THE grammar school which educated and inspired Michael Howard was ruled with a rod of iron, but he found a way to subvert its strict discipline, a fellow pupil recalled yesterday.
Emyr Phillips, who attended Llanelli grammar school with the Tory leader in the mid-Fifties, recalled the school as being convential and steeped in tradition. “It was very traditional and you kept to every rule. Mr Shaw was an old style headmaster who would wear a black gown and ruled the school with both an iron rod and an almighty eye,” he said.
Mr Phillips, who owns a travel agency in Burry Port near Llanelli, remembered Mr Howard as talented and very bright. “The pupils were primarily from coal mining or steel worker families. Mike was a cut above the rest with his family running their own dress-making business.”
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However, the “leading light in the literary and debating societies” had “something of the truant” about him. Mr Phillips told of how he and Mr Howard would sneak out of the school and walk into the town centre for lunch. “We would end up called before the headmaster, where I believe he got his initial experience in law, because he would think up imaginative defences and alibis. It never stopped Mr Shaw from giving us 100 lines — ‘I must not play truant at lunchtime’.”