Introduction

Hubert Dunford Barnes (1900 - 1984), headmaster of the Grammar School, Henley-on-Thames, from 1934 to 1957, began a diary on May 28,  1940, a few days after Winston Churchill had become prime minister of Great Britain and a few weeks, or at most a few months before - as most people believed - the country would be invaded by Hitler's army.

This is the story of the man, his school, his times and himself told in almost daily entries that give the reader an inimitable sense of what it was like to be living through this extraordinary period - the war and its frustrations, the post-war poverty of Britain, the slow recovery, the reforms of the Labour governments of 1945 to 1951, characterisations of his family, friends, school staff, pupils and governors and other Henley notables - and an intimate portrait of the man himself.

He began his diary in order to leave an account of these dramatic events for, among others, his son, not quite fours years old at the time, who, however, might never have had the opportunity: the headmaster's wife, Nora, confided to a friend that if there were an invasion, she would kill her son and then take her own life. Happily, the son survived to edit the diaries.

The first 18 months or so of the diary is an absorbing account of the events and the atmosphere of the time, the comic as well as the serious. The war wore people down, including the diarist: the 1943 diary is the shortest of all the 40 volumes. The post war diaries became more personal and intimate, but in many ways more interesting than the war year diaries, especially the effect on the middle class of the social changes brought about by the war and its aftermath.

Hubert Barnes was the son of John Barnes, manager of a branch bank in Walthamstow, and Florence, née Atkins, daughter of the Rector of Hatford (near Abingdon). He was educated at Forest School, Walthamstow, and Keble College, Oxford, where he gained a first class degree in history. He married Nora Tydeman (1898-1982), educated at Putney High School for Girls and University College, London, where she gained degrees in English and Psychology, becoming the first (I think I am correct in saying) educational psychologist to be appointed in that capacity by a city council in England - at Leicester.

The diarist was brought up as a High Church Anglican, but lost his faith when at Oxford and opted for a career in education rather than the church. He taught first at St John's School, Leatherhead, and then became lecturer in education at University College Leicester.

As headmaster of HGS he was regarded by the governors of the school as dangerously progressive, although politically he was a moderate. He abolished corporal punishment (inappropriate at a co-educational school, he believed) and the Cadet Corps, introduced a common staff room for men and women teachers, strove, successfully, to keep successive rectors of St Mary's, Henley, from infiltrating the school, and believed that the objective of the school was to provide good education, which was not the same thing as a high score for the school in examination results.

His stewardship of the school was endorsed by a superb report from the Ministry of Education inspectors in the year before he retired. They backed the Headmaster's record and educational principles to the hilt, a view, however, that did not make much impression on the governors and still less on the diarist's successor as headmaster.

The grammar school eventually fell victim to educational reforms. It is now the Henley sixth form college.

The diaries will appear in quarterly segments, usually posted on Fridays and Mondays over the next few months, concluding with the 1959 volume.

Diary styles
Spelling: The diarist always uses z in words such as surprize, organize, and so on, where today the s is often used. He spelt to-day, to-night and to-morrow with a hyphen, which I have retained. There are a few words that today take a double-l, as appalling, which he spells with only one l. I have preserved his spelling. He does not always spell the names of foreign statesmen correctly, especially in the case of Russians. I have for the most part left his spelling alone.

Dots  ..... mark excisions. Not all cuts are marked. The published version retains about 60 - 70% of the original text, varying from year to year. Comments on military developments during the war have been abbreviated, as have comments on international affairs, accounts of holidays and visits to churches, castles and country houses, the diarist's great hobby.

Square brackets [] indicate an intervention by the editor. Otherwise, parentheses () are inserted by the diarist, who was punctilious in inserting full stops between initials, as in U.S.A. I have usually retained this style. The use of capital letters is not always consistent, e.g.,  the blitz is sometimes the Blitz, the West may be the west.

I have inserted footnotes in the text, almost always in italics, rather than sending them to the bottom of the page. Extended quotations are usually in italics.

A note on place. The diarist's father, John Barnes and mother retired to Exton, near Exmouth in Devon, in 1920. The diarist's uncle Sam Atkins, a high church Anglican who made a deep impression of the diarist in his boyhood, was rector of the parishes of Shillingford and Dunchideok, near Exeter (he has an imposing tomb outside the west end of Shillingford church). The Devon connection appears often in the diaries.

For the rest, I let readers discover who and what kind of person the diarist was. I have tried, not completely succesfully, I fear, to correct typos and errors of transcription. I hope readers will bear with me.

Comments, corrections and additional information about local events and people mentioned are welcome at hba080936@aol.com

Hilary Barnes