This obituary of Lawrence Waddy appeared in The Times on 18th May:
Lawrence Waddy was appointed Headmaster of Tonbridge School in 1949 when he was only 34, one of the first heads of a leading school from the generation that had served in the Second World War. He was there for 13 years but spent the second half of his life in La Jolla, California.
His father, Stacy Waddy, was headmaster of King’s School, Parramatta, New South Wales, where Lawrence was born. But when his father went to work in Jerusalem, Waddy was sent to Marlborough College before going up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was awarded a Domus Exhibition, gained a first-class honours degree in Classical Mods and won the Craven Scholarship.
He was ordained in 1941 and was married in the same year to Natalie Robinson, daughter of C. E. Robinson, a classical historian and Winchester housemaster. During the war he enlisted as a naval chaplain in the RNVR, serving on HMS Jamaica at the North African landings and on the Arctic convoys. At the end of the war, he returned to Winchester as a college chaplain for four years before being selected as Headmaster of Tonbridge.
With only a few years’ experience as a teacher, and none as a housemaster or administrator, he lacked the experience of most modern heads, and his natural optimism sometimes bordered on the naive. But, arriving when the school had weathered years of austerity, his youth was invigorating.
He was a keen games player, having played squash and Rugby fives for Oxford, and became directly involved in school cricket, where he was admired by senior boys, one of whom was the future England captain Colin Cowdrey. They became long-lasting friends. Waddy was nevertheless quoted as saying that he would rather a boy published a book of sonnets than made a century at Lord’s.
He added a School Service organisation as an alternative to the Combined Cadet Force, encouraged arduous training in North Wales, established pupil exchanges with a German school and formed the Athena Society to recognise academic achievement and creative originality. A lover of drama ever since he played Puck as a boy and produced for the Balliol Players, he found time to direct some memorable school plays. In chapel, his presence was of a man of simple and transparent faith, and his sermons were perfectly pitched and beautifully delivered.
Much of what he achieved at Tonbridge has since become commonplace in independent boarding schools and elsewhere, but Waddy was in the vanguard of change.
When he left Tonbridge in 1962, he went to work for the BBC in its schools broadcasting department, but, distressed by the breakdown of his first marriage, he accepted the invitation to become chaplain of The Bishop’s School in La Jolla in southern California. Here, known as Father Waddy, he made a new life in a very different world. He was married again and for 11 years was a lecturer in Greek and Latin literature at the University of California in San Diego.
His uncomplicated biblical Christianity had a natural appeal in his new surroundings. He was the founding vicar of a church in La Jolla and an honorary assistant in St James-by-the-Sea Church there. He was able to give full expression to his gift for bringing drama to worship, a passion that dated back to his time at Tonbridge and with the BBC, when he composed several musicals based on stories from the Bible, composing the tunes in his head as he drove round the country.
Two of these, The Prodigal Son and Job, were successfully produced on television, Job winning a prize at the Monte Carlo Film Festival in 1964. He published Drama in Worship (1978) and Bible Drama in 2004, a collection of 136 Bible stories adapted for acting.
He is survived by his wife, Laurie, and three daughters from his first marriage.
The Rev Lawrence Waddy, priest and headmaster, was born on October 5, 1912. He died on March 26, 2010, aged 97