We are very sorry to notify you of the passing of Ian, who taught German at the School from 1970 to 1993.

Ian passed away last month at the age of 93 years. His daughter, Sarah, has informed us that his funeral will be held on Thursday 26th March at St Philip's Church, Dorridge at 1.15pm. The service will be recorded and can be viewed here.

We are conscious that some people who knew Ian during his time at the School may not be in contact with us and we would be very grateful if you could pass on this information to those that you know. 

As is usual practice, we would like to place an obituary for Ian in the 2025-26 OI Journal. If you know of any stories or memories which you can pass on to us so we can put them together for the publication we would be most grateful. Please address any contributions to me through oldipswichians@ipswich.school

Sally Webber
OI Chair

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Ipswich School played a big part in the life of our family as my 3 siblings and I all attended the school (my brothers Andrew Waters and Stephen Waters in the 1970s, and my sister Philippa (Pippa) Dore, nee Waters from 1985-1987), as well as Dad teaching there – so we all have very fond memories. My brother-in-law, William Dore, also taught at the school and is where he met my sister (when she returned from university to play in the school orchestra)!

Ian's Daughter, Sarah Sasse (OI 1983-85)

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Sorry to hear of the death of the late Ian Waters. He taught me German at school for both O level and A level between 1984 and 1988. He was passionate about his subject and particularly about German literature in the A level course and taught the subject well. He organised the very successful German Exchange to Gymnasium Eppendorf in Hamburg in combination with Ipswich High School, which alternated between Lent and Summer holidays and gave Suffolk country teenagers the experience of living in a major European city with many happy memories. I remember he was a very proud alumnus of Jesus College Cambridge where he took A level students to see the German plays. May he rest in peace. 

Bruce Finch (OI 1977-88)

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I'm sorry to hear Ian's passing away. I knew him a lot when I taught at the school. He was such a nice man. My deepest sympathy to his family.

Gerard de Negri (Former Staff 1978-1983)

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Whilst I have not been in contact, I was sorry to hear this and my thoughts are with his daughter. I was in her class and a friend. 

Adrian Walker (OI 1974-85)

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A wonderful, inspirational and exacting teacher! Learners of German will remember “TMP” (Time - Manner - Place) scrawled over our stumbling attempts at getting the order of sentences correct. And the cry of “use your brains!” echoing down the corridor. May he rest in peace. Bis später, Herr Waters

James Anderson, The Rev’d James Anderson (OI 1984-91)

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Very sorry indeed to hear this, but thanks for letting us know. Ian Waters was a brilliant teacher of German. It was due to his inspiration that I ended up living and teaching in Berlin and translating German philosophy. I wrote to him via Ipswich School a few years ago about it, thanking him, and he sent me a lovely handwitten letter back (ach, die guten alten Zeiten!) about his life after leaving Ipswich School and his children and grandchildren. Die Sonne scheint [noch] aus einem wolkenlosen Himmel … 

Michael Beaney (OI 1966-77)

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I am very sorry to hear of Ian’s death but glad he led such a long life. He taught me German at O, A and S level and was the most engaging and enthusiastic of teachers. Perhaps also something of an inspiration for me, although I never saw him again after my time at university (where I read law). I have never forgotten him. I like to think that Ian would be pleased to know that this former pupil still takes German lessons and has just submitted his PhD thesis on modern German art in the Weimar period! Ruhe in Frieden, Ian, und herzlichlen Dank für alles.

James MacLachlan (OI 1968-74)

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You Never Forget a Good Teacher - In Memoriam Ian Waters

I have always liked the Government slogan that was used for many years in adverts to promote the recruitment of new teachers. I have always considered it particularly apposite based on my own formative educational experiences, and I still do since Ian Waters is with me every day when I stand in front of university students. Without Ian’s influence, I would not have been teaching in higher education for thirty-two years. Maybe there is a kind of appropriate synergy in the fact that I began teaching just as he retired, as if he had somehow passed the baton on. And even though I no longer teach German - sadly, with the slow decline of languages at university, I reluctantly had to make pragmatic decisions to move into a new discipline - what Ian taught me between September 1982 and July 1985, and the way he taught me, means that his influence has never waned. Not once.

I first encountered Ian when I was rather surprised to find myself in the Bantams First XV squad in my second year. As a Welshman, moulded by a passionate father over many years of watching Wales playing rugby, fully immersed in the hwyl of it all, I had been an enthusiastic, if somewhat imperfect, scrum half in my first year, when I had finally been able to play the game for the first time. Full of delusions of grandeur - and how could I not have been when Gareth Edwards had accompanied me through childhood and Wales were still winning things regularly in 1978?! - I joined the top set, which Ian coached in those days, only to find that there were two other number
9s in the mix, both of whom were far better than I was. So, during the first practice game of the term I was asked to play at full back.

Now, although I also idolised JPR Williams, I was a very short, very skinny twelve-year-old. Nevertheless, somehow I managed to bring down a huge, rampaging number 8, my classmate Andrew McEwan, just short of the line, perhaps more by luck than any genuine skill, and probably with my eyes closed to boot. In jubilation, Ian enthusiastically shouted: ‘That’s it! Evans, you’re going straight into the team for Saturday against Felsted.’

To cut a long, and very painful, story short, my sense of pride at such praise was but brief. We lost the game 90-0, and my tackle completion rate, as they say today in this data-driven era, was 0. Ian was far from happy! Suffice to say, I never played for the Bantams First XV again, and ended up the year in the second set happily playing scrum half once more. Form 2A would though subsequently win the form cup that year with me playing in my favoured position. Ian refereed the final!

When I learned that Ian was to teach me German in my O-Level year, I was more than a little apprehensive that he would remember that Evans had been such a disastrous full back, and that the classes would be affected by that memory. But, of course, nothing could have been farther from the truth! It was that year under Ian’s passionate, sensitive, inspired tutelage which explains why I now do what I do for a living. For that, I will be forever grateful. Watching the Thanksgiving service for Ian online a short while ago, so many happy memories came flooding back of myriad experiences in Ian’s classes that have shaped my career, without me having had any notion at the time that I would end up teaching, let alone at university level.

I had always wanted to learn German since the age of six, and subsequent family holidays in France had instilled in me the desire to learn French as well. Indeed, it was the opportunity to be able to learn both at Ipswich School, as opposed to my local comprehensive where one had to chose just one language, that meant that my parents decided to put me forward for the school’s entrance exams. I was determined to repay them for that support by being the best I could be at both languages. However, when I started German in third year, I found the grammar tremendously challenging.

I had been desperately frustrated by my struggles and relative lack of progress in the first two years of German. So, I started that crucial O-Level year with no little trepidation, but Ian’s tuition was an utter revelation. His passionate, and light-hearted, teaching style struck a significant chord with me. I relaxed, enjoyed myself and responded really well to his unwavering encouragement. But most tellingly of all, his skill in teaching the complications of German grammar meant that everything suddenly made sense, all those rules fell into place. He made it seem so straightforward, which underlines just how good a teacher he was. I had wrestled in particular with the case system, and the difference between the use of accusative and dative, but with Ian’s deployment of the catchphrase ‘nuts oder monkeys’, which sounds like the epitome of surrealism now, the lightbulb moment was reached for me, and very quickly. I never looked back thereafter.

By the time we got to sixth form, our class, which my former classmate Andrew Walsh has described aptly as ‘mad and wonderful’, had been joined by Ian’s daughter Sarah. My passion for German simply deepened week by week in those two A-Level years, and when the prospect of university started to raise its head, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Andrew and I had a very productive, and friendly, rivalry, vying weekly to see who would get the highest mark for our work, and I have often wondered how much Ian was aware of that ‘competition’. He never commented on it, nor did he discourage it. I like to think he delighted in how enjoyable those classes clearly were for us all, and how that rivalry in particular had been fostered by Ian’s genuine passion and skill as a teacher.

When Andrew and I opted to apply for Oxbridge - Andrew to Cambridge and me to Oxford - I loved the additional tutorial sessions we had with Ian in preparation for the entrance exams. On reflection, I think I enjoyed those sessions more than anything else, since it felt like experiencing genuine university tutorials. Which, of course, in essence they were. In those sessions, Ian introduced us inter alia to the plays of Bertolt Brecht and his concept of ‘epic theatre’, the Novellen of Theodor Storm, and the Sturm und Drang period. I lapped it up. All of it. This was what I wanted to be doing. Storm remains one of my deepest loves to this day because of Ian.

I ended up reading German at Swansea University, where I also went on to do my PhD, on East German author Günter de Bruyn, and those Oxbridge preparation sessions with Ian laid so many foundations that I built upon steadily as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student in Wales. Moreover, I subsequently unearthed the handouts Ian had given Andrew and I on Brecht, when, in my first year of lecturing at Bangor University in 1995, I gave extra tutorials to two students who just did not ‘get’ epic theatre. They both ended up with Firsts, and I realised in that moment just how wonderfully Ian had been teaching Andrew and I, as if we had been undergraduates, not just mere sixth-formers.

That moment was simply one of many in my career when I have realised just how much I learnt from Ian, how much his passion for topics dear to his heart fed my own passions, from which generations of students have also benefited, I hope. The way he used to use articles from the German news magazine Der Spiegel each week, for example, to help foster our language skills, as well as to broaden our general horizons, was something I pinched when teaching English at Mainz University as a language assistant at the end of my PhD. I used articles from the Sunday Times in exactly the same way, and garnered much praise for so doing. Naturally, I made sure to give the true credit for that pedagogical approach where it was due.

Consequently, successive cohorts of German students at Bangor were exposed to Der Spiegel, and I also came up with my own Waters-esque catchphrases along the way, which graduates enjoy reminding me of to this day. My enthusiasm for teaching grammar was always commented on by colleagues, with Hammer’s German grammar book, which Ian had used with us, as my bible. I would happily explain that it was all due to Ian, to ‘nuts oder monkeys’, which had made studying, and then teaching, German grammar such a joy for me. So much so that I miss teaching it still. Incidentally, I still have the edition of Hammer from Ipswich School on my office shelves.

Even though I no longer teach German, alas, I feel that Ian’s approach to teaching remains very much part of my own. And when German culture gets mentioned in my lectures, which happens every week in some context or other, it is because of Ian. German may be in serious decline at universities across the UK, even at Russell Group institutions like Nottingham currently - it no longer exists at Bangor, incidentally - but it will always feature in my courses because Ian’s passion for all things German struck such a resonant chord with me when I was fifteen. I like to think that he would be proud of me continuing to fight the good fight for a language we love.

We remained in touch for a long while after I secured my first academic post, but when my wife and I adopted two children, things slipped, much to my deep regret. The last time I saw him was when he invited me back to the school to talk to sixth-formers about studying German at university in September 1988, shortly before I went to study at the Freie Universität in West Berlin on a prestigious German Academic Exchange Service scholarship, an experience that eventually fed directly into my PhD subject, as the Berlin Wall fell shortly after my return home for my final year at Swansea.

On the day of the talk in the then AV Centre, my train from London had been delayed, so I had to come straight to school without having had time to get changed at my parents’ home first. He smiled as I stood there, feeling immensely scruffy and very unshaven but perhaps more authentically a student (!), alongside my fellow smartly-dressed OI speakers, my former classmate Philip Saunders and Katja Leseberg. Ian proudly told the students that I had won this scholarship, which I had been too shy to mention. The twinkle in his eye, which was spoken of several times during his Thanksgiving service, was very much in evidence. I think about that often.When my thesis was published in 1996, I thanked Ian in the acknowledgements for ‘capturing my imagination at school’, and I hope it made him happy to know how profoundly he had shaped the scholar I became because of him.

This coming October, I have been invited to speak at an international conference in Beeskow, near Berlin, launching the centenary year of Günter de Bruyn, who died in 2020 at the age of 93. The same age as Ian. It all seems to mark how things have come full circle for me thirty years later with my return to researching German literature as my career starts to wind down. Ian has been in my thoughts a great deal, therefore, in the past couple of years, as this process has felt very much like coming home academically to where I truly belong. But without Ian Waters, I would never have known that it was home in the first place.

When I stand at the lectern in October, Ian will be uppermost in my thoughts and I will dedicate that paper to him. It feels like the very least I can do to once more acknowledge my debt to this wonderful teacher. I think de Bruyn would have approved too. Indeed, in so many ways, they shared many cultural passions and beliefs, with the possible exception of rugby!

I like to think that Ian will be smiling down on me in the autumn, that twinkle in his eye once more.
And I know he will have forgiven me for being such an inept full back…

Owen Evans (OI 1978-85)