George Lyttelton (teacher)

Lyttelton was born at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, the second son of Charles Lyttelton, 5th Baron Lyttelton and later 8th Viscount Cobham, and Mary Susan Caroline Cavendish (second daughter of the 2nd Baron Chesham). He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a sporting young man, distinguishing himself at the Eton field game (a form of football),^[1] and at cricket, in which he shared a second wicket partnership of 476 for A. C. Benson's XI v H. V. Macnaghten's XI (Eton, 1901), and played at Lord's in the Eton v Harrow matches of 1900 and 1901.^[2]

At Trinity, Lyttelton was a member of the University Pitt Club and was its librarian.^[3] He became president of the university athletics club,^[4] and was a distinguished shot put competitor, winning the event for Cambridge v Oxford three years in a row (1904, 37'7"; 1905, 37'11" and 1906, 38'3¾").^[5] He was a less distinguished amateur musician: according to a contemporary university magazine: "When George Lyttelton practises the cello, all the cats in the district converge upon his rooms in the belief that one of their members is in distress."^[6]

After graduation he returned as a master to Eton, where his uncle Edward Lyttelton was headmaster from 1905 to 1916. He married Pamela Marie Adeane, daughter of Charles Robert Whorwood Adeane and Madeline Pamela Constance Blanche Wyndham, on 3 April 1919. They had four daughters and one son – the latter being the jazz trumpeter and radio presenter Humphrey Lyttelton.^{[n 1]}

Lyttelton retired in 1945, having taught at Eton for his entire career. He taught, among others, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, J. B. S. Haldane, and John Bayley. He taught mostly classics in the fifth form, but became known for his optional course of English as "extra studies" for senior specialists.^[8] The biographer Philip Ziegler said of him:

George Lyttelton was one of the greatest of English schoolmasters. He was wise and tolerant; his massive presence ensured a dignity which his fine sense of the ridiculous alleviated without diminishing; he cared passionately about good writing and communicated that passion to his pupils.^[9]

Another former pupil wrote:

From that study we staggered with our arms full of books, Wells and Hemingway, Milton and Dr Johnson, Henry James and George Moore, our minds fired by his enthusiasm and wise advice, our shoulders tingling from the squeeze of his mighty hand as he guided us through the bookshelves. We think of him... majestically immobile as he umpired in the Field, and he was the best of them all in ruling the game and in writing about it afterwards; or... those brilliant expositions of the reading or writing of English where he achieved the perfect artistry of teaching; or at his Old Boy dinners, enveloped in a vast and aging dinner-jacket, delivering with commendable timing a string of improbable stories about his large family or the more obscure annals of Suffolk agricultural life.^[10]

Lyttelton was a member of the Johnson Club and The Literary Society in London, and of the Marylebone Cricket Club.^[11] Between the wars, he contributed The Times's reports on the Eton and Harrow matches, usually anonymously, but in 1929 on the occasion of the hundredth match his tour d'horizon of the series appeared under his name.^[12] His reports were later described in The Times as the best prose of their time.^[13]

In 1945 Lyttelton retired from Eton and moved to Grundisburgh, Suffolk, where he died on 1 May 1962 at the age of 79.^[8]