A former naval officer and veteran of the Second World War, committed to good works from amateur dramatics through the YMCA (he chaired the Glasgow organisation) to the Scottish National Orchestra Chorus and influential lay service in the Church of Scotland, William Branston was to most pupils an 'astonishingly remote, God-like figure'. He enforced regular religious observance – such as morning assembly – and the school was noted through the 1970s for its rigid uniform code and highly conservative, rote-learning traditional teaching methods, notably in arithmetic and English grammar.