David Arnold
David Arnold was born in Hackney in 1933 and educated at an elementary school and Christ’s Hospital, where he won a history scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford. Two years in the army, mostly in Germany in a Polish tank transporter unit, and three at Oxford, were followed in 1957 by forty-two years as a schoolmaster. His first teaching post was at Clifton College, Bristol, and while there he got married.
For sixteen years he was a head of a history department, first at a former London grammar school, Quintin School in St John’s Wood, London, and while there he wrote a much used text book. In 1967 he and his wife moved o Stowe School, Buckingham, with their three children, who were able to grow up surrounded by what has been described as “the most perfect combination of architecture and landscape gardening in the country”.
In 1976, as the children all became teenagers, he went to be the headmaster of King George V School in Southport, with the job of turning a boys’ grammar school into a mixed sixth form college. After his wife’s death at the age of forty-seven in 1982, he moved the following year to be the principal of the College of Richard Collyer in Horsham, and while there married again – this time to the niece of his former history teacher at Christ’s Hospital.
After retirement in 1999 at the age of sixty-five he engaged in a number of voluntary activities, notably as a governor and almoner of Christ’s Hospital and as parish warden of the Horsham parish church of St Mary-the-Virgin. After 2008 he was free to spend more time reading and writing and in the next fifteen years produced five more books, mostly about history. He has been a fellow commoner of Jesus College, Cambridge, and holds a diploma in education from London University. In 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the Historical Association “in recognition of a significant contribution to the promotion and knowledge of History”.
He and his wife live with their cat in Horsham in West Sussex.
