I want to spell out certain facts which speak for themselves, and which I believe do constitute the cornerstone of the Watson years and the Watson approach at Bishops.

Firstly, enrolment targets were increased, and the school has been full. The school raised the numbers threshold from 600 in the College to 660, and that was achieved on target over a five-year period. Since then the school has started each year full.

Secondly, the academic results have been consistently high, and this was always Clive Watson’s prime concern – set the expectations high, accept only the highest levels of performance, and the results will follow. They did – four years in a row with no failures and an increasing level of A aggregates.

There is largely a new staff now – young and vibrant. Clive took a lot of care over the appointments he made, and one common thread was his insistence of appointing staff with a Christian background.

The area closest to his special interests seems to have been the efficiency of the business operation of the school. New procedures were put in place and rigid discipline in terms of budgeting and expenditure was set up and maintained. A lot of attention was given to understanding the relationship of fees, salaries, and expenditure, and I think that the insight which Council now has on the business aspects of the school’s operation is very clear.

The buildings and grounds have been maintained, improved and beautified, and procedures have been put in place to ensure that an appropriate measure of maintenance can be sustained. One special project was the repainting of the Chapel, to return it to its original colouring, and the overall effect is very beautiful.

Right from the start, Clive would test everything against values, and by rigorous analysis, would break issues down to first principles, and then test these against his own value structures. He led a very principled opposition to inter-personal behaviour which infringed on the rights of individuals, and the school has taken a strong stand against bullying on a variety of fronts, and Clive has never shirked from taking up the issues as they arose. Equally, there has been action on substance abuse, and Clive’s goal was to achieve for the Bishops campus the status of being a drug-free zone.

I don’t want to go into a whole analysis of sports results, except to make this point, that there have been a large number of individual opportunities for boys – it would be interesting to establish how many boys from Bishops have represented their country while still at school during these past 7 and a half years. Cricket, sailing, hockey, judo, water-skiing, fencing, water-polo – there probably are more.

Clive Watson was also the Principal who took the decision to launch the school on the laptop programme, and this exploration of technology in the classrooms has placed Bishops in the front runners of this educational development in South Africa, and maybe also in the world.

Most recently, Clive’s focus has been on the strategic needs of this school, and indeed of the wider independent school movement. His work in the ISASA analyses of the role and place of independent schools was a special contribution which he as Principal of Bishops was able to give to the movement as a whole.

Clive saw himself as a change agent, and I believe he was appointed to be a change agent. That is intrinsically a risky business. He saw his function as bringing the school to see itself with new eyes, and then to remodel itself on new lines. Well, there’s been a lot of that going on over these years. This job was not completed – there is still much that has to be achieved – in fact it’s a never-ending process – don’t measure the height of the achievement – rather measure the distance travelled.