Having completed the stenography and typewriting course with adequate credits I was again at a loose end.
Not for the last time the question arose, what was I to do? Alas, no £5,000 a year directorship offered itself. My father was aghast. My mother, whose faith in me however severely tested remained unshakeable, was not quite so disappointed. She knew that I had always wanted to go to a university, and believed that it was the necessary culmination of every gentle man’s education. A university must be even more important than a public school simply because the choice lay between two only, whereas Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and some few other public schools were not entirely ignoble alternatives to Eton. The single choice between Oxford or Cambridge was as imperative as that between a man’s shoe- and gunmaker. The shoes came either from Lobb or Peel, the guns from Purdey or Holland and Holland. There was no other way of looking at these matters.
At this stage of my history my mother stepped firmly into the breach. She now happened to be at home, and my father to be away – not of course abroad, which he did not countenance unless it were Monte Carlo or Le Touquet for a fortnight in the spring. Since it was now August and the grouse season he was probably in Scotland. So my mother, with a determination which seized her when her emotions were aroused, declared that Oxford was to be my destination after all. She also declared that my father must pay for it. This was not unreasonable because she had little money of her own. The important thing was to fix everything up before his return. He must be faced with a fait accompli which he could not possibly revoke.
I went off on my motor scooter to be interviewed by the President of Magdalen College. Sir Herbert Warren had enjoyed the presidency for well over forty years. He was known to my mother whose brother had been at Magdalen under him. He received me graciously. I have met many obvious snobs in my life – in fact the majority of human beings, high and low, are snobs of one sort or another, which is what makes them so entertaining – but with the single exception of a restaurant proprietor in Moscow, I have never encountered a more blatant social snob than this eminent President. Mrs Roxburgh was a romantic snob who was fascinated by the vagaries of upper-class people. She even embroidered their eccentricities for fun. Sir Herbert honestly believed that a title conferred a heavenly grace in which those poor handleless creatures were sadly and totally lacking. How anyone without a title, and there were quite a few, ever got into Magdalen during Warren’s presidency, I am at a loss to explain. That the titled and untitled were regarded by him as sheep and goats I am quite certain.
My mother who was aware of and amused by Sir Herbert’s little foible primed me in advance. She had somehow managed to come upon a list of past and present members of Magdalen. Against those with illustrious prefixes she put a pencil tick. ‘You must pretend’, she advised, ‘that they are your relations. He will never find out.’ ‘But’, I protested, ‘he’s bound to. He’s sure to have all their genealogies at his finger tips.’ This did not turn out to be the case. My mother was right.
I was ushered into Sir Herbert’s study. Oh, the horror of being interviewed! One feels like a cow in a market stall; a corpse on a dissecting table; a rabbit before a stoat: anything but a human being confronted by another human being. I was to undergo in the future far more alarming interviews than this particular one. Sir Herbert was not disagreeable. He did not set out to wither his victim with scathing satire. He did not expose the emptiness of my mind, or mock my intellectual pretensions. On the contrary he meant to put me at my ease. He merely cast an oblique aspersion upon my lineage.
It was easy to see that he had once been a large man. He was now crippled with arthritis, and lame. He had a pointed grey beard, authoritative lower lip – his least pleasant feature– and shrewd, yet kind eyes. He was very neatly dressed. He sat behind a knee-hole desk. He bowed me to a chair facing him. Immediately, with what I thought unnecessary carelessness, he allowed a large gold pen to slip from his fingers. In attempting to pick it up he dropped it on a woolly rug. ‘Dear me!’ he said, as I dived to retrieve it. ‘Her Majesty’s present which she gave me when His Royal Highness left the which she gave me when His Royal Highness left the College.’ Reverently I replaced it on his pen tray, which was an over ornate adaptation in miniature of the Taj Mahal. I gave this vulgar object a quick glance of disparagement. ‘I see’, he remarked, ‘that you admire the Viceroy’s little token.’ ‘Oh, rather!’ I answered promptly. There was a pause. He then said, ‘And how is your cousin Lord Fitzpatrick?’ I was completely flummoxed, for I had never heard of such a person, nor was his name on my mother’s list of fictitious relations. ‘As far as I know, he is still flourishing,’ I answered lamely. Suddenly I was inspired with self-confidence. If Sir Herbert Warren was capable of making such an inept mistake, I might risk deceiving him. ‘But we all felt very sad, sir, when my great-uncle Evesham died,’ I ventured. ‘Evesham, Evesham,’ he repeated, rolling the name round his tongue like a mouthful of non-vintage port. ‘I don’t recall him.’ To my alarm Sir Herbert reach ed for the red book on the little table beside him, in order to jog his memory. ‘I’m afraid you’ll draw a blank there, sir,’ I shouted desperately. ‘There was no heir, sir. The title is now quite extinct.’ Sir Herbert replaced the red book unopened, and grunted. I had had a narrow squeak. If after I left he consulted the Extinct Peerage and discovered my deception, he was too late. Perhaps he merely thought I was a fool and was confusing my home town with the title of another peer like, for instance, Lord Esher, who I regret to say was no relation whatever. At all events before I left he promised to take me, provided I passed the college entrance examination in six months’ time. ‘I do this’, he said with solemnity, ‘for your uncle Robert’s sake. He was one of Magdalen’s best scholars. Only a demy, of course. Still he was a gentleman.’ The last words were not uttered with that conviction which I would have liked. I accepted them as a delicate personal reproach.
Yet my mother and I were jubilant. She wrote immediately to Sir Herbert Warren asking him to confirm his promise in writing. He did so and his letter was in due course presented to my father on his return from the moors. Needless to say he was much displeased by our underhand machinations during his absence, and for committing him to the appalling expense of Oxford bills . . .
Oxford for which I had so long clamoured turned out a bitter disappointment. I have always felt guilty towards my mother because I did not enjoy or profit from it more. She fought for me to go, and won the battle with my father, firmly believing that I would thereby justify her confidence in me. Although I did nothing to forfeit it, and left with a degree, I did not do anything remarkable to confirm it. I had looked forward to leading a cloistered existence in this medieval seat of learning. I imagined that my studies would be rigorously supervised, my tastes encouraged to expand, my intelligence cultivated and my steps guided by interested pastors and masters in the rook-racked, lichen-laden city. I longed to be taught, to be interested, and to learn. I would gladly have worked twelve hours a day and burnt the midnight oil, if only there had been supervision and encouragement. Instead the Oxford which I had mistakenly viewed through the eyes of my dead uncle of a generation ago had totally changed. The periphery was a hurly-burly of industrialism. Sir William Morris had ringed the city with factories and subtopia. To wander like the scholar-gipsy straight into the open country was no longer possible, even in 1928. In strolling round Addison’s Walk or in Christ Church Meadow you were horribly aware of the rattle and din of traffic so that even in those backwaters quiet contemplation was out of the question. The High Street, Cornmarket, and indeed all the streets were jammed tight with lorries and cars, thrumming, hooting and belching exhaust fumes. Furthermore in those days Oxford absorbed an overflow of Mayfair good-timers. Except for the highly disciplined undergraduates whose circumstances withheld from them the wiles of social life, the prevailing spirit of frivolity was extremely disturbing.
I soon discovered that unless an undergraduate came to Oxford with outstanding academic recommendations the authorities paid not the slightest attention to him. They did not care a hoot whether he sank or swam. He would have no encouragement, no help. Tuition was minimal. His tutors were either too busy or too lazy to be bothered. So long as he attended the prescribed number of lectures he would not be penalized in any way. And who the hell can learn from lectures? To pass three hours a week feverishly trying to take down notes, or memorize a string of platitudes or paradoxes usually the latter since most lecturers tend to show off – is utterly useless. A student does far better to read the stuff quietly in his room. It will take him a quarter of the time, and he will thus be able to concentrate without distractions. But he does need personal guidance as well.
One would suppose the purpose of a university to be to teach the unqualified who are anxious to be taught. I went to Oxford with few academic attainments. I left with no more. My three years at the University were a complete waste of time, a blank in my life over which I do not now care to linger. As it was, the term time only covered half the year. Six months out of every twelve one was down from Oxford, idling. What was the point of the whole institution? To make us men of the world? Eton had already started that process which the world itself, the world outside Oxford, was soon to complete. Few of my Eton friends went to Oxford, where I did not make many more. True, my extreme poverty was partially responsible. Although my father was committed to paying for my board and education, if such it was, he gave me no allowance. For pocket money I was once more dependent upon my mother’s generosity and whim. Whereas poverty at school does not isolate a boy from his fellows, at Oxford and Cambridge in the Twenties and Thirties it ruled out most forms of social intercourse. I learned that the difference between having no private means and £200 a year of one’s own was far greater than that between having £200 and £2,000.
The exclusiveness of the rich undergraduates and the cynicism of the dons were remarkable. Among the preceptors those who toadied to the jeunesse dorée to the neglect of the struggling scholars (among whom I cannot claim to be numbered) were probably the most intellectual in the University. The fact that the hungry sheep looked up and were not fed did not bother these tuft-hunting pedagogues. And needless to say, retribution from that two-handed engine at the door in the shape of a strong conscience was meaningless to men who propagated disbelief in all ethical values.
I will acknowledge that Oxford did two things for me. First, it aroused that love of architecture in which I have ever since been constant. Architecture which has brought me such immeasurable joy and pain. I do not suppose any adolescent susceptible to man-made beauty can spend a large part of three years at Oxford without being profoundly moved by those grey stones. In spite of the ceaseless nibbling at the city’s green feet, in spite of the ever expanding ‘base and brickish skirt’, the industrial squalor, and the roar and stink of traffic, the university city is unsurpassed in the variety of distinguished buildings. I learnt at Oxford how of all the arts architecture is the only one which cannot be ignored either by the philistine or the indifferent. It is there. It cannot be avoided, and has to be seen. It must shape the minds and thoughts of all men whether they dislike or like it. In which case it is to the public’s advantage to be good, and not bad. We cannot turn our backs upon it as we can upon painting, sculpture and music, and pretend it does not concern or influence us – that we do not notice it. I also realized the terrible fragility of architecture. It is vulnerable to every insult, whether direct mutilation or indirect neglect, ignorant improvement, or environmental change.
One evening of a summer term, I was taken by friends to dine at Rousham on the river Cherwell midway between Oxford and Banbury. This remote Jacobean house was re decorated in about 1740 by William Kent, who likewise redesigned the landscape that encompassed it. The principal rooms with Kent’s painted ceilings, stuccoed walls, marble chimney pieces and gilt gesso furniture, and the collection of family portraits of Cottrells and Dormers, and other paintings, constitute an early Georgian monument of rare distinction. Kent’s gardens with their temples, follies, terraces, grottoes and sculpture rank among the best preserved layouts of the period. The family who still own Rousham and are collateral descendants of its creator, had leased it to a capricious alcoholic. This individual, who was rich, clever and slightly mad, had an irresistible appeal to sophisticated undergraduates. He had much to offer them, especially good food and a lot of drink. On this occasion we all dined exceedingly well. I, like the rest, made the most of what I was offered, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. But I did not get so drunk that I was not appalled by the meal’s sequel. I was accustomed to Oxford evening orgies which were either boring or great fun, according to the mood one was in and the degree of one’s successful participation in them. They were inevitably good natured and confined to one’s contemporaries, or near contemporaries from London. This Rousham orgy was different. Our host seemed to me an old man. I suppose he was in his early thirties. He became noisy and rowdy. On leaving the dining-room he got hold of a hunting crop, and cracked it against the portraits. With the thong he flaked off chunks of paint. When satisfied with working off some effects of his brandy on the Knellers and Reynoldses, he fetched a rifle from the gunroom. He went to the terrace and proceeded to fire at the private parts of the statues. I do not think that by then his aim can have been very accurate. For all I remember he missed, and I sincerely hope that the manhood of Apollo, Pan and the Dying Gladiator remains unscathed to this day. I have twice visited Rousham since, but on neither occasion could I bring myself to make a close inspection for fear of finding that some pudenda were missing, in which case I would hold myself partly responsible. For to my lasting shame I never raised a finger in protest against this hideous iconoclasm. Today no scruples of politeness or what a guest owed to his host would prevent me from hitting him until he desisted.
I was, it is true, only one among many, but that does not excuse, nothing ever does excuse pusillanimity. The other guests were vastly entertained. They cheered and egged on our beastly host in the way in which I am sure the sycophantic courtiers of Leo the Isaurian applauded that Emperor’s overthrow of the Byzantine images. Not one of them betrayed by a flicker of the eye that he was faintly shocked. Yet all were fairly cultivated youths, and the don among the party was a man of letters who was to become a clamorous champion of western ideologies. At least I can truthfully say I did not cheer, but remained dumb. On the contrary I felt numb with dismay and misery. The experience was a turning point in my life. It brought home to me how passionately I cared for architecture and the continuity of history, of which it was the mouthpiece. I felt sick as many people would feel sick if they watched from a train window an adult torturing a child, while they were powerless to intervene. Those Rococo rooms at Rousham, with their delicate furniture, and portraits of bewigged, beribboned ancestors, were living, palpable children to me. They and the man-fashioned landscape outside were the England that mattered. I suddenly saw them as infinitely fragile and precious. They meant to me then, and have meant ever since, far more than human lives. They represent the things of the spirit. And the ghastly truth is that like humans, they are not perdurable.
That evening I made a vow – at the time it seemed so silly that I mentioned it to no one. I vowed that I would devote my energies and abilities, such as they were, to preserving the country houses of England. The opportunity was not to occur for at least six years. Thereafter I fulfilled my vow for three decades in, admittedly, a small way.
It could perhaps be argued that this revelation of the meaning of architecture which in my generosity I allow to Oxford might have come to me had I been living in some other city; and that Oxford does not provide the only route to Damascus. True perhaps, but it came while I was an undergraduate there, so Oxford may as well boast of having conferred the inestimable benefit.
Extract from Another Self
James Lees-Milne © 1970
Click here to browse the podcast archive 
Leave a comment