George Mallaby

Sir (Howard) George Charles Mallaby (17 February 1902 – 18 December 1978), was an English schoolmaster and public servant. He received the US Legion of Merit in 1946 and was knighted in 1958. From 1957 to 1959, he was the British High Commissioner to New Zealand. Early life and family Born in 1902 at Worthing, Mallaby was the youngest child of actor and acting company manager William Calthorpe Mallaby (né William Calthorpe Deeley- his father had insisted on a stage name; d. 1912) and his wife Katharine Mary Frances Miller. He was educated at Radley College and Merton College, Oxford, where he was a classicist and an exhibitioner. At Radley, he was Cadet CSM of the school's Officer Training Corps. At Oxford, he graduated BA in 1923 and MA in 1935. Mallaby's parents had married in 1893 and he had one elder brother, Aubertin Walter Sothern Mallaby (born 1899), and one sister, Mary Katharine Helen Mallaby. The children's maternal grandparents were George Miller CB (born 1833), Assistant Secretary in the Education Department and a member of the Athenaeum Club, and his wife Mary Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Peter Aubertin; while their great-grandfather was the Rev. Sir Thomas Combe Miller, 6th Baronet (1781–1864). Mallaby's great-uncles on this side of his family included Sir Charles Hayes Miller, 7th Baronet (1829–1868) and Sir Henry John Miller (1830–1918), who became Speaker of the New Zealand Legislative Council. Career After a year of teaching at Clifton College, Mallaby became a master at St Edward's School, Oxford, in 1924. In 1926, health problems took him to South Africa, where he taught at the Diocesan College, Rondebosch. In 1927 he returned to St Edward's, where he became a housemaster in 1931. On 22 September 1933 was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant of the school's Officer Training Corps, resigning his commission on 7 March 1936. He was an exceptional schoolmaster, teaching literature as well as classics, and also coached rugby football. At St Edward's one of the boys he taught was Robert Gittings, later a poet and biographer, who after Mallaby's death wrote an article on him for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From 1935 to 1938 Mallaby was headmaster of St Bees School in Cumberland, and in 1938 he took the first step towards a new career in the public service by becoming District Commissioner for the special area of west Cumberland, with the task of alleviating the problem of unemployment.