Stanley Ronald Kershaw GURNER
was born in London and educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He went to Oxford,
where he was a classics scholar at St. Johns. He gained a First in Honour Moderations
and won a University Latin Prize; after illness in his final year he was awarded
an aegrotat degree.
He took up part time teaching positions at Haileybury in 1912, before moving to Clifton in 1913, and to a permanent post at Marlborough in September 1913. In 1914 he was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and served two years in the trenches before being wounded at Arras (where he won the M.C.) in 1917 by a sniper.
He became Headmaster of the Strand School, an L.C.C. school in Brixton, in 1920 at the age of thirty, and was appointed to KES in spring 1926.
In the summer of 1927, he resigned to take up the vacant post at Whitgift School in Croydon.
He published poems and several novels. These include:
"Pass Guard at Ypres", a thinly disguised autobiography of his time
as a junior officer in the Salient;
"The Riven Pall", about a working
class scholarship boy in a northern steel city called "Orechester",
who went to a high-performing day school, then to Oxford, and ultimately gained
success by inventing a new process that benefited the local steel and engineering
industry; His other novels included,
"The Day Boy" based on Strand
School,
"For the Sons of Gentlemen" (written under the pseudonym
of Kerr-Shaw), and "Reconstruction" written in 1937.
[Source: Cornwell, John (2005). King Ted's (1st ed.). King Edward VII School, Sheffield. ISBN 0-9526484-1-5.]