Lawrence Norcross

Lawrence Norcross was headmaster of Highbury Grove boys' comprehensive in north London, which was at the heart of the battle to preserve state schools from the grip of Left-wing activists.

When the future Tory minister Sir Rhodes Boyson was elected an MP in 1974, Norcross, his deputy at Highbury Grove, found himself excluded from the shortlist of applicants for the post of head on a technicality by The Inner London Education Authority (Ilea). The governors responded by refusing to interview the seven candidates on the grounds that they were "trendies" with no great interest in discipline. Six months later Norcross was confirmed in the position.

Settling in, he explained that he planned to run the school like Boyson, with uniforms, homework and a tradition of hard work. "I believe in a healthy emphasis on conformity to requirements," he said, and that meant using the cane "occasionally but not excessively" in cases of serious or repeated offences.

He proceeded to invite parents to attend classes on how to help children with their English and arithmetic at home; banned a community sex education project, called Grapevine; announced that he was sending his own daughter to a girls' grammar; and was elected an "additional member" of the private schools' Headmasters' Conference.

A highly effective speaker despite a stammer, Norcross was also a vigorous contributor to the letters' column of The Daily Telegraph. He wrote about his constant problems with local government advisers and inspectors. He denounced "armchair Red Guards" who wanted to control candidates entering the teaching profession and joined a committee for the defence of independent schools.
Frances Morrell, the Ilea leader, responded by saying that inspectors had criticised Highbury Grove for failing standards and that Norcross had refused to implement their findings, adding: "It is very much easier for someone like him to attack other people than to put his own house in order."
More serious, she supported several attempts to change the ethos of Highbury Grove by amalgamating it with other schools. These threats were seen off by vigorous protests, not least by immigrant parents.

Norcross had an initial input into the Conservatives' first Education Act in 1980. Then, during a period when the party's attention was diverted elsewhere, he published, with Fred Naylor, The ILEA: a Case for Reform (1981) and The ILEA after the Abolition of the GLC (1983); he also helped to draft proposals for school prospectuses, the publication of GCE results and the assisted places scheme, which were introduced by a successor Act eight years later.
Shortly before the 1987 general election, he gave a well-publicised fillip to the Tory campaign by resigning his post five years early, protesting against Ilea's increasingly politically correct policies: "I am sick and tired of being lectured and hectored at by callow youths who feel that they have discovered some really fundamental truth that has been hidden from the rest of us since the beginning of time."

Though the Thatcher government had not provided the support for his educational views that many expected from a Conservative government, Norcross gave enormous encouragement to fellow teachers by preventing the janissaries of the Left from forcing the gates of Highbury Grove.
Lawrence John Charles Norcross was born in Peterborough on April 14 1927, the son of an electrician who died young in a motorcycle crash. Lawrie left school at 14 to join the Navy, and trained to be a signaller at HMS Arethusa before seeing action in the Far East.

A member of the extreme Left by the time he extricated himself from the service, he joined the Communist Party and was a union activist in the printing industry. He then went to Ruskin College, Oxford, before studying English at Leeds University under the Marxist Professor Arnold Kettle. Tearing up his party card the day he graduated, Norcross's Left-wing views steadily melted away as he first taught at Singlegate and Abbey Wood Schools before becoming a housemaster at Battersea County School and then joining Highbury Grove.

After resigning as headmaster he sat on several quangos, such as the National Council for Educational Standards; the Primary and Secondary Education Trust; the Grant Maintained Schools Trust; and the National Committee for Educational Standards. He also advised the Institute of Economic Affairs, and founded the John Ireland Society to champion the work of that neglected composer.

Norcross, who was appointed OBE in 1986, retired to Warwickshire. An ardent cricket fan, he claimed to be equally addicted to John Donne and Benny Hill, and used to say that his best job had been delivering beer around Surrey after he left the Navy.
Despite having had a lung removed as a young man, he was a smoker for many years, smoking a pipe in front of his wife and cigarettes everywhere else. "If this is the only way I've deceived my wife, I haven't done too badly," he would tell friends.

Lawrie Norcross died on January 30. His wife, Margaret Wallace, whom he married in 1959, died last year, and he is survived by their three sons and one daughter.

References:

The Telegraph; Obituaries
5:42PM BST 27 Apr 2010