OXFORD
O, the sweaty clothes, and O, the smashed window-panes,
Ecstasy!—WRIGGLESWORTH: _Thoughts in a Parsonage_.
I find it customary among the writers of reminiscences, if they have had
the privilege of an Oxford or Cambridge education, to make great play
with the dons who were already greybeards in their time, survivals from
a yet earlier past. Thus, we shall be told of old Tommy So-and-So, who
was so well seasoned that he could carry his five glasses of port after
dinner and get to bed without assistance: or how What’s-his-name was
reputed never to have had a bath in fifty years of residence: or how the
Master of This was so absent-minded that he delivered a lecture on Homer
by mistake for one on political economy, and his audience were so little
attentive that none of them noticed the difference, while the President
of That used to be a great sportsman in his time, and rode a
motor-bicycle at full speed round Addison’s walk on Sunday afternoon for
a bet. This is all very well, but it is not first-hand-reminiscence. How
many of my young friends who are up at Oxford now know anything about
the patriarchal figures of the place, know so much as the very names of
them? You have passed them toiling up Headington Hill, that Professor of
European reputation who still wears the soft flannel collars and the
“plus-four” knickerbockers of the early thirties, that venerable Tutress
of St. Veronica’s, whose archaic skirt barely reaches below her knees;
and—confess it—you have never had the curiosity to ask who that old
blighter is. Why should you expect us, then, who write reminiscences, to
tell you stories of the old dons that were already skin and bone when we
matriculated? We, like you, were young, and lived in a self-contained
world of youth. Let nobody expect from me a description of Oxford which
shall represent it as a fossil-museum of the still remoter past. There
were elderly dons in my time, but I do not remember coming across them
at all, except one whom I met at a tea-party, and mistook for a fresher,
because at seventy or so he still looked so incorrigibly youthful!
My academic career at Oxford was destined to be successful beyond my
expectations. When I first looked at the list of subjects which I should
need in order to go through Pass Moderations, my heart sank within me.
Latin! Greek! Logic! Did they think I had stepped straight out of the
Middle Ages, that I should be prepared to face examination in such
subjects as these? But a reference to Appendix XVIIIc of the Regulations
reassured me. I had to take Latin “or some other foreign language”—the
old days at Barstoke with my French governess were to come in useful
after all. Instead of Greek I could take Mineralogy, Practical Farming,
Middle Icelandic, Military Tactics, Geography, Mental Therapeutics,
Book-keeping and Short-hand, Levantine Literature, or Old Testament
Anthropology. I need hardly say that I selected Geography at once. There
was a still longer list of substitutes for Logic, which seemed more
formidable, but I was assured that it was almost impossible to fail in
the Theory of Statistics—and so indeed I found it. My first two terms,
in fact, made little demand on my intellectual capacities, and I was
free to look about me, make friends, taste life, and enter into the
multifarious activities of the place.
I found little or no jealousy of the freshers, little or no anxiety to
keep them in their place, on the part of the second-year women. On the
contrary, the breakfast parties at which they used to entertain us were
some of the merriest functions of my life. Heavens, what huge breakfasts
we ate in those days! Tea, coffee, milk, sugar, porridge, boiled eggs or
even eggs and bacon, toast, butter, marmalade, sometimes jam—and yet we
felt fresh and energetic after them, ready to discuss any problem of the
universe! We would sit round smoking afterwards—pipe-smoking was just
coming in—indulging in our interminable conversations, till at last the
claim of half-past nine lecture broke up the little company. To be late
for lecture was a serious thing in those days; if the lecturer were
short-tempered, it meant that you missed your guinea attendance fee.
“No, it’s no use!” our geography lecturer, Hoskyns of B.N.C., would
shout at us, exasperated but still courteous. “I can’t have you ladies
come clattering up the Hall in those great boots, making a noise like a
troop of cavalry: go back, and save up your pocket-money!” He was
something of a misogynist, but unrivalled at his subject, and I do not
think I ever saw a man better tailored. I early decided to read
geography for my final schools, so as to continue under his tuition.
It was an idle undergraduate even in those days who did not keep her
four lectures every morning. If schools were not hanging over you,
Quarter Day was, and there was no temptation to “cut.” Dr. Feilding, of
Christ Church, had for a time a particularly successful lecture on
Ukrainian antiquities, until it was discovered that he was giving his
pupils a bonus of ten shillings! This practice was rightly discouraged
by the University authorities, who pointed out that it practically
amounted to paying people to be educated. By half-past one we were
whizzing along the moving pavement in the middle of St. Giles’ (one of
the first to be started, I believe, in the United Kingdom. The then
Principal of Pusey House would never travel on it: “these young ladies
are too _fast_ for me,” he said waggishly, more than once) and _en
route_ for our luncheon. This, according to the old Oxford tradition,
was a very simple meal—just a chop or a cutlet with vegetables, a cold
sweet, and a plate of cheese and butter; I doubt if modern Oxford would
stand it! Afternoon lectures had not then been instituted, and between
luncheon and tea we ordinarily devoted ourselves to sport. I continued
my football career with some success, but an unlucky strain prevented me
ever getting my Association half-blue. Tea was our chief social meal,
and I doubt if I had tea alone more than a dozen times during the whole
period of my residence. The habit of “lacing” one’s tea has grown up
since my time, and I do not think my young friends are any the better
for it. By six o’clock we would be at our books, till at seven, the old
College clock boomed out the hour for dressing.
I do not know that I have ever seen a prettier picture than was formed
every night by the College dinner. The harmonious lines of the building
itself—enlarged, of course, but enlarged in keeping with its original
architectural design—the soft glow of the wire electrics, falling on the
frilled shirt-fronts of the dons as they sat at the high table; the long
rows of sable-jacketed and sable-skirted undergraduates, the kindly,
weatherbeaten faces of the old “guides” who waited on us—it vied, I
think, in beauty, with the brightest of our modern ball-rooms. But
attendance in Hall was not compulsory, and as often as not one would be
dining out at the O.U.D.S., the Asquith, or the New Bolsheviks with a
party of friends from other Colleges. (Vincent’s and the Grid had not
yet admitted women.) That would mean a scramble to be back before the
College gates shut at ten, with the fear of meeting on your way there,
all capless and gownless, the terrible figure of the Proctress, with her
attendant “cowers.” A friend of mine, Ena Toogood, coming back from a
fancy dress ball in the costume of King Henry VIII, had the good fortune
to pass herself off on the Proctress as a man, and baffle the Proctor by
giving her College as St. Lucy’s!
Nor was all always peaceful even within the confines of the College.
There were nights (mostly after some athletic triumph) when the Quad
rang to merry choruses and catches (sometimes) uncomplimentary to the
dons. But these occasions were rare; the rowing women objected to it
because, for the greater part of the year, they were in training; and
the working set, who had great influence in the College at this time,
were loath to be disturbed at their studies. I myself belonged to the
dancing set my first two terms, but joined the working set afterwards as
the result of a personal quarrel with Lady Anne Forres, the leader of
the dancing set, who suspected me, I think, of rivalry. We were not much
divided up into cliques at this time, though I believe that later on the
admission of Astor scholars from America and the colonies tended to
break up the solidarity of the College.
In summer, there were fresh conflicts and fresh delights. I did not,
indeed, play tennis, because my dear mother thought it was unladylike—it
would have been absurd, of course, to play College matches in skirts!
But I played cricket fairly regularly; and I am not ashamed to be
thought old-fashioned when I say that there was a good deal of fun to be
got out of the game. It was slow, I admit (not so slow, perhaps, as when
my great-grandfather used to play it in a top-hat!), but there were
exciting moments when the scores were nearly equal, and sometimes plenty
of exercise. But I confess that I preferred the river, although I was
never a rowing woman. They were great evenings, when you would take down
your dinner in a picnic basket to Timms’ boat-house, and launch your
frail motor-punt just as the soft chimes of Keble struck eight o’clock;
when, some half-an-hour later, you would find that you had got beyond
the houses and the press of craft, and would tether “the old bus” to a
willow, and bathe, and spread out your dinner on the mown grass; when,
the dinner cleared and the cigars lighted, you would float home again
downstream to the gentle music of a hundred distant gramophones, and
think, who knows what thoughts? under the velvet skies of the June
evening.
But, more important than all these busy idlenesses of Oxford life, I
began to find myself at this time as a public speaker. Juliet Savage had
early joined all the clubs she could hear of: I never knew a woman who
had such a passion for the exchange of opinions. It was through her
instigation that I joined, besides several College Clubs, the Curzon,
the Dynamiters, and the _x_+1’s. (Of course I belonged to the Union: at
the time of which I am writing, anybody of British parentage could get
in without even paying an entrance fee.) The Curzon was a very select
Tory club, founded a short while earlier owing to a schism in the
Canning: a bare majority, who contrived, however, to keep the club funds
and the Lygon Cup, refusing admission to my indignant sex. It was full
of time-honoured institutions, such as taking a pinch of snuff before
you began your speech (which always made me cough rather), and singing
“Down among the Dead Men” in chorus before we broke up—never did we do
this so lustily as one evening when the “senseless, woman-hating crew”
of the original Canning were meeting on the same staircase (in Univ., I
think it was), and had to be given the full benefit of our opinions.
The Dynamiters had one custom which was, I suppose, unique. At each
meeting, one of the members was chosen by lot to murder the
Vice-Chancellor, and had to report at the next meeting on the attempt
made and the reasons for its failure. Apart from this, it was simply a
home of rather _démodé_ revolutionary talk, with a foreign element in it
so strong that I once introduced a motion to have French talked at the
debates. It proved, however, that our German comrades had not enough of
the international spirit to tolerate the proposal. The _x_+1’s were, I
must admit, a more interesting Society. There was no reason whatever for
their being so called. They debated literary questions mostly, not
without acumen, but with a rather painful striving after originality.
Thus, one member would try to resuscitate the dead laurels of Tennyson;
another would condemn Masefield as a mawkish sentimentalist, another
would write in disproof of the existence of Dr. Johnson. The most
characteristic note of the Society was its repudiation of all the
courtesies of debate. The President always opened the proceedings by
saying that it was his unpleasant duty to allow Mr. So-and-so to read
his paper, on the hackneyed subject of So-and-so; he could only hope
that it would be as brief as possible. When the paper was ended, the
Secretary would rise, and remonstrate with the honourable member for
having read so uninterestingly, and would proceed to move a vote of
censure on him, which was solemnly carried. In speaking, if you referred
to anyone who had addressed the House before you, you were bound to
mention him by reference to some physical defect, or unpleasant personal
characteristic, as “the honourable member who forgot to shave this
morning,” or “the honourable member whose ears are so much too large for
her,” and so on. At the conclusion of the proceedings, a vote of censure
was passed on all the officers. The President then rose, and proposed
the dissolution of the Society; the Treasurer seconded, and the motion
was carried _nem. con._ I do not know why we enjoyed it, but we did.
Alas, one begins to discover even as an undergraduate that man’s most
violent innovations turn almost at once into a sort of archaic ritual.
The Union, of course, was a more serious affair: of this Society I had
the honour to be the first woman President. We had some fine speakers in
those days, notably Eustace Travers, who afterwards became a very
successful book-maker, and Arthur Cardman, who as Lord Bythorpe did so
much to improve the breed of Hertfordshire cattle. But this was long
after the days of real Union eloquence, the days of Raymond Asquith and
Humphrey Paul. The most notable debate at which I was ever present was
that at which the proposal for Indian Home Rule was discussed, only six
months before it was carried into effect. Indians in those days used to
come to Oxford in large numbers, and the front benches were parted by an
absolute division of colour, “looking,” Savage said to me, “just like
those advertisements of stuff to dye your white hair with, only the chap
in the picture has only tried it on one side for a start.” Lord Cheadle
was the guest of the evening, and I imagined, as I looked at his bowed
shoulders and untidy white hair, and listened to his voice, still
silvery in quality though lacking its old fire, how those tones must
have thrilled the Commons at the time of the Five Years’ War. The
excitement was intense throughout the evening: every sentence of Lord
Cheadle was cheered to the echo, and the very dons in the gallery shook
their fists when his Nationalist opponent appealed for her
fellow-countrymen. The voting, as usual, went against the visitor, and
we had the satisfaction of feeling that the Oxford Union had once more
dictated its policy to the Government.
It must not be supposed that, because I was so multifariously occupied,
I was neglecting my chances in the Schools. I had decided to take as my
subject for Finals the group known as Group 65B, which consisted of
Geography and Byzantine Architecture, with French as a subsidiary
subject. I sat once more at the feet of the great Hoskyns, and was
privileged to attend the very first lecture to which he released his
considerations on “Whereness examined as such, without reference to
spatial conceptions, with special allusion to the recently discovered
work of Aristotle on Πουότης.” He followed this up with a course (I have
the notes of it still) called “Towards a reconciliation of Teleology
with Geography, with some remarks on the Where as a function of the
Why.” Alas, it was after my time that he startled the world with his
“The Whence as an aspect of the Whither, a point Einstein overlooked.”
In fact, he had not yet made his name, but he had one fervent devotee.
So enthralled was I by his speculations that I made a suggestion that I
should come and take private classes with him at his house: when
difficulties arose, I actually consented to come without receiving the
usual fee. Never shall I forget the thrill of those evenings! It was
something of a pilgrimage that I had taken on myself, for he lived in
one of the most fashionable streets of Boar’s Hill, and this was before
the funicular railway had been electrified. At the end of our fourth
class, however, he proposed marriage, a suggestion which so took me
aback that I put him off with the plea (an unusual one, even then) that
I must write for my parents’ consent. My mother was very busy at the
time, since she was entering her dog for a show, and my father found it
impossible to get away. The result was unexpected, but perhaps
fortunate, a visit from old Miss Linthorpe! She interviewed Charles
Hoskyns for three-quarters of an hour, and came away saying that the man
ought to be in Bedlam (a melancholy prophecy of what happened later on).
The engagement was broken off, but I promised that I would always be a
sister to him, and when he married his typist a few months later,
suggested further that I would be a sister-in-law to his wife.
My researches in Byzantine architecture were less absorbing; it was a
subject more difficult to treat in a theoretical aspect. I went to
Church at St. Barnabas’ one Sunday, to collect local colour, but the
expedition was not a success. That Church had been one of the earliest
to acclaim and to encourage rapprochement with the Greek Orthodox
Communion, and I found that, during the week, an enormous screen had
been erected in the middle of the Church, completely hiding the Eastern
portion of it. The screen, indeed, had doors in it, which were meant (I
afterwards learnt) to be thrown open at various points in the service;
but unfortunately these doors jammed on this first occasion, and the
congregation had to be content without seeing the officiating clergy at
all.
I hope it will not be thought to argue defective piety in me that I
have, so far, said nothing about the religious state of the University.
I am sorry to say that I think the women who were up in my time were, on
the whole, far better Churchgoers than their successors of to-day. The
old idea of compulsory chapels had disappeared almost before the Five
Years’ War; and there was now no worldly inducement to keep even Sunday
chapels except that those who went on Sunday evening were not charged
for their dinner afterwards in Hall. In spite of the purely voluntary
character of these services, I think we had nearly always about a third
of the College in attendance; and very heartily, I remember, did they
join in the singing. Miss Garvice, our principal, used to conduct the
service, and would occasionally preach us a lay sermon: she always
refused, however, to pronounce the Absolution; the assumption of
anything like priestly powers by women in the present state of feeling,
she said, could do no good and might possibly do harm. We used the
ordinary Prayer Book service, but, in virtue of a special privilege
accorded to us by our visitor, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, we altered
the masculine gender to the feminine wherever it occurred in any general
connexion: “When the wicked woman turneth away from her wickedness,” and
so on.
Our devotion to the services of the Church at St. Lucy’s was but part of
a great religious movement throughout the University. In those days, the
Sunday evening sermons for undergraduates which are now preached at St.
Peter’s-in-the-East were still preached at St. Mary’s, and when a really
popular orator such as the then Bishop of Plymouth was to occupy the
pulpit, you did well to be in time for the opening prayers if you wanted
to make sure of a seat. I remember an atheist meeting, which was being
held opposite the moving platform in St. Giles’, where the old Martyrs’
Memorial used to stand, being almost broken up by a set of Magdalen
undergraduates who were returning from the Bullingdon dinner. When the
Archbishop of British Guiana was given his honorary degree (I was in the
theatre myself), there was no larking among the undergraduates in the
gallery, except that one young man threw down a black and only partially
clothed “Golliwog” in his direction—an action which the _Oxford
Magazine_ criticized afterward as being in doubtful taste. Altogether,
our young friends at Oxford might do worse than go back to the religious
standard of the early thirties.
No one man can be more reasonably credited with having brought about
this state of things than Canon Dives of Christ Church. It is not easy,
of course, from the Catholic point of view to sympathize with his
difficulties or to rest satisfied with his affirmations. But in those
days he was a tower of strength to many weak hearts. I remember
attending a meeting of the Oxford University Churches Reunion in the
J.C.R. at Worcester, to which he read his famous “Explanation of the
Existence of Good.” I felt it to be so remarkable a feat that I kept the
notes of it, of which I give an abstract. Evil, he said, was an
undeniable fact in our experience. The phenomenon of pain, which some
short-sighted philosophers had attempted to deny, was sufficiently
attested for us by the “fugitive reaction” which it set up in Man and
even, apparently, in the lower animals. “If I am kicked on the shin,” he
explained with his dry humour, “my instinct is to put my shin
elsewhere.” A very little reflection would show us that the parallel
phenomenon known as “Moral” evil had an equally real existence. “If I
see a man kicking a baby on the shin, my instinct is to remonstrate with
him.” He then drew a lurid picture of all the moral evil that went on in
the world: even in those days, it was a damning indictment! “Now,
gentlemen,” he continued, in that curious little shriek that was so
characteristic of his pulpit delivery, “no Evil without Good! Evil
cannot exist without implying the existence of its correlative! If you,
gentlemen,” (beaming at us through his spectacles) “are to be at liberty
to do wrong, you must _ipso facto_ leave me my liberty to do right. You
will tell me that, on this showing, Good has only a parasitic, and
almost a negative existence. Be it so; it exists. And now, how are we to
account for its existence?” He went on to show, in a really eloquent
passage, that Evil can only realize itself fully if and in so far as it
finds itself in a continual struggle against Good; that Good is,
consequently, necessary to the constitution of the world, which demands
Evil as a condition of its fulfilment. “Some day, perhaps,” he added,
“wiser heads and clearer vision than yours or mine will be able to
include Evil and Good under a Higher Synthesis which shall co-ordinate
and subsume them both. Meanwhile, we struggle on in the half-light of
our uncertainty, only confident that the Power (for so, I think we may
call it) which has instilled into our natures such an irresistible
craving for what is evil, will somehow, somewhere, bring that evil to
fulfilment.” The roof of the J.C.R. echoed again as we testified by our
grateful plaudits our gratitude to Canon Dives for his courageous
utterance.
But it must not be imagined that our whole time at Oxford was spent in
these serious occupations! We had our relaxations, too, and wherever
innocent fun was going, you may be sure that the undergraduates of St.
Lucy’s had their part. No less than five of us, I remember, were
included in the caste of “Oh, blast it all” when it was performed by the
O.U.D.S. in the Lent term of 1936. I came on myself in the Mixed Bathing
scene, and again at the end of the Fourth Act, where the male and female
choruses come out of the Noah’s Ark in pairs, in fancy dress. We had the
opportunity of seeing most of the successful revues at the Theatre, some
of them when they had only been running three years or so on the London
stage. Occasionally (for the Proctors were very strict about the
management of the theatre) we had to vary the entertainment with the old
classical stage of Pinero and Brandon Thomas.
It was in the Eights Week of my last year (1938) that the St. Lucy’s
boat went up into the First Division, beating Merton II. It was true
that Merton I had now been head of the river five years in succession,
and some thought that they sacrificed the prospects of their second boat
to those of their first, but it was, nevertheless, a memorable triumph.
There was bad blood between the rowing and the football sets at the
time, because the football semi-final had been reported in the _St.
Lucy’s Chronicle_ in a way that we all thought odious. But it was not a
time for narrow, sectarian grudges; and we all turned out in our
football skirts and our blue-and-gold-edged “perspirers” to watch the
race from the towing path. The habit of putting on “change” to watch the
races was merely a survival, ever since the towing path had been turned
into a moving platform, but it was a ritual rigorously observed. How we
shouted, as the nose of the St. Lucy’s boat gradually gained upon our
Herculean antagonists, and bumped them just opposite the Lady Margaret
barge! There were great doings in the College that night, and we broke
three of the library windows.
But meanwhile the shadow of Schools was drawing nearer, and there was
little time left for such frivolities. I knew that I was sound on my
texts, and my tutress warned me to take it easy toward the end. I went
away for three days before the examination—to Ascot, where I made some
good selections. The examination itself filled me with despair: the
weather was thunderous and the heat of the room excessive. I even went
so far as to write on one of my papers: “TO THE EXAMINER.—I could have
done this question much better if the woman in front of me were not
using such a noisy typewriter.” My “viva” was a short and purely
informal one; they asked me the whereabouts of Tonkin, which I located,
in the embarrassment of the moment, in Lancashire. But when the lists
came out in September I found my own name among the first class, and
made history once more as the first woman who had ever made good in
Byzantine architecture.