When Nelson died in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar, it was decided that a square should be created in his memory in London with a suitable centrepiece monument. Trafalgar Square was duly created in 1835 and Nelson’s Column – one of London’s most iconic tourist attractions, was completed in 1843. This is all narrated in an easy but expressive jargon-free style with a great deal of humour, much of it directed at the author himself and a picture emerges of someone whom we can unreservedly admire and not only because of his opposition to apartheid, something the author barely mentions. Jonty Driver is not only an idealist, as I said, but one whose idealism is tempered by an underpinning of pragmatism. After a year's teaching at Sevenoaks School, he went to Trinity College, Oxford, to read for an M.Phil, and afterwards taught again at Sevenoaks School and then at Matthew Humberstone Terrorist, Crane River, 2015. Used to be Great Friends, an essay in autobiography, originally published in Granta in 2002, was issued in an expanded form as an e-book by in STANZAS, No 11. Two poems appeared in the magazine Theology, May 2018, No 121 No 3: "In a French Garden" and "The hymn of the Christian atheist".

In 1976 he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for twenty-three years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978-83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983-9;Master, Wellington College, 1989–2000). He is now a full-time writer, though he continues his involvement in education. He has been an honorary senior lecturer at the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, since 2007. Jonty restructured Common Room by developing a Senior Management Team; he reintroduced the notion of compulsory Chapel attendance; he espoused the use of IT; he set out to make the school more international; he aligned Wellington with the Round Square network of schools; he established the democratic election of prefects and introduced leadership training for staff and pupils; he developed a sense of corporate Identity; he founded the WCA which saw a much greater involvement of parents in the day to day life of College; he brought in the Basic Courtesies as a blueprint for well-mannered behaviour, and he began the process, by transforming the Quads, of making Wellington more beautiful. Driver published five novels: Elegy for a Revolutionary (1969), Send War In Our Time, O Lord (1970), Death of Fathers (1972), A Messiah of the Last Days (1974), and Shades of Darkness (2004). Several issues required Jonty’s immediate attention when he took over: discipline needed tightening with Housemasters and senior pupils perhaps too influential; numbers were on the wane and academic standards were slipping. Jonty, who had already enjoyed successful headships at Island School Hong Kong and Berkhamsted, brought a steely, but always fair, sense of purpose, not only solving problems, but also bringing in many important innovations. One of the advantages of forced idleness is that I’ve had time to sketch out the framework for a long poem in my head.”

Before. Crane River in association with the Africa Sun Press. August 2018. ISBN 9781909717978. (A collection of 22 poems) The advent of democracy made possible a return to the nation that had retained his name on a list of banned persons until the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other anti-apartheid organisations made return possible. In response to this completion of what was almost a biblical trajectory of departure and return for so many, he wrote voraciously, not simply evoking but immersing himself anew in the landscape that had been such a crucial part of his hinterland from his earliest years and which was nowsinging a song of freedom for him and his contemporaries not one of persistent misery and injustice. This all elicited his very best poetry. Whether in freer form iambic pentameter or sonnet or haiku, he achieved an ebullience on the one hand and a poignancy on the other that made his one of the most compelling voices writing in English in the period since the end of apartheid.Alan Paton's Hofmeyr". Race & Class. 6 (4): 269–280. 1965. doi: 10.1177/030639686500600403. ISSN 0306-3968. S2CID 143844131. Driver was as of November 2019 [update] an honorary senior lecturer at the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, [7] a post he held since 2007. [ citation needed] What strikes me most about Jonty’s death – like those of other friends and acquaintances in recent years — is how lives lived in so many different times and so many different places can be compressed and imagined into a single instance of grief and celebration, shared among family, friends and colleagues, both locally and abroad.