Mr Poynder
A commercial traveller with a grey face, mobile lips and a bald scalp with damp hair plastered across it, chosen as spokesman by the parents who come to complain about Dorothy Hare's teaching. He holds the floor throughout and talks until flecks of yellowish foam appear at the corners of his mouth, chiefly about Shakespeare, the facts of life, and new-fangled methods.
The book
At a glance
- Spokesman for the parents who complain about Dorothy Hare's teaching
- Commercial traveller
- Chapter 4
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMr Poynder is a commercial traveller, and the father of a pupil at Ringwood House Academy, the small private day school in the London suburb of Southbridge where Dorothy Hare teaches. He appears once, in the scene that ends the only good weeks she has there.
Dorothy has been reading Macbeth with the class and has explained a word in it. Six parents arrive at the school in a body, and Mrs Creevy, who owns it, seats Dorothy on a hard chair in the middle of the ring of them like a stool of repentance. The parents have chosen Mr Poynder as their spokesman, and he speaks for about twenty minutes.
His case has two halves. If Dorothy knew the play contained such words, she should never have given it to the children; if she did not, she should have gone straight past and taken no notice. Told that the children would not have understood the play without an explanation, he answers that this is the point and she is missing it: we don't want them to understand. He speaks, he says, for all the parents, who are Baptists and Methodists and one or two Church of England and can sink their differences for a case like this, and who are trying to bring their children up decent and save them from knowing anything about the Facts of Life. Afterwards he moves on to Dorothy's new-fangled methods of teaching. The parents leave having reduced her nearly to tears, and Mrs Creevy keeps her back for ten minutes more.
How the book draws them
- How the book describes himA youngish to middle-aged man with a grey face and mobile lips, and a bald scalp across which some strips of rather nasty-looking damp hair are carefully plastered.
- The eloquenceGeorge Orwell's phrase for it is a facile bagman's eloquence -- the fluency of a man who talks for a living. The other parents have picked him for it.
- How long he goes onUntil flecks of yellowish foam appear at the corners of his mouth. The whole visit lasts about twenty minutes.
- The word he will not sayHe conducts the entire complaint without once repeating the word that caused it, so nice is his regard for the decencies. It comes out as "such words as we're speaking about" and "the word I'm referring to".
- On Shakespeare"Only the other morning I was reading a piece in my News Chronicle about Shakespeare being the father of English Literature; well, if that's Literature, let's have a bit LESS Literature, say I!" He adds that it is a disgrace schoolbooks can be printed with such words in them.
- On teaching"We don't want them to understand." His method is to tell children to keep quiet and not ask questions, and his position is that no girl should know anything about the Facts of Life until she is twenty-one.
- The chorus behind himA large, buffalo-like man with drooping moustaches agrees from deep down inside -- "Yer, yer! I'm with you there, Mr Poynder" -- and a greengrocer keeps rapping out that what is wanted is practical work, figuring and handwriting, not poetry and making maps.