Local folklore has it that JF, as Roxburgh was known, cycled to from Great Brickhill to Stowe each day where he worked as their headmaster. He lived alone, unmarried, at the top of Pound Hill in the house to the right of the entrance to the current Roxburgh House. He died accidentally slipping in his bath and apparently drowned.
See Stowe School Website and Roxburgh Society for more information.
The following newspaper cuttings were published locally following his death.
David Niven (1910-83)
Stowe School has many famous alumni. Sir Richard Branson is one who is recorded as a frequent user of the public telephone booth ‘below stairs’ on the main corridor of the old building. He used it for doing deals apparently when he might otherwise have been at his studies. The phone has long since gone, but Sir Richard’s reputation lives on.
In the ‘authorised biography of David Niven’ by Graham Lord, many pages are given to David’s early days at Stowe. He joined the school in its second term in 1923. JF was aged 35 at that stage, and according to Lord, opened with ten assistant masters and ninety-nine boys aged 13 to fifteen. The boys included John Boyd-Carpenter (a future Cabinet Minister) who described JF (in his memoirs) as the ‘greatest schoolmaster of his generation’.
Lord Annan, who joined as a pupil in 1930, wrote that Roxburgh ‘tried to make the lot of the ill-adjusted, the lonely and the scruffy, happier. Niven fitted that category at the time and JR took him under his wing to establish a relationship that lasted all Niven’s life. Niven wrote to him over the years, exchanging greetings and letters of support in a way which for most would be unusual and unexpected. Graham Lord’s book is amusing and well worth its placing in the References Section.
DM Sep 2023