Talk:Merlin Minshall

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Take a look at his sailing yacht at http://www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl/219/collectie-item/?id=95 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.87.137.148 (talk) 09:02, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Removed from article

Interesting stuff, but not suitable for the article: Benea (talk) 18:34, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

During the years 1967 to 1972 I was taught History by Merlin Minshall at Churchill Secondary Modern School at Westerham in Kent UK. I am unaware of when Mr Minshall began his teaching post there but he left a year before I did in 1972. During this time he was the House Master for Wolfe House. He was an idiosyncratic teacher: he told us from our very first lesson that he was going to primarily be teaching 20th Century History, because it was that which was relevant to our lives and apart from a basic grounding in Classical architecture, dealing with the three orders, he was true to his word.

During our weekly lessons he would frequently tell his 'stories' of his exploits in the years just before and during the Second World War. I once questioned him why during the yearly staging of the end of year House Play he always chose James Bond as the subject? He replied " Because there's more truth in James Bond than any of you will ever know". I consider Merlin Mnshall to have been an extraordinary teacher, his informal methods and friendly, jovial manner clearly left him at odds with other members of the teaching staff. On many occasions when he took us for a French lesson he'd have the entire class of 11 year olds belting out 'The Marseilles' the revolutionary French National Anthem, only now do I see he was thumbing his nose at the stiff Conservative ethic prevalent within the school. Despite being a member of the senior staff as evidenced by his House Mastership, Mr Minshall was somewhat of an 'outsider figure', often at odds with the other teachers and taking his lunch and coffee breaks in private in his Dormobile Camper van in the staff carpark.

It was not until I saw him on an English television interview sometime in 1975 or 1976 on the publication of his biography Guilt-Edged that I treated his wartime stories as being true and even then I thought the old rascal may have been pulling everyone's leg. However: in 1996 I read the book OpJB by Christopher Creighton (Simon and Schuster 1996) in which Creighton alleges he (Creighton) was part of a Naval Intelligence Operation to bring Martin Bormann out of Berlin in the last days of the war through the canal German/European system. If this was true then it was very likely they did so using the intelligence on the canal system gathered by Merlin Minshall in the 1930s. Creighton's book contained references to his time as a child spent on Winston Churchills estate at Chartwell, I too lived barely half a mile form the Chartwell Estate and found that Creighton's details of certain places were indeed of a nature that they would only have been known by someone with an intimate knowledge of the area. Although Cerighton's book is, given its very subject matter unverifiable and a highly controversial re-telling of a secret history, on reading it I became convinced that, not only had Minshall had been telling a truth, even if he'd embellished it a little in order to tell a good tale, but also: that the deeper implications implicit in Creighton's book which are quite chilling in their own right seemed to be confirmed by Minshall's version of events too. Because of my time - five years of double period history- spent in Merlin Minshall's company I have a suspicion that I was a privileged 'eavesdropper' on a hitherto secret and untold version of history and indeed it may all be a large part of the truth.

Regardless of his wartimes exploits Merlin Minshall was a remarkable man and a brilliant an inspirational teacher.

Rachael Tyrell