No sooner had we received the news, in June, of the death of Dennis Silk, one of Siegfried Sassoon's greatest friends, who for the past ten years had been President of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, than obituaries, reminiscences and photographs were flooding the web. It was hard to find anything useful to say in this blog on the subject of Dennis and his reputation. Having just returned from attending his memorial service at Southwark Cathedral, I have realised how much more there is to say about him.
Dennis was a multi-talented man who excelled in many things. Few sportsmen can claim to be intellectuals, but he was both an exceptional cricketer (as well as a useful rugby player) and a great scholar. His thirty-five-year career as a schoolmaster, much of it as Warden of Radley College, won him many friends and admirers; I've lost count of the number of men who have spoken with pride of their time as one of his pupils. One doesn't need to approve of the public school system to be able to recognise that Dennis's motivation throughout his career came from what he saw as the opportunity to give boys the advantages of the good education his missionary father had managed to obtain for him despite lack of funds. Radley is considered by many to be "different" from the other boarding schools at the top end of the market, and much of this can be attributed to his personal influence.
I first met Dennis in 2000, when he spoke at the famous "Marlborough Day", as a result of which the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship was founded, but it was some years before I got to know him well and realised what a charming and accomplished man he was. His great contribution to Sassoon studies was that he managed to persuade the elderly Sassoon to record some of his poems on tape during the 1960s. Since the few recordings Sassoon made for radio no longer exist, Dennis's private tapes are unique and invaluable. Through Dennis we heard funny stories about Sassoon, and these have been recorded by the biographers when they might otherwise have been lost to posterity.
At his memorial service on 19th November, over a thousand people filled Southwark's relatively small cathedral to share their memories of Dennis, and Radley's school choir provided most of the musical inspiration - I can't omit to mention that a jazz sextet from Christ's Hospital (the school Dennis himself attended) played us out with a Glenn Miller tune. In addition, there were teachers and pupils from Marlborough College, another school where Dennis taught. Because of the numbers present, big screens were used to ensure that the whole congregation had a view of what was going on at the front, as well as displaying old photos of Dennis - as a schoolboy, as a young man going out to bat, enjoying quiet moments with his wife Diana, and of course on special occasions. In almost all of these, he was grinning broadly in the way we all remember. An anonymous caricature of him in his Radley days adorned the back of the order of service, emphasising the prominent chin that was most of his most distinctive physical features.
As one might expect, everyone who spoke or read - family, friends, former colleagues and teammates - did so with warmth and admiration, but some of the most moving tributes were readings from literature. Sassoon's poem "Dreamers" was a great favourite of Dennis's, and was read with feeling by his son Tom, but perhaps even more touching was the reading by the actress Jill Freud, wife of Dennis's late friend Sir Clement Freud, who commented that Geoffrey Chaucer, when writing the preface to the Knight's Tale, "didn't know at the time that he was talking about Dennis". I think that it is apt to include the whole quotation here, as a way of summing up what Dennis means to us.
A knight there was, and that a worthy man
Who from the day on which he first began
To ride abroad had followed chivalry,
Truth, honour, generousness and courtesy.
He was of sovereign value in all eyes,
And though so much distinguished, he was wise
And in his bearing modest as a maid.
He never yet a boorish thing had said
In all his life to any, come what might.
He was a very perfect, gentle knight.
