My Favourite Teacher: Polar Explorer Pen Hadow

I joined Temple Grove School in East Sussex in September 1970 when I was seven and a half. Everyone there was a boarder – all boys then. It was a very successful, popular school [since closed] and I savoured its gardens with the spectacular herbaceous borders and yew hedges. I’m still a great lover of rhododendrons and azaleas; the gardens made a lasting impression on me.

The school had three lakes: Upper Lake, Middle Lake and Lower Lake, and I was a keen birdwatcher and would take myself off in breaks with my notebook. I built a hide and would clock up which birds I saw. You weren’t allowed on the lakes but there was a great hut culture – you’d go out with your mates and build huts. Every now and again our headmaster would come out at lunchtime when the whole school was assembled in the dining room and declare: ‘Hut warfare has broken out and therefore all huts will be banned until further notice.’

Pen Hadow was a boarder at Temple Grove School in East Sussex from September 1970

My Latin teacher, Simon Wright – known as Shrew because of his initials, ‘SHW’ – was an astonishingly capable scout master. But my geography teacher Andrew Keith, whom I met in my last year, had the greatest influence on me. He was a Cambridge man, quite young when I first met him, and he lived above the stables with his wife and children. At Cambridge, his research had been to prepare maps of islands in an atoll and I remember how he had had water-painted them with washes of blues and greens reflecting the depths and heights. It really had an impact on me, and I’ve often wondered how much that made me think about exploring the natural world.

When he arrived I wasn’t super sporty, but my body soon went through a major change: I became very strong and pretty fast. I began excelling in football and rugby, and I took my cricket seriously – but Keith introduced athletics.

Before, no one practiced for sports day – you just turned up. I got into the 400m, 800m and shot put, and would push myself in training sessions devised by Keith, who I asked if he’d let me take three shots home for the Easter holidays. With putting it’s all about speed and power surging from low down, and I practiced this every day for four weeks in our orchard. After a month I was throwing further; it was so exciting.

Keith was different: he wasn’t like a master and he wasn’t like a father, but I saw things in his approach that seemed valuable. There was a meeting of minds for me. He opened a window on the real world for me, sowing seeds in quite an explicit way; he introduced me to the benefit of having an appropriate training programme.

Pen Hadow has loved sports from a young page, including cricket, rugby and shot put

What I’ve learnt in life is that there is no end to expanding our human capacity – it’s about compliance to the right process over time. Most of my stories about Keith are things that didn’t happen in lesson time – that’s where the value added is in these schools. It wasn’t all the teachers, but some of them had the passion to inspire, and he was one of those.

Some years ago, about eight of us got together and met with him. It was really nice to be able to let him know how important he had been to us back then. Such pupil-teacher relationships are golden. By Eleanor Doughty