Character
Impressively built and inclined to be set in his opinions, he earned the nickname 'Boss', but was respected for his scrupulous fair-mindedness and capacity for hard work. Legends generated around him, such as the yarn that he once caned the entire school in an attempt to put down smoking. Despite Anderson's successful academic and career record, one short-term junior teacher who was learning his trade at Scotch College later caricatured him as unimaginative, a charge which does not tally with his apparent fair-mindedness and which has been rejected by eminent educators. The majority held Anderson in great respect even during his last difficult wartime years.
Anderson brought to Scotch College a model of 'godliness and manliness', for he was a ‘typical product of a Scottish Presbyterian background’, tall at 6’4’’, a strong disciplinarian whose main interest was in sport, and, although not an educational innovator, he was a 'reliable' leader. The notion of 'godliness and manliness' is at the heart of late nineteenth-century 'muscular Christianity', a term coined in response to the work of Charles Kingsley, associated with magazines like the Boys' Own Paper and a host of popular books like Tom Brown's Schooldays and Coral Island, and in recent years portrayed in films like Chariots of Fire.
Read more about this topic: P.C. Anderson
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Reputation is not of enough value to sacrifice character for it.”
—“Miss Clark,” U.S. charity worker. As quoted in Petticoat Surgeon, ch. 9, by Bertha Van Hoosen (1947)
“I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,—which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)