Obituary: Jocelin Winthrop-Young OBE, the Gordonstoun ethic ran deep in life and work of educationalist and Hahn disciple

Gordonstoun Coast Guards Service; was a keen musician; a respected educationalist; a naval officer who saw action on D-Day, later serving in the Far East; a one-time news department officer in the Foreign Office; a disciple of Kurt Hahn and a chess player with an interest in travel, politics and democracy.

The son of Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the highly-respected mountaineer and educationalist (and a foremost HM inspector of schools and one-time Alpine Club president), Jocelin was, above all, a man devoted to his friends and family with a lifelong interest in history and contemporary politics.

By birth, Geoffrey and Jocelin were linked into an extraordinary network of families and friends, including the Trevelyans, Arnolds, Arnold-Forsters and Huxleys.

While HRH the Duke of Edinburgh was a contemporary, his rather wider Gordonstoun contacts included members of the Byatt, Campbell, Packard and Crole families, as also Peter Carpenter, founder of the Kurt Hahn Trust and a close friend of my late parents, and Prince Max von Baden.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is credited with close involvement in the appointments of governors in the early years of Gordonstoun.

Educated at Salem and later private tutor to Crown Prince Constantine, Jocelin was, however, no elitist but rather an educationalist with a concern to ensure the offering of scholarships by schools, a life-long promoter to “all nature and condition of men” of the Gordonstoun ethic, the philosophy of Hahn and the Plus est en vous (the Gordonstoun motto).

At one stage, given just five minutes by the determined and persuasive Hahn to decide whether he wanted to go to Greece to open a “Hahnian” school there, Jocelin became private tutor to Constantine and then, in 1949, co-founder and head of Anavryta School near Athens, set up following the ideals and guidelines of Salem and Gordonstoun.

He founded and set up the Kurt Hahn Archives in Salem in 1965. In 1966, he founded that which was to be the most lasting of legacies, the Round Square, privileged to have HM the King Constantine as president and HRH the Duke of York as patron, and from which educationalists across the world have learned, continue to learn, and must equally continue to learn, much.

He was a man who believed in the importance of discussion as much as did Hahn in persuasion.