collaboration with another master during his Winchester period, became a standard school textbook. James Report on Teacher Training In 1970, the British Secretary of State for Education and Science Margaret Thatcher, asked James to chair a government inquiry into teacher training. His slant on education of future teachers included a conviction that teachers should be educated rather than trained. He wanted teachers who could inspire children; beside this great principle, what or how they should teach were questions of lesser import. He held that a single subject, well taught, might form the basis of a true education; equally that an apparently alluring spread of studies, badly taught, would simply become a drab routine. The James Report on Teacher Training, which appeared in 1972, envisaged the colleges of education as mini-universities where students would follow a two-year, purely academic, course leading to a Diploma of Higher Education, before engaging specifically with teaching. Only after the DipHE should future teachers undertake a two-year course addressed to the theory and practice of work in the classroom. It was also proposed that teachers should attend an in-service course for not less than one term every seven years. The James Report received opposition from the National Union of Teachers, but the Government and the preponderance of opinion supported its recommendations. Honours and awards James was knighted in 1956, and was created a life peer as Baron James of Rusholme, of Fallowfield in the County Palatine of Lancashire, in 1959. Personal In 1939 James married Cordelia Mary Wintour, the sole daughter of Major-General Fitzgerald Wintour, and sister of Charles Wintour, an editor of the British daily newspaper 'Evening Standard'. Cordelia was a paternal aunt of the fashion magazine editor Dame Anna Wintour and of the British journalist Patrick Wintour. The son of Eric James and Cordelia Wintour James is Oliver Francis Wintour James, who became a professor, a leading British hepatologist, and pro vice-chancellor of the Newcastle University. Death Eric James died in 1992. He had become blind, and fell in his home in North Yorkshire onto a miniature orange tree: a twig penetrated his eyeball and pierced his brain. Publications References no longer available Eric James as a chemistry teacher in Winchester College by Freeman Dyson (video) 1909 births 1992 deaths Life peers High Masters of Manchester Grammar School Knights Bachelor Alumni of The Queen's College, Oxford Vice-Chancellors of the University of York Winchester College