WELCOME FROM THE OTS PRESIDENT

Ian Bradley (WH 63-68)

I was amazed when Richard Hough asked me if I would consider serving as President of the OT Society for the year 2025-2026. For a start, I live a very long way from the School – in the north east corner of the Pictish kingdom of Fife – and very seldom venture as far south as London, let alone into Jutish Kent. I also feel that I am considerably less qualified for this high public office than my distinguished immediate predecessors, Gerald Corbett, Anthony Seldon, Peter Fincham and Sherard Cowper Coles. Apart from anything else, they are all quite a bit younger than I am. My contemporary Robert Rodgers (aka Lord Lisvane) was six years younger than me when he held the office and my immediate thought that I was both too far away and too old to discharge the presidential duties. 

However, my fondness for my alma mater, and the encouragement of Richard Hough and others, prevailed, I agreed to his request, and I am delighted and honoured to serve as OT President for this coming year.

I have had what I think is nowadays referred to as a portfolio career – in other words I have dabbled in various very different worlds, journalistic, academic, literary, political, theological, and even ecclesiological. Following Tonbridge and Oxford, where I read history and stayed on to do a doctorate in the relationship between religion and politics in the early nineteenth century, I was a general trainee in the BBC, stood as a Liberal candidate in Sevenoaks in 1974, spent six and a half years on the staff of The Times ( for which I still regularly write), covering news, politics, education, and latterly being in the parliamentary lobby and writing features. I spent three very happy years in the early 1980s running general studies at Cranleigh School, acting as speech writer for several Liberal and Lib Dem party leaders and making documentaries and feature programmes for BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 and Radio 2.

Newly married, my wife Lucy and I moved to Scotland in 1986 for me to pursue theological studies at St Andrews prior to ordination in the Church of Scotland. My first post after ordination was as Head of Religious Broadcasting for BBC Scotland. I subsequently served as a psychiatric hospital chaplain and as lecturer and reader in church history and practical theology at Aberdeen and St Andrews universities where I particularly enjoyed teaching medical students the pastoral and spiritual aspects of medicine. I ended up as Principal of St Mary’s College, the Divinity School at St Andrews University, and Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History there. These various roles have been combined with unpaid ministries in various parish churches and with writing numerous books on subjects ranging from Celtic Christianity and hymnody through Liberal politics and theology to Gilbert and Sullivan and musical theatre. I still regularly take church services and conduct funerals around Fife and I hope to make it to my fiftieth published book before my arthritic fingers (or, more accurately, finger, as I have never learned to type properly) finally give out. I am currently on book number 48. I continue to take church services, preach and conduct funerals (and the occasional wedding).

My time at Tonbridge coincided with the McCrum years. One of the biggest ‘take aways’ from my schooldays was the daily experience of singing hymns in the chapel. During my presidential year, I am looking forward to joining in the (I hope still raucous and roof-raising) hymn singing, to preaching in what I will always regard as the new Chapel and to sitting in on lessons and savouring the vitality and energy of the School today. I shall also enjoy meeting fellow OTs, especially those of my own vintage, and communing with some of the present pupils in the School. We are a very lucky lot. I will certainly always be enormously grateful that my parents chose to send me to Tonbridge and it is a privilege and delight to be able to re-connect with the School in my twilight years. I will not, however, be connecting via a mobile phone as I do not have one and aim to get through my life without ever possessing this malign little instrument which I have no doubt at all McCrum would have thundered against from the pulpit and in his classroom beneath the Smythe Library. You can see the effect Tonbridge had on me!