My father, Michael Neal, who has died aged 97, was a housemaster at Eton and then headteacher of Cranborne Chase school for girls in Wiltshire. An educator who listened to the young, he was considered by scores of his pupils to be a kindly, intellectual force for good.
Born in Edgbaston, West Midlands, Michael came from a line of Birmingham button manufacturers on his father’s side, bicycle-makers on his mother’s. He was the son of Margaret (nee Wilson), a nurse, and David Neal, an officer in the first world war, later a chartered accountant; his great-aunt was the suffragette and folk revivalist Mary Neal. Michael relished wartime evacuation from his Birmingham prep school to rural Shropshire; boarding at Winchester less so. He rowed at school, and recalled competing at Henley on the day of the D-day landings.
Joining the Rifle Brigade in 1945, he was posted to Mandatory Palestine with the military police before going to University College, Oxford, to study history. Active in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, he met Barbara Carter while they were acting in plays together. They married in 1952.
His first teaching job was at Dartmouth College, where he taught naval cadets. Rehearsing for the Queen’s Coronation he drove the 1923 Rolls Royce he had recently acquired (for £80) along the harbour front so cadets could practise their saluting. My mother, waving from the back seat, played the monarch.
In 1954, he took up teaching history at Eton and was invited to set up a new geography department from scratch. As commander of the cadet corps, he took boys camping in Wales, a visit that led to our family acquiring Wegnall’s Mill, a water mill near Presteigne, on the Powys-Herefordshire border, which became my parents’ main home.
A teacher of American history and a bibliophile who frequented the library at the US embassy in London, he was invited by the US Information Agency to tour the US in 1965. There, he witnessed the civil rights movement and listened to Martin Luther King, and his outlook on world events changed for good.
Michael, who was known throughout his teaching career as “Dapper Neal” to pupils and colleagues alike, left Eton in 1969 to become headteacher of Cranborne Chase school, housed at New Wardour Castle in Wiltshire – the first male head of an independent girls’ school. In partnership with my mother, who taught drama, he created a flourishing and creative school. He would remark that girls were “on the edge of rebelling all the time” and “more courageous than boys at challenging you”.
My parents retired to Wegnall’s Mill in 1983, where they embraced rural life. Michael served on the parish council in the nearby village of Titley for more than 30 years.
Barbara died in 2002. Michael is survived by four children, his sons, Tom and Gub, his daughters, Tab, and me, 13 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
