The author David Cornwell is best-known for the espionage novels he wrote under the pen name John le Carré.
David John Moore Cornwell attended Sherborne School (Westcott House) from September 1945 to July 1948.
In the foreword to the 1991 edition of A Murder of Quality, David explained his reasons for leaving Sherborne School early in 1948:
‘I hated English boarding schools. I found them monstrous and still do, probably because I began my boarding school career at the age of five, at a place called St Martin’s Northwood, and did not end it till I was sixteen, when I flatly refused to return to Wescott House, Sherborne, on the solid grounds that I would take no more of such institutions.’
During his time at Sherborne, David played cricket, rugby and hockey for his house. In 1947 he captained the Westcott House junior cricket team when it won the Junior XI cricket cup and was credited with ‘the success and spirit of the side’. In 1948 he was a member of the School’s 2nd XI cricket team during which season they won three, lost two and drew four matches. He played his last game of cricket with the 2nd XI on the Upper on 26 June 1948, which ended in a draw against Bruton School.
David was encouraged to write poetry at Sherborne by his English master Robin Atthill and regularly contributed poems to the school magazine, The Shirburnian. In 1948 he won the School’s English Verse Prize with his poem ‘The Dream of the Deserted Island’, which he read out at the end of term Commem celebrations. The author John Cowper Powys, who judged the English Verse Prize with his brother Littleton Powys, wrote after reading’s David poem in 1948, ‘The boy has IT’, with ‘IT’ underlined three times.
David also displayed at Sherborne a talent for acting, taking part in June 1947 in a School production of Everyman in which he played ‘Discretion’, and in June 1948 appearing as the ‘Soothsayer’ in the School production of Julius Caesar. Both plays were produced by John Melvin.
David credited Frank King, his German master at Sherborne, with inspiring his love of the German language, describing it as ‘love at first sight’. In a speech given at Oxford University in 2013, David explained how it was his love of German that in 1948 took him to the University of Bern in Switzerland after he ‘bolted’ from Sherborne.
It was while he was a pupil at Sherborne School that David first met the Rev. Vivian Green, the man credited with inspiring David’s most famous creation, the spy-master George Smiley. Vivian was the School chaplain and a history master and, according to David, it was Vivian’s ‘disregard for manly sports and distaste for the school’s addiction to Spartanism and corporal punishment’ that first appealed to him. After David had served his period of National Service in the Intelligence Corps it was Vivian who, despite David’s lack of qualifications, ‘shoehorned’ him into Lincoln College, Oxford, and later, when his father was made bankrupt, secured funding to allow David to complete his studies.
On graduating in 1956 with a first class degree in modern languages, David taught for two years at Eton College before joining MI5 in 1958 and in 1960 transferring to MI6. In 1961, his first novel Call for the Dead was published, it was followed in 1962 by A Murder of Quality which was set at a thinly-disguised Sherborne School where, in 1990, a TV adaptation of the novel starring Denholm Elliott as George Smiley was filmed. David’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and allowed David to leave MI6 to become a full-time writer.
Although, David’s memories of his time at Sherborne School were not always happy ones, he returned to the School on a number of occasions to give talks to the School’s literary societies (in October 1966 he spoke to the Green Ribbon Club about The Looking-Glass War and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in May 1970 he spoke to The Duffers about the ‘Cold War of Writing’, and in June 1977 he addressed the Duffers about ‘The Secret Heart’). In December 1967 he attended The Digby‘s house supper, and in November-December 1990 he returned to watch the filming of A Murder of Quality.
In 2011, David donated his archive of personal papers, letters and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
In January 2020, David was awarded the Olof Palme Prize. The prize organisers praised his “extraordinary contribution to the necessary fight for freedom, democracy and social justice.” David donated the prize money to Médecins Sans Frontières.
David Cornwell married twice: firstly in 1954 to Alison Ann Veronica Sharp, and secondly in 1972 to Valérie Jane Eustace (1939-2021), a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton who had attended Sherborne Girls’.
David John Moore Cornwell died on 12 December 2020, at the age of 89.
Online Resources:
- Judging the English Verse Prize 1939-1949 – Littleton Powys and John Cowper Powys
- Filming John le Carré’s A Murder of Quality at Sherborne
- Obituary for David Cornwell, The Guardian online, 13 December 2020
- Obituary for John Warmington (1942-2019) who was taught German by David Cornwell
Links:
- Catalogue of the Literary Archive of John le Carré (David Cornwell), Bodleian Library
- John le Carré to gift his entire literary archive to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 24 February 2011
Further Reading:
- John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (Viking, 2016)
- Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015)
- Tim Cornwell (ed.), A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020 (Viking, 2022)
For further information please contact the School Archivist.
Return to the School Archives homepage.