Homage to a passionate Pedagogue

Viji Weerasinghe

'Beware the Ides of March' - almost sottovoce; but, then, a few minutes later - perhaps it was a few classes down the school month - as we sat, literally spellbound, in our fourth form English Literature class, 'Ducky' Weerasinghe would revert to his almost stentorian voice. Just after Mark Anthony's third disguised mockery of the nobility of Brutus - '..and Brutus is an honourable man' - in his belated funeral oration for Great Caesar, 'Ducky' would raise his beautiful, deep, almost sensuous voice and repeat Anthony's incantation and explain to us the subtle intention behind the strategy employed by that loyal Caesarian. An ordinary school lesson and a potentially boring class on an ostensibly heavy subject, unrelated to the contexts in which we were living in old Ceylon, would have been transformed into an almost magical theatrical performance.

Many years later I had the good fortune to see and hear the great Olivier perform Henry IV, Part I and the scene when Hal berates Falstaff for pointlessly asking for the time was made wholly intelligible to me entirely because of those wonderful lessons on reading and interpreting Shakespeare, given by a dedicated, educated, teacher who had devoted his life to the art of pedagogy.

I write these lines forty-four years after those halcyon days of fourth-form classes; but those lessons 'Ducky' imparted, not by diktat but by making his method speak through its electrifying effect upon naturally restless teenagers - we would have been fourteen and fifteen year olds - to capture their attention, remain etched in braided gold, in my increasingly frail memory. In my own many years of academic life, at Universities spanning many continents and in languages more varied than even we were blessed with in that once salubrious Island of ours, I have consciously sought to emulate the style, method and effect that I thought 'Ducky' achieved.

When he repeated those last few words Shakespeare made Caesar say, 'Et tu Brute, then fall Caesar', I felt one was being magically transported to the scene near the heart of the Roman Empire. Italy has been one of my homes for more than half my 'half-life', and during many an autumn twilight, when the eternal city is at its enchanting best, as I have sometimes walked its streets, 'Ducky's' voice seemed to echo from the walls that Caesar built and from the steps where he fell. Of course it is not 'Ducky's' voice that I hear echoes of; but reverberations of meaning imparted by teaching with passion that gave content and context where none could have been envisaged.

I am, by education, training and profession, an applied mathematician and an academic economist. By definition, at least due to the melancholy characterization given my subject by Thomas Carlyle, I purvey the 'dismal science'. Economics has become mathematical, at least in its façades. But its messages, when effective, require the poet's sensitivity and the artist's imagination to convince a sceptical public to accept. On those occasions, mercifully rare, when I have been called upon to make a public lecture, by definition calling forth a performance in the theatrical sense, it is to the message and the style that I learned from 'Ducky', all those forty and some years ago, that I still turn for succour. It has never let me down.

The passion for teaching that I have inherited from just one year of 'Ducky's' dedication to this noble profession was perhaps the most memorable of many pleasant remembrances of the Esprit de Corps that came out of the happy years at Royal. I salute the memory of 'Ducky' Weerasinghe, almost half-a-century too late, but with the gratitude that has matured during those same number of years, like a good wine, into something full blooded and fragrant.

May his noble soul rest in eternal peace.

By Vela Velupillai
John E Cairnes Professor of Economics
National University of Ireland, Galway
Research Professor
University of Trento, Italy
& Fellow of Giton College, Cambridge