Photograph: The Gloucestershire Echo
A message from Michael
A good teacher with a passion for their subject stays with you. I remember Rosemary Diamond bravely doing Equus when I was one of a classroom of cynical fifteen years old – a play that still haunts me in anything I write now. I remember her standing in front of the entire school and singing The Carphone Warehouse jingle to make a point about materialism and the toughest boy in the class being so taken with what she said that he organised a Christmas card from us all at the very next lesson. I met up again with Rosemary and her husband Peter, shortly after she’d retired, and was shocked that rather than doing the crossword or re-reading the works of Henry James that they were instead leaving England for an entire year to teach in schools in the developing world. A good teacher makes a real and lasting difference.
When my father founded The Abbey School, Tewkesbury, he used all of his available money to buy Avonbrook House, decorated the place himself and slept on a camp bed in what was to become my form room some twenty years later. He couldn’t afford central heating so kept warm by burning old wooden desks in the grate. It had been his dream at twenty-one to bring choral music back to Tewkesbury Abbey and although The Abbey School eventually closed in 2006 his choir, now housed at Dean Close School in Cheltenham, lives on.
Following the sale of Avonbrook House I decided to start a charity to help the schools in the developing world that Rosemary and Peter have long supported. The aim of Avonbrook Projects Abroad is to work long-term with several education projects around the world, making a real and lasting difference to them and the communities that they serve. Rosemary, Peter and my father are all testament to the positive change that passion and belief in education can bring about. Our work is inspired by them.