragement; he inspired the same generosity of spirit in all those who learned from him.
He is survived by Joan, their children, Edmund, Jessica, Olivia and Ben, and 11 grandchildren, for whom he reserved his greatest pride and admiration.
