Geoffrey Langlands

Geoffrey Langlands died at the age of 101 in a hospital in Lahore on 2 January 2019 following a brief illness. Al-Jazeera called him one of the country’s “most respected educators” The BBC said his “death [sent] a whole country into mourning”

He turned 100 in October 2017, which was celebrated with a party which many luminaries attended, as reported in Dawn.

Langlands served the school for the rest of his life. He suffered a stroke in 2008, which hastened the search for a replacement. By the time Declan Walsh reported on the man and the school in 2009, it was clear that standards had slipped, and the financial situation was parlous; the district’s top official said Langlands was “”A brilliant teacher but not a good manager.” Eventually another principal was found, and Langlands reluctantly agreed to move to grace and favour accommodation on the grounds of Aitchison College, as it was thought that he could do more good for the Chitral school by fundraising in the capital. At the age of 94 in September 2012, he moved back to Lahore.

In late 1989, Langlands took charge of the first private school in Chitral, which was later renamed Langlands School and College in his honour. The school, founded in September 1988 by local Deputy Commissioner Javed Majeed, grew steadily under his leadership. From 80 pupils it grew to 800, about a third girls, and many won scholarships to universities.

In 1979, the Chief Minister of the Northwest Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) offered Langlands the post of principal at Cadet College Razmak in North Waziristan. IN April Langlands joined the Cadet College, which had been created only the year before, and served until September 1989.

In January 1944, Langlands arrived in British India as an army volunteer on a troop carrier and worked three years as part of the selection board for officers training in Bangalore. Rising to the acting rank of troop sergeant major, he received an emergency commission in the British Indian Army as a second lieutenant in the Garhwal Rifles on 3 September 1944. After Bangalore, Langlands was stationed in Dehradun. He was promoted to temporary captain on 28 July 1945, subsequently transferring to the 14th Punjab Regiment. During the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 when India and Pakistan became independent nations, Langlands decided to move to Pakistan and was transferred to Rawalpindi where he joined the Pakistan Army.

In July 1935, Langlands completed his A Level education and began his teaching career in London, the following year at age 18. In September 1936, he was a mathematics and science teacher to second grade students in a school in Croydon. When World War II began in 1939, Langlands joined the British Army as an enlisted soldier. In 1942, Langlands became a commando and took part in the Dieppe Raid.

Geoffrey Douglas Langlands CMG, MBE, HI, SPk (21 October 1917 – 2 January 2019) was a British educationalist who spent most of his life teaching in and leading schools in Pakistan, instructing many of the country’s elite. In World War II he served as a Major in the British Army, and afterwards in the British Indian Army, where he worked to keep the peace during the partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947. He transferred to the Pakistani Army at the birth of the country, and returned to a career in education, first of army officers. Then, at the invitation of the President, he joined the so-called “Eton of Pakistan”, Aitchison College in Lahore. After 25 years there, he left to lead a military high school, Cadet College Razmak. He ended his career by taking on a new school in Chitral and raising it to internationally high standards; he continued to lead it into his 90s, when it was renamed in his honour Langlands School and College.

Langlands was born in 1917, with a twin brother, in Hull, England, to a father employed in an Anglo-American company and a mother who was a classical folk dance instructor. His father died in the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide. His mother then took her children to her parents’ home in Bristol.