Richard Roper (front row, 4th left) and his all stars: Housemasters Bonito White, Horton Dolphin, and Roy Reynolds, back row, l-r; Thelora Reynolds, front row, 2nd left, and Carleton Lowrie, front row, 3rd right. Vice Principal Stephen Harle is front row, 2nd right. Completing the picture on the front row are Mrs V. White, history teacher and wife of Bonito White, 1st left; Mrs. J. Dolphin, Spanish teacher and wife of Horton Dolphin, 3rd left; Mrs. M. Roper, wife of Mr. Roper, librarian, scripture and English teacher, and Mrs. J Harle, librarian and wife of Mr. Stephen Harle. The group were reunited in this picture in 2013 as special guests of the class of 1978 to 1985, who staged a class reunion and honoured the group at a luncheon at Munro.

From the early seventies into the eighties, at around the same time when Clive Lloyd’s all-conquering West Indies team ruled the world of cricket, Richard Roper, to much less fanfare, did pretty much the same thing in Jamaican high school education.

To bolster his own tremendous leadership skills, he assembled a star-studded team of Housemasters who helped him run the school like clockwork.

His right hand, Vice Principal, and one time Housemaster of Harrison House, one of two day-student houses, was Stephen “Staggy” Harle, about whom, like Roper, much has already been written in this publication.

But the success that Munro was under Roper’s watch went beyond its two senior partners. In addition to a staff room full of mostly good to brilliant teachers, there were also five other big guns, in the form of Housemasters, who took the batting deep into the middle order.

The Belle of the pack was Mrs. Thelora Hurga Reynolds, who went on to be Principal of B.B Coke Secondary and long-time Dean of Student Services at the University of the West Indies (UWI). She was formidable enough to be Munro’s first ever – and for a long time only – female Housemaster. She took over the leadership of Harrison House to allow Mr. Harle to concentrate more on his long list of Vice Principal duties. The seemingly ageless Mrs. Reynolds was a friendly, vivacious, smiling beauty, who simultaneously still managed to be strict enough to be very intimidating. In addition to her Housemaster duties, which did include caning, just like her male colleagues, she was also a phenomenon in the classroom. She was a truly gifted teacher (some say the best) who had an uncanny knack of being able to explain anything well enough to make it seem very simple, and who made her class interesting enough to make you love any subject she taught, which happened to be Geography and A-Level Economics. How unfortunate for some of us that she never taught us Math or Physics!

Her husband, the stern, tall and imposing Roy Reynolds, was the woodwork teacher and Housemaster of the other day-student house, Sangster. He was the newest Housemaster, and Sangster was the newest house at the time, but he quickly asserted his personal authority on school life, and almost as quickly moulded Sangster into a major threat in all house competitions.

Carlton Lowrie, who went on to be the Warden of UWI’s Irvine Hall and coach UWI’s debating teams to international success, was the Housemaster of the iconic Coke Farquharson boarding house, located in the historic old building which is now a heritage site. Lowrie also excelled as a senior teacher of English and Spanish. Although he was perhaps the quietest and least physically imposing of them all, he still maintained very strict discipline, and policed his house like a hawk.

The most physically imposing one was Bonito “Bunny” White, a tall, huge, broad fellow who looked as if he should be in the American NFL or playing the part of fearsome strongman “The Mountain” on Game of Thrones. He might have had some claim to being the best chemistry teacher in the island, except that the man who already held that title, and who taught him chemistry at Munro, “Staggy” Harle, was still there. Modest and unassuming, you would never hear it from him, but the records indicate that during his time at Munro he was a brilliant student and a star athlete in several sports. He was Housemaster of Pearman Calder, which includes the Heritage Site “Baby Dorm” building. The troublemakers among us who were never in his house still count our blessings that we never had to ever receive a caning from him. Those unfortunate ones who did still tell the stories. He went on to be the Principal of Manning’s High School for several years.

As flamboyant and loquacious as Bunny was quiet and unassuming, there was also Horton “Dollo” Dolphin. Schooled in Guyana’s answer to Munro, the famous Queen’s College, that background enabled him to blend seamlessly into the similar Munro culture. The students all accepted him as one of us – fully Jamaican by assimilation, even though he has never lost his trademark endearing Guyanese drawl. Quite the cricketer and ever the cricket scholar, he played youth cricket as an opening batsman for Guyana as a schoolboy and then played for UWI, and it is believed that he could have made the West Indies teams of his youth if he wasn’t concentrating on his education instead. Quick with a joke and a fertile repository of tall stories and cricket trivia, he’s the kind of guy we aspired to have a drink with when we got old enough to do so, and we weren’t disappointed when the time came. After leaving Munro, he joined Mr. Lowrie and Mrs. Reynolds at UWI, first as Warden of the Munro-influenced Chancellor Hall, and then as Warden of the new Preston Hall. He also managed the Combined Campuses and Colleges regional cricket team, which included Munronian Chadwick Walton.

For Munro to truly fulfil its destiny, these truly great educators provide the blueprint for what we must aspire to.