Many years ago I did a PGCE and for my practical I went to the Royal Liberty School in Romford. The German teacher was Aubrey Pope, and he seemed to have a much better idea of how to teach German than the “direct method” we were encouraged to use and which I could never understand (grammar rules should not be taught – doesn’t work for me). Pope would get pupils to drill complex sentences by varying the nouns in them.

The Times Educational Supplement had a series “My best teacher”, where the then MP Norman Baker wrote about Aubrey Pope in a better way than I can.

Aubrey Pope wore John Lennon glasses, a tweed cap and cycled to school on one of those bikes with very small wheels. He rode a bike for environmental reasons, not because he didn’t have a car. He was very “green” long before it became fashionable.

He was unlike any other teacher I ever had. He taught me German and Russian at Royal Liberty school in Essex, and I still remember his first lesson. He taught us a complete sentence in German, which would translate: “After the two children had left the house, they go into the park to play football.”

On this site run by Robert Priddy is a collection of remarks about Pope.

On a 1957 trip to Leverkusen:

The trip included a visit to a chocolate factory. I can still recall how we all stood beside a conveyor belt that carried hundreds upon hundreds of freshly minted chocolates past our noses. When the white-clad factory workers pointed to the chocolates and then to us and said, ‘Nimm! Nimm!’, we just smiled politely (as British boys did in those days) because we didn’t have clue what they were talking about — obviously, back in the classroom, it hadn’t yet come up in Deutsches Leben. Aubrey just stood by and grinned (as he was wont to do). Hardly had we returned to RLS, when Aubrey gave us a lesson on the imperative forms of German strong verbs. It was here that we learnt that ‘Nimm!’ means ‘Help yourself!’ Bastard! (David Vale 53-59)