Miss M Fine MA (Cantab) - from Phoenix 68 [published November 1968]

Miss M.Fine M.A. (Cantab.) joined the staff of this school in January 1954 as Head of the Classics Department and was further appointed Senior Mistress in 1959. She had previously taught at Caernarvon Grammar School as Senior Classics Mistress for eighteen years (1930-48), during the last four years of which she was Senior Mistress as well. During this time she had qualified as a Barrister-at-Law of the Middle Temple and left teaching to practise at the Bar as a member of the Wales circuit.

A brilliant Classics scholar and an excellent teacher, it was inevitable that In terms of University examinations her pupils in Latin should do uniformly well. What reveals more perhaps her pedagogic skill was her particular success in teaching Greek Literature in Translation to pupils who, measured by their weakness in other subjects, seemed to be most unrewarding material. She is one of the select band who has produced a school play: ‘Ambrose Applejohn’ s Adventure’ by Walter Hackett in 1957. She was Careers Mistress for many years with special responsibility for College of Education entrants.

Her great contribution to the school, however, was her work as Senior Mistress. For some ten years she watched over the welfare of the girls of the school, comforting many, counselling even more. She did not seek cheap popularity, but she wonln the end the affection of most and the esteem of all. Possessed of a shrewd, penetrating mind, she could make one at times feel almost uncomfortable, especially the ‘humbug’, the hypocrite, the giver of feeble excuses, with whom she was rightly impatient. She sought to maintain a clearly defined high level of standards in all things, in morals, manners and general behaviour, in a decade when standards have been questioned and attacked, when we have heard perhaps to much of the ‘teenager’ (and, of course, no-one wishes to remain a teenager for ever~) and when permissiveness’ has been too readily proffered as the answer to all adolescent’ problems. She was therefore able to give a firm and unequivocal lead in what she knew was right or wrong. Even if some girls were not always willing to accept her advice or recognise the justice of her admonitions they at least knew where they stood with her: they were given a standard which they could accept or knowingly reject. It is this for which I believe Miss Fine will be most remembered and for which most pupils will be grateful to her when they look back upon their schooldays. She may be the first to admit that she has moved a long way along their road, even if she has appeared sometimes to be a brake upon the too impetuous; but she is essentially an evolutionist and not a revolutionary.

We are sorry that during the last two or three years of her teaching career her health should have failed her, so that she was not able to complete her final year. Let us hope that she is already benefiting from the rest she has already been able to have and the freedom from heavy responsibilities concomitant with the position she held, and that she will enjoy very many long years of happy retirement.

R. L. E.