Mark Eabry Stewart.1960-2023. BGS 1971-1978. 

From Roland Clare

RIP Bristol’s über-maverick Mark Stewart, one of my most memorable ex-pupils. He never collected a marked essay he wrote for me in 1977, which I’d always hoped to return to him. Its final paragraph read simply ‘Art for the rich, sex for the poor. Fuck Art’. I forget the ostensible topic — probably Beckett — but I still have somewhere. It epitomised an uncompromisingly bold and opinionated nature. Mark — by his own account a former alien abductee — left skool at the end of the Lower Sixth. He told me he’d be on the front page of [I think] New Musical Express within a few months. And he was: his photo filled the page in connection with The Pop Group. His classmates included a member-to-be of The Clash and an actor-to-be in ‘Quadrophenia’. Ambitions burgeoned fast in those days and it was quite exciting to share a classroom with those blokes, blathering with them about books.

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