Michael Hoban

Michael Hoban (7 October 1921 - 6 July 2003) was a teacher of classics, and Head Master of Harrow School from 1971 to 1981.

Hoban was a gifted teacher, a scholarly and private man of great integrity, a warm person with a clear moral purpose. He headed Harrow at a difficult time for British public schools generally, with unfavourable political environment and many financial pressures. Despite sometimes public criticism, Hoban responded with cost-saving centralisation of pupils’ feeding, and of academic departments, while refurbishing houses. Innovations included the new Knoll boarding house, physics and mathematics schools, and a golf course.

Life Events

• 1921 Born in British Guiana
• 1920’s Father dies; spends two years in a British orphanage
• 1934-9 Scholarship to Charterhouse School
• 1940-5 Spends World War II as a captain with the Westminster Dragoons, mentioned in dispatches
• 1946-9 Reads Greats at University College, Oxford
• 1947 Marries Jasmine Holmes, the daughter of his Charterhouse house master
• 1949-52 Assistant master at Uppingham School teaching classics
• 1952-9 Assistant master at Shrewsbury School teaching classics
• 1960-4 Headmaster of St Edmund's School, Canterbury
• 1964-71 Headmaster of Bradfield School
• 1971 Head Master of Harrow
• 1974 IRA bomb explodes at one of the masters' flats
• 1975 Pupil who set fire to The Grove house stands trial at the Old Bailey
• 1976 Sir Eric Miller withdraws his son from Harrow, alleging anti-Semitism.
• 1981 retires
• 2003 dies aged 81