A TEACHER WITH FLAIR

In 1934, when Gerhard Hirschfeld and I arrived at St. Christopher School in England, invited to Sunday supper by the headmaster, Lyn Harris, we were received by some ten or fifteen boarders as heroes, having run away from another school. In the dining room we met the German teacher, Reginald Snell whose spare hair and high forehead made him seem especially wise, or smart. It turned out that Mr. Snell had a record player in his room, to which he would invite the new German-Jewish boys for German music and songs. These invitations helped Gerhard and me to feel at home in the strange environment and, over the next year or two his little room on the second floor became a sort of refuge.

At St. Christopher School we had, every school day, something called “morning talk”, during which we boarders and most of the day students would sit on the floor of the gym while Mr. Snell would sing German songs, or give an inspiring talk. For me, those mornings of music and quasi-religious addresses were a first introduction to the culture of a school so different from what I knew from Germany and they became, for me, a key to English life and thought.

The fact that Reginald Snell spoke German almost without an accent, and that he would speak to us refugee boys about the adventure of coming to England, made him very special. Today I still have a small, ten-page, booklet – a German/English dictionary of phrases - handwritten for me by him, that provided an entrée into daily life at the school for someone who had only rudimentary knowledge of the spoken language. Having recently rediscovered Mr. Snell’s “dictionary”, I am reminded of how much I owe him. He has remained in my memory as a teacher with flair and imagination.

H.D. Kirk