Ivory Towers

By R.B. Le Page

R B Le Page (1920-2006) was one of the founding fathers of sociolinguistics. From an impoverished and unpromising start in east London WW2, and after a dangerous few years flying against submarines during the war, he worked his way through Oxford to become a young lecturer at the new University College of the West Indies in the 1950s, then a professorship in Malaya, and finally at York University. It was in Jamaica that he developed a lifelong interest in multilingual communities and creole languages, developing an idea of language creation not as an abstract set of rules, but as what real people do in complex daily lives. This view conflicted with the prevailing Chomskyan idea of "deep rules" and idealised speakers, theories which Le Page regarded as inherently absurd. His ideas of language in society have been hugely influential.

   This marvellously humane and witty autobiography describes the slow foment of his idea over four decades of work at twelve diffierent universities, leading to the creation (with Fred Cassidy) of the Dictionary of Jamaican English which is still a standard work, and the seminal study Acts of Identity (with A.Tabouret-Keller).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stupor Mundi Books
• Release date: May 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386930389

R.B. Le Page

Bob Le Page (1920-2006) was a founding father of sociolinguistics. Growing up in the east of London in the 1920s, and after a perilous WW2 flying against U-boats, he worked his way through Oxford to become a young lecturer in English at the new University College of the West Indies in the early 1950s.  There - based on his observation of multilingual Caribbean societies - began the slow foment of his view of language as not some theoretical construct of "deep rules" and idealised speakers (as many linguists studied) but as the complex "acts of identity" of real people in their difficult daily lives.    After Jamaica he moved to a professorhip in Malaya, and then founded the first British school of sociolinguistics at York University, as well as teaching in the USA, Singapore, Norway and elsewhere, and a longterm collaboration with A.Tabouret-Keller in Strasbourg. His longstanding involvement with creole language communities led him to a profoundly humane and sympathetic view of language behaviour which has grown steadily in influence over the years.

Book preview

First issued in a private edition at the University of York, UK (1998)

and reprinted by the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Trinidad (2002).

This edition with minor emendations and corrections

published 2018 by

Stupor Mundi – Wonder of the World

KY14 6JF

Fife, Scotland, UK

www.stupormundibooks.wordpress.com

email: [e-mail]

Copyright © the estate of R.B.Le Page 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, printed or electronic or otherwise, without the prior permission

of the copyright holder.

Set in Garamond 11pt.

Cover design by Kit McCarthy

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Stupor Mundi was the name often given to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (d.1250).  A man of great talents and learning, he was a lawgiver, patron of the arts and sciences, linguist and warrior whose Sixth Crusade retook Jerusalem by negotiation rather than bloodshed. His court at Palermo was described by Dante as ‘the birthplace of Italian poetry.’

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To my family

RBLeP

CHAPTER CONTENTS DETAILED

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CHAPTER ONE

Starters

Leaving the Fleet Air Arm – To Oxford as a Fresher, October 1945 – Some Oxford characters of the 1940s – Some theatrical activities – Enchantments and disenchantments: Reading English – Schoolmastering averted: medievalism triumphs.

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CHAPTER TWO

London, Birmingham, Oxford, London

Alan Ross and Probability Theory – Birmingham days, and prosodic forays – Lingering theatrical leanings – Job possibilities – More statistics, more Ross.

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CHAPTER THREE

Caribbean & Creole

New friends and colleagues – Architects for a start – The value of royal connections – The cultural scene, and the value of local connections – Birth of a Creolist.

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CHAPTER FOUR

America, America

Shades of linguistics – Travels in America.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Partnerships

Ross on the Reef – High-powered help – A digression to Edinburgh –  Academic Jamaica in the 1950s – Decolonising the curriculum – Learning the very difficult art of teaching – Teaching in America – And again in the Caribbean – The research team, and the fun we had – The first book: Jamaican Creole – A Yorkshire tyke – A touch of administration – Going down the islands – Running a conference – The students’ verdict.

CHAPTER SIX

Beds in the East

Not a literary man – Struggles for power in Malaya – A little corruption here and there – President of a trade union – A modest research programme – Teaching on a cultural divide – Teaching literature – The indigenization of education: some problems – New blood – Visitors from abroad – New Departments: Architecture? Medicine? Chinese? – A social merry-go-round – Expanding the Arts Faculty – Links forged with Africa and Hong Kong – Chinese New Year in Malacca.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The York Road

Trial by Jury – A job for life – Return to Malaya – The circumnavigation of the globe completed – York: starting a new university for the third time – A new department: plans and realities – Recruiting staff again – Behaviourism and behavioural science – Starting the new curriculum: structuralism and Chomsky – Sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and linguistics – A voyage down a simile to the sea – Financing research – Attracting students – How to teach French on a shoe-string: send them to France – Colonial connections again – Contact language situations as a core for teaching and research – A fresh and fruitful collaboration – Perpetual motion.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Initiating another major research programme

Getting the money and getting the work done – On a cranky dorey – Ploughing it all back in – The Idea of a University revisited.

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CHAPTER NINE

Starting a new college

A Provost as well as a Professor – Architects again – The architect as expert – Fresh young architects with open minds – The Provost's House, and the Concert Hall – Getting a College established during an uproar – A kitchen cabinet – Bread and circuses – The Senior Common Room – Some insight into the drug scene – Conflicting and converging loyalties – College vs departments.

CHAPTER TEN

Town & Gown, Village & Gown

Town and Gown – Village and Gown.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

An expanding universe

Crowded and troubled days – The efficient and effective use of resources – How to consult, and how to direct.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Growing pains

Gathering a team, and making a mark – Devising syllabuses and giving conference papers – Combined degrees – Handout for a seminar – Combined degrees and modular courses – Combining with Psychology – The 1973 ACU Congress – Interesting students – How big should a university be? – Linguists as poets manqué – Fougasse.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Drumming up trade overseas

A very sad loss – The threat of racism – Getting staff for nothing.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Acts of Identity, and IGLSVL

Some more preliminary travel – IGLSVL gets under way – Books, books, books – Lies, damn lies, and statistics – The Equator – The Arctic – Taking retirement in easy stages.

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EPILOGUE: AUGUST 1997

A success story? – Assessing and being assessed – An Ivy League? – Sex differentials – Vice-Chancellors as Managing Directors – Are we then failing? - Finis

CHAPTER ONE: 1988

I have given my last lecture – what a relief! All that remains is one more term of teaching ten thickheads (no, I shouldn’t say that, it’s a symptom of exhaustion) some Anglo-Saxon, reading Beowulf and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and The Battle of Maldon with them (they will have to read The Dream of the Rood on their own, it makes me cry). Then to turn out forty years of accumulated books and papers and rubbish out of my room; sell the books, throw away the papers.

I reckon that if I have averaged two lectures a week for 27 weeks of the year for forty years that comes to about seven million words. (Or is it 70 million? It seems more like it.) That’s in addition to all the tutorials and seminars and conference papers. And six books. And about one hundred and twenty ‘learned’ publications. And summer school teaching in America – in Ann Arbor, in Madison, in Pittsburgh; and so on, and so on – not to mention a semester in Singapore and another in Hyderabad, a world-wide trail of words. Not as many words, perhaps, as George Bernard Shaw. Somebody (I forget who) had a nightmare of Shaw as a set of false teeth smiling and endlessly moving like typewriter keys; or was it piano keys? A Max Beerbohm cartoon? Shaw based the rationale of his passion for English spelling reform on the supposition that everybody spent as much time writing as he did.

One thing I am not going to do is check my references. If I libel, misremember, misquote – too bad. No footnotes either. Footnotes are over and out.

It has taken me five minutes to write this page. If I reckon on 300 pages to gut my life – my academic life, that is – that’s 1,500 minutes, 25 hours, four or five days. But with arthritis and other symptoms of ageing it’s going to take several months. I must get it done by September. Then we’ll go back to Jamaica.

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Starters: leaving the Fleet Air Arm

I became a don by accident. A series of accidents, rather. I left school when I was 16 and was apprenticed to a firm of Chartered Accountants in the City of London for four years before the war. The war let me off that leash. In 1945 I decided that I could not go back into accountancy, was unlikely to find sublimation between balance sheets, could not face commuting on the Southern Railway and the Tube again. The government advertised an emergency one-year training course for primary school teachers. I applied and was accepted.

But on VJ night, drinking in the wardroom of the Royal Naval Air Station in Arbroath with a man who had been my pilot in 836 Squadron, I asked him:

‘What are you going to do now, Dave?’

‘I’m going back to Oxford. Why don’t you come?’

‘Would they have me?’

‘Why don’t you try?’

I hitched a flight down to RAF Culham the next week and went into Oxford. Before the war I had audited the accounts of The Queen’s College, and knew their Bursar well; he was my first port of call.

‘I’ve only got basic Matriculation, five credits at School Certificate. Is it worth applying?’

‘Not to us,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be full up with all the people who started their degree courses with us during the war and will come back to finish them. But why don’t you try Keble? They’ve been the Ministry of Ag and Fish all through the war – no students.’

I walked through the Turl and along Parks Road to the red brick fortress of Keble College and was told that I could see the Dean at tea time. He was a rather shrivelled, drip-nosed little man called Leonard Rice-Oxley, but he gave me tea and encouragement.

‘I’ll work very hard,’ I said.

‘What would you want to read?’

‘English literature. I’ve always wanted to.’

‘You have done some Latin, I suppose?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Where did you go to school?’

‘Christ’s Hospital.’

‘Ah, yes. Well, I think that will be all right.’

I could hardly believe it; I walked on air. Me – at Oxford! Now I could be a secondary school teacher, not teaching little kids but bigger kids. The only remaining problems were, to get out of the Fleet Air Arm by October and to find enough money to support my wife and myself for the next three years. I would have my war gratuity; my memory is that it came to about four hundred pounds; and we had saved three hundred pounds which I had made by smuggling birdseed for starving budgerigars during the war. We would buy it by the kitbag full for sixpence a pound in Norfolk, Virginia or in Newfoundland when our carrier put in there, fly it ashore on the Swordfish bomb racks when we got back to Britain, and sell it to a man living in a council house in the East End of London for £1 a pound. But that’s another story.

I flew back to Arbroath and broke the news to my wife.

‘My Uncle Wyndham,’ she said, ‘thinks you’re a fool not to stay in the Navy. You’re a lieutenant and only 24. Why throw it all away?’

‘You know me,’ I said. ‘Difficult enough to stand the bull in wartime, let alone now the peace has come. Anyway, they wouldn’t have me. I’m ripe for a court martial as it is.’

It was true. I had become explosive of temper and given to crying uncontrollably. I had already given several senior officers a piece of my mind. I went to see a friendly Surgeon Lieutenant Commander and told him all the symptoms. Luckily I had an operational record that made them seem plausible.

‘You want to get out, I suppose?’

‘As soon as I can.’

He only gave me time to pack a bag before sending me in a naval transport up to the Royal Naval Psychiatric Hospital at Kingseat, near Aberdeen. It was a big old stately home, converted into a mental hospital. A Petty Officer opened a grille in the front door, opened the door to let me in, then shut it and bolted it behind me.

‘You’re in now,’ he cackled. ‘You won’t get out again.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Captain only keeps his rank as long as he can muster the right number of patients. Nobody gets out!’

I got out in two weeks by threatening to throw the furniture around if I didn’t. I was discharged, invalided out of the Navy without a stain on my character, and with a certificate to say I was suffering from psychoneurosis due to operational strain. But those two weeks spent among mentally sick naval officers made a profound impression on me. Some were having deep sleep treatment (as I was) and some, ECT. Some talked endlessly, compulsively, about themselves; others remained absolutely silent. Four of us played poker every day, all day, or liar dice. One of the four, a trawler skipper who had been blown up twice by mines, would get out of the bed opposite to mine every morning and stare out of the window.

‘What’s it like, Dickie?’

‘Thick fog. Won’t get into Suez today.’

His next-door neighbour, a submariner, the only regular officer in the ward, would ring all the bells in the middle of the night and then try to line everybody, nurses and all, up for inspection.

‘Look at your hands, Nurse Brown. They’re filthy!’

‘Now, now, Lieutenant Cook, it’s back to your bed, please, and no more nonsense tonight.’

‘Yes, come on, Cookie, we all want to get some sleep.’

‘Sleep – that’s all you bloody lot think about. What about the efficiency of the Service?’

‘Sod the Service. Go to sleep!’

‘Undisciplined bloody rubbish, the Wavy Navy.’[1]

Occasionally this last remark would elicit a short chorus of ‘There’s a balls-up on the flight deck and the Wavy Navy done it,’ sung quietly as a lullaby.

During these two weeks, I later discovered, my wife in Arbroath was puzzled as to the sympathy given to her by the wives of other officers.

‘Poor old Bob. It must have been hell for you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know that he’s that bad.’

‘George said he punched the Commander in the face and had to be taken off in a strait jacket.’

So rumour sped around the Air Station and around my friends and acquaintances in the town, and even reached one of my sisters in London. But I arrived home and we all went out to the pub for a farewell piss-up before my wife and I set out in our decrepit old car, loaded up to the gunwales, on our long journey south. As we drove out of the Air Station in two car-loads for the party I tooted BULLSHIT in Morse on my horn. The Duty Quartermaster at the gate stopped me.

‘Was that you tooting?’

‘No, Chief – car behind.’

We drove out. To the driver behind:

‘Was that you tooting?’

‘Of course not, Chief – fellow in front.’

It was quite a party; and as we drove back at midnight along a deserted road in the crisp moonlight the white line ahead of me weaved (or wove) around in my headlights. Very reprehensible.

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To Oxford as a Fresher, October 1945

Some weeks later I drove alone to Oxford from London, through the beech woods of the Chilterns, in beautiful Indian summer sunshine. I had to spend at least my first term living in college. Then my wife would join me if I could find somewhere for us to live that we could afford on a Further Education and Training grant from a grateful government. I was given a set of rooms on the ground floor adjoining the clock tower; beneath the clock were the only six baths in the college. I had a sitting room, and a tiny bedroom, and a scout, Mr Collett, to clean up for me and bring me buckets of coal for the fire. He would examine the cigarette butts in the ashtray in the morning:

‘You’ve ’ad women in ’ere.’

My close companions and neighbours were an Australian bomber pilot who was a Greek scholar and a New Zealand Coastal Command pilot who was reading forestry. We had been used to generous service rations, not to the sort of food civilians had had to survive on. Lunch in Keble hall on the first day was decorously served by the scouts: bread, water, and one half of a tomato each, thinly sliced on a dinner plate. We looked at each other and at the head scout incredulously.

‘Is that it?’

‘That’s all there is, sir.’

The college had our ration books. Action was imperative. Bread was not yet rationed. We went around the Oxford shops. I bought a Valor oil stove, a frying pan, and some kind of ersatz cooking oil, and we begged and bullied at a grocer’s until we came away with some dried milk powder and some dried egg powder. I used to produce horrible ‘scrambled eggs’ which we would eat voraciously in my rooms, mugs and plates around us on the floor. But we quickly discovered the British Restaurant at the beginning of the Woodstock Road, where you could get a meal of sorts each day for sixpence or a shilling. It was in an Edwardian church hall, rather cheerless but crowded; lots of the dons used it too. The one who sticks in my mind was a philosophy Fellow at Keble, Donald Mackinnon. He was a huge shaggy black-haired Scot who wore an even huger shapeless old army greatcoat from his Home Guard days, and usually had a sardonic but fairly benign smile on his face. We became good friends.

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Oxford characters of the 1940s

Donald was a legend for eccentricity. He was my moral tutor, to whom I had to go whenever I needed an exeat to visit my wife. I dashed into his rooms one Friday morning to find him in the middle of a tutorial. Two apparently terrified girls were crouching on his settee while he stood over them like a bear with his arms gangling, saying in his nasal, drawly voice:

‘Now, this tram that I’ve got in my hands – it’s an imaginary tram, you understand.’

He had the unnerving trick of jabbing at his eyeball with the point of a pencil while he listened to you. He married, while I was an undergraduate, a very attractive young lady from his native Aberdeen, who came down to Oxford to join him. We were invited to tea. There was no sign of Donald, though we had been warned that we might find him lying on the floor underneath the tea-table. We asked her impressions of Oxford:

‘I was told I would find Oxford full of eccentrics,’ she said, ‘but I’ve not met any so far.’

We were all speechless. One day Donald asked if I was going to listen to his broadcast talk that evening.

‘Yes, of course I will. Which programme?’

‘The Third, of course.’

‘Do all the Fellows broadcast on the Third? I notice the Warden is to give a talk soon.’

‘Good Lord, no! The Warden’s essentially a Home Service man.’

My English Literature tutor was the Dean I had been interviewed by in the summer, Leonard Rice-Oxley. He turned out to be quite useless as a tutor to us ex-service undergraduates; the only pupil who found any inspiration in him was a lad of 18 straight from school who talked like a 6th Form Literary Society debater. I had been away from school for nine years and needed something more. Most of the dons when I was at Oxford either hated teaching ex-service undergraduates or else greatly preferred it. Very few of them had been in the services themselves. We were far from being the young licentious soldiery let loose on Oxford in 1919; we all knew we had lost five or six years of our lives and had to catch up. We had little interest in Rice-Oxley’s tales of college derring-do, of Bumps Suppers when they had burnt a boat in the quad, in Freshers’ Blinds for which the Second and Third Year men bought the First Year all the beer they could drink.

Rice-Oxley had gone straight from Westminster School to Oxford in 1916 and, apart from a year spent in the army under canvas on Salisbury Plain in 1917-18 had spent the whole of his life since in his rooms in Keble. His only publications were an illustrated guide book to the Oxford colleges and an edition of excerpts from Fielding for a Clarendon Press series aimed at 5th-form schoolchildren. He would listen to me reading my pedestrian essay each week in his rooms and then tell me which author to write about for the next week. And so in three years we worked our way steadily through the centuries from 1300 to 1832. Literature in Oxford stopped at 1832, unless you were very daring and took a ‘Modern Literature’ paper which went up to 1900. I cannot remember a single illuminating comment he ever made to me, either on my essays or on an English author. By the end of our first term a rumour spread among us that none of his pupils had ever got better than Third Class honours. He asked my advice about getting married, and duly married, a very nice large dignified lady twice his size who shepherded him around the British Restaurant like a shunting engine with a truck. They bought a house in North Oxford and settled down to a quiet domestic life. We used to speculate sometimes about their passionate encounters.

But we were luckier elsewhere. I had the great good fortune to go to the lectures and seminars of, among others, J.R.R.Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and Neville Coghill. The first lecture I ever went to was Tolkien on Beowulf. It was in a room at the Taylorian Institution, right on St Giles. The room was packed. Convoys of heavy military traffic made their way constantly past the windows towards Carfax and Cowley. Tolkien had a quiet voice and way of speaking – he did not project himself at all. At the end of the lecture I went up to him, a brash young naval lieutenant still in uniform.

‘Do you realise that you can’t be heard at all more than four rows back?’

‘Oh well, if you keep coming there won’t be more than four rows in a couple of weeks.’

He was right, of course. That was my introduction to the academic, as opposed to the naval, way of solving problems: leave them alone and they’ll solve themselves. I had not realised that lectures which were crowded in the first week of the autumn term might be almost deserted by the end of it. But I went to Tolkien’s lectures on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the other poems in the British Museum MS Nero A x throughout my time at Oxford, and came to both respect and to like him for his scholarship and his genuine love of the literature and his ability to share his enthusiasms. He had already published The Hobbit but we knew nothing of his work on The Lord of the Rings. If he arrived late for a seminar he would sometimes say in a rather lugubrious voice:

‘Chained as I am to the kitchen sink, I have only been able to prepare a short passage this week...’

He presented a somewhat grey and gloomy picture of North Oxford life with his wife and his son Christopher (who was my contemporary as an undergraduate). I have no idea how well it corresponded with the facts, nor whether he became very rich when years later The Lord of the Rings (which my daughters loved but which I found quite unreadable) had such an enormous vogue. I have been told that he claimed he did not.

Tolkien was succeeded as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon by C.L.Wrenn from University College, London. He seemed a morose and quarrelsome man whose sight was so bad that he would hold a text close to his eyes and slightly to one side while he read and commented on it in his high-pitched voice, deriding the efforts of other scholars as he went along (he was doing an edition of Beowulf himself at the time). I felt that he was destroying the bridges between philology and literary appreciation which Tolkien had so happily constructed. I was told that Wrenn had been a very good teacher in London and certainly one of his pupils there, Randolph Quirk, went on to do great things in the writing of grammars and eventually, as Vice-Chancellor of London University, in the amalgamation of colleges and his own entry into the peerage. But that lay many years ahead.

I had come to Oxford seeing myself, on the strength of a few wartime poems, as a literary man, resenting naked philology and those who – like another very pedantic textual commentator, one Smithers – confined themselves to cruces. Smithers was dreariness personified. He was also very right-wing in his politics. Today I associate that with his having been a South African, but at the time I did not. We quarrelled fiercely at a party once when he was bemoaning the Labour Government and currency restrictions.

‘Before the war,’ he said, ‘anybody could go to the South of France without asking anyone’s permission. If you wanted to go you just went. None of this nonsense about rationing money.’

‘How free,’ I asked, ‘was an unemployed miner to just go to the South of France before the war?’

‘What on earth have unemployed miners got to do with it?’

Ironically, he finished up as a Professor at Durham University, in the heart of coal-mining country. Some young student even married him.

C.S.Lewis was lecturing on medieval and renaissance literature. He was already famous for The Allegory of Love, and his lectures were in the same mould – immensely scholarly, informative and insightful about the literary conventions, the formative cultures and the creative outcome of Latin, Italian, Spanish-Moorish-Semitic, French and English poetry and prose. I took pages of notes at each of his lectures, which were lucid and beautifully delivered, always to a large audience. They were in fact the matter of the Renaissance volume he later published in the Oxford History of English Literature series (English Literature in the 16th Century, excluding Drama, 1954). I could never in a lifetime have read all the sources for myself; half of them were in languages I could not read. He performed therefore one very necessary function of a university teacher: predigesting and regurgitating for the young who need to be fed before they can feed themselves. In his large black gown and dark suit and with his slightly corpulent figure he looked like a farmer at a fair, his face red with veins, a nose that might have owed a little to drink.

I only once saw him slightly taken aback. That revolt against wartime austerity and uniform skirts for women, The New Look, was about to burst upon us: full skirts almost sweeping to the ground, a pronounced waist and full bust. One of its first wearers in Oxford, an attractive young woman, waited until the lecture hall in the Examination Schools was full, and Lewis well into his opening paragraph, before she swept in with her little black commoner’s gown over her magnificent outfit, swept on right down to the front row where a friend was keeping her place, and took her a place. Lewis doffed his mortarboard very courteously to her before continuing. After his lecture, at midday, he and Tolkien would often adjourn together to the bar of the Eastgate Hotel on the corner of Merton Street and the High, for beer.

Oxford never managed to appoint Lewis to a Professorial Chair – a strange lapse. He eventually made his way to a Chair at Cambridge.

Lewis and Tolkien were members of a small literary clique which at one time included Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. I joined the English Club and we met them occasionally there, invited to give papers or to read their own work. Lewis, as I remember, was working on The Screwtape Letters; Dorothy Sayers was translating Dante. She would bring chunks to read, and to discuss the problems of translation. She was a large, somewhat masculine and somewhat hairy lady who seemed to like drinking a pint of beer with the men – a sort of Margaret Rutherford figure. She reminded me of one or two senior Wren officers I had known during the war; one in particular, the very top Wren I believe in Scapa Flow, who dared to challenge the authority of the Admiral Commanding the Home Fleet, Sir Bruce Fraser, when he invited his Wren driver on board his flagship. The girl demurred: she was not allowed to go on board without permission. The admiral tried to order her, Top Wren overruled him. War broke out around the anchorage, only to be concluded, I was told, by a dinner party on board to which both Top Wren and Wren driver were invited. In the Fleet Air Arm we always felt that Wrens could be delightful until they were commissioned, after which demons of snobbery and toffee-nosed attitudes got into them and they became impossible. It was an extremely sexist service, although in those days the words was unknown. Oxford, too, was a very sexist institution; boys’ public school mores were still very strong and I had to remonstrate once with a lad who behaved rudely to a young woman who strayed by mistake into our Junior Common Room at Keble.

Neville Coghill was lecturing on Piers Plowman in the dining room of his own college, Exeter. I came to think (and still do) that all students in all disciplines should be made to read this poem. Would to God the young chemist, Margaret Roberts, had dine so when she was at Oxford – and many an economist too of those who gave her such arrogant advice:

When all treasures are tried · Truth is the best. 

(Even a line or two of Chaucer might have helped her: For pite renneth sone in gentil herte.)

Later, Coghill lectured also on Chaucer. He read Old and Middle English verse beautifully, and I learned my own pronunciation from Tolkien and from him. Fourteen years later, I sent one of my own students, a Jamaican girl who had got a First in her B.A. at the University College of the West Indies, on a scholarship to Oxford. She told me afterwards that she had been interviewed by Coghill who asked her if she knew any Old English. Yes, she did. He passed her a copy of Beowulf – was she able to read it? She read it aloud to him, very well. Coghill was slightly taken aback.

‘And do you know what it means?’

She translated it for him. She was in. He was hearing his own voice, passed on through me, the transmission of an oral culture. She is now a Professor at one of the more prestigious women’s colleges in New England; no doubt the cultural transmission continues.

Coghill was much involved in amateur dramatics, with college dramatic societies and with the Playhouse theatre. He was a great influence on one of his pupils, Richard Burton, who years later took his wife Elizabeth Taylor down to Oxford to meet his old tutor. I became involved myself in a very modest way – partly through the rather pretentiously-named Experimental Theatre Club of which Kenneth Tynan became one of the more pretentious leading lights, and partly because I revived the Keble Plays.

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Some theatrical activities.

Before the war, I gathered, the Keble Plays had been a feature of college life, productions in the Lent Term each year being given in the college hall. They were given some additional polish by a former Keble man, Leslie Banks, who had become a successful and well-known actor. I had had some experience of amateur dramatics both at Christ’s Hospital and with the Old Blues’ Dramatic Society in London – in the 1930s we put on plays at epileptic hospitals and at Borstal institutions and for charity, and Basil Radford, who later became famous with Naunton Wayne in a film called The Lady Vanishes, would come along to the Christ’s Hospital Club in Great Tower Street, in the City of London, to some of our evening rehearsals and give us advice and help. Often I was confined to being assistant stage manager; occasionally I was given a very small part. And then at the end of the war I had played, in Arbroath, the juvenile lead in a production of Ian Hay’s Housemaster, opposite a very glamorous Wren officer called Olga. She had been a model a year or two before the war; I did not know that a revealing photograph of her as a model had appeared on the front cover of a men’s magazine a month or two previously. When we did the play on the naval air station the mere sight of her brought the house down with wolf whistles; we had a rather more restrained success when we did it again in aid of the Red Cross in the Toon House in Arbroath, with all the burghers and their ladies in the audience eating sweeties and reserving their applause until they were sure they were going to get a good evening’s entertainment for their half-crowns.

And so, seeking for further amusement as Stanley Holloway would have put it, in my first year at Oxford I started the Keble Dramatic Society, and we put on a modest production of James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan in the summer of 1946. That autumn we felt bolder, and embarked on a costume play for the following Lent term – Congreve’s Love for Love.

I wrote to Leslie Banks, asking if he could help us again. He replied very courteously that he felt too old to do much in that line, but recommending me to get in touch with a young actor whom he himself had helped in the Keble Plays before the war, Michael Goodliffe. I did so, and it was the start of a long friendship with Michael and his wife and, later, his children.

Michael had been taken prisoner at Dunkirk and had spent the war behind barbed wire. After the war he had married a very attractive Canadian girl. He came down to Oxford with her and stayed a night or two to help us with our rehearsals, and my wife and I fell for them both. He was desperately trying to start again in his acting career, which had just been getting going in repertory in Liverpool when the war had broken out and he was called up.  He was generous of his time and of his expertise, and both he and his wife were generous with their friendship.

The production of Love for Love, which I had so rashly undertaken, was rather pedestrian and undistinguished, but the faults were mostly mine; some of the cast at least had star potential. I no longer have a programme to remind me of all the details, but Valentine was played by John Russell Brown, today a distinguished Professor of Literature; and other male leads by Michael Croft, who went on to found and direct the National Youth Theatre; by Leo Price – A.Leoline Price QC – who has distinguished himself (and I imagine made a great deal of money) at the Bar; by Stuart Simmonds, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese, had worked on the Burma railway, and then capitalised on his consequent knowledge of Thai to become Professor of Thai at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London; by David Kerr who gave a great performance as Sir Sampson Legend; and by Geoffrey Bailey who became a headmaster in London. The women’s parts were mostly played by girls from St Anne’s. I’m afraid that I don’t remember their names but if any of them should happen to read this I greet them and thank them. It was not my fault that it snowed.

We had decided that Keble hall was just too vast and bleak and cold, and so I cajoled the Headmaster of St Edward’s School – Lawrence Olivier’s old school – down the Woodstock Road, to let us use his school hall for three nights in return for a small sum and free seats in the front row for his staff and friends; he thought the play was too risqué for the boys to see. I laid on coaches to ferry people from Keble lodge to the school and back again, the fare included in the price of the ticket. I had a huge banner painted to advertise the play hung down against the wall of the lodge, so that the joke went round Wadham Junior Common Room, just along Parks Road, that a new cinema had opened. In Wadham, any joke at Keble’s expense was a good joke.

Alas, it snowed heavily and the audiences were thin. I doubt if we had more than one coach load each night.

I had another affair with coaches when we found there was a production of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-on-Avon which my wife and I very much wanted to see but couldn’t afford to go to. Very daring, I bought 32 cheap seats and hired a coach and then sold around the college 30 combined coach-and-theatre seats for more than enough to cover the whole cost so that we went free. Had she been around to darken the horizon at the time, Margaret Roberts would have cheered my entrepreneurial activity. The outing was a great success, but I learned how difficult it is to ensure that 32 people are punctually in the same place; some are always going to be adrift.

My Fleet Air Arm friend, Dave Wormald, was finishing his degree in modern languages at Jesus. It was through him that I met another Jesus man, John Hale, who had spent the war in the merchant navy going back and forth to New Zealand as a radio officer. Now he was reading History and being a leading member of the Experimental Theatre Club. We used to put on very avant garde productions, in which everything was left to the imagination of the audience, in St Ebb’s church hall, which badly needed dusting. One of these plays, which John Hale produced, was Machiavelli’s The Servant. I needed a black shovel hat for my part, and couldn’t find one. On the day of the performance I was rushing out of Keble just as the Warden, a future Bishop of Oxford called Henry Carpenter, was coming in. I stopped dead in the gateway, and stopped him. He was wearing exactly the right kind of clerical hat. To his credit, he handed it over with scarcely a murmur, beyond urging me to take care of it; I ran off along Parks Road with it on my head and my black commoner’s gown as the only items of costume thought necessary to transform me into a stage Machiavellian villain.

John Hale was one of the most remarkably assiduous men I have ever met, and marked out for success. If he had a half-hour to spare, which I would have spent having a coffee, he would go to the Radcliffe Camera to work. He was concentrating on Italian Renaissance history; got a travel grant, learned Italian, and went off to Florence. He won the Newdigate Prize for a poem on the subject of Caesarion, leaving it so late that he had to climb in at midnight over the railings of the Sheldonian to post his entry. Of course, he got a First; he knew he would get a First; he has finished up covered with honours, a member of the Athenaeum with a knighthood having been Professor of Italian at London University, Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, presenter in person of his own excellent series on Italian Renaissance painting out-clarking Clark, and much else besides – the epitome of the great and the good. The moral of this tale – one moral, at least, which I never learned – was that if you take care of the half-hours the years will take care of themselves.

One other theatrical activity in Oxford which I observed with some rather detached amusement and some irritation was the Union. I am a life member, having paid my dues throughout my three years – I believe it makes me a life member of the Cambridge Union too. Its greatest benefit to me was the library, but I occasionally went to the debates, purely as a spectator. Those undergraduates with political ambitions tended to take the Union seriously and did their best to shine there, usually modelling their style on their more theatrical predecessors and on the House of Commons; frequently, it was clear, style was more important than content. Leo Price was for a time a leading light of the Union, and as I remember in the university’s Conservative Club too. I have a photograph of him striking an attitude at the Despatch Box. I was myself politically illiterate and unattached, although having a good deal of sympathy with what Attlee was trying to do as Prime Minister, and with the Beveridge Plan for the Four Freedoms. I suppose that I was by nature rather bolshie.

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Enchantments and disenchantments: ‘Reading English’

But I must return to more academic concerns, and to a meeting and a friendship which, once again, changed the direction of my life. There were three academic degree courses in ‘English’ at Oxford – I, II and III.  I had chosen III, which had the least philology and was the literary course, but nevertheless we had to take three philological papers out of nine and read Old English and Middle English and a very curious concoction known as A4. This required us to memorise more-or-less disconnected gobbets of information about set texts from 700 AD to 1830, supposedly illustrating the history of the English language. There was absolutely no theoretical framework, literary or linguistic or textual. (I did not in fact learn about a discipline known as literary criticism until I had left Oxford and met Cambridge graduates who had come under the influence of I.A.Richards and F.R.Leavis – but that is to anticipate). I had to have a ‘Language tutor’ and was farmed out by Rice-Oxley to a Polish lady in a basement flat in the Woodstock Road, Stefanyja Olsweska, married to a lecturer in English philology at Birmingham University, Alan S.C.Ross.

‘How much Old English do you want to do?’ she asked the five of us sharing a tutorial at our first meeting.

As little as possible, came the sturdy response from three of us, Stuart Simmonds, Gordon Ricketts and myself. Gordon was a former fighter pilot, married to an extremely pretty Waaf. The fourth man, Dave Butts, a former intelligence officer in the RAF, demurred. He was much nicer, more serious, more scholarly than the rest of us; he had started with C.L.Wrenn at University College London before the war. He thought he wanted to do a fair amount. The fifth man was a lad straight from school who could be enthusiastic about anything.

We could see that Stefanyja was a serious scholar because she had the thirteen volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary spread out over the floor; it was some weeks before we discovered they had been concealing coffee stains on the carpet. She turned out to be not only an excellent scholar and teacher but a good-humoured and witty companion who proved a very good friend to me.

With Stefanyja we began to read our way through the Anglo-Saxon set texts, which of course included that mighty epic Beowulf, memorising the translation. One of the monsters Beowulf killed was Grendel’s mother, a troll-like creature who lived in a cave under a waterfall. Rather unkindly we dubbed Stefanyja ‘Grendel’s mother’ because of her large and shapeless woollen garments and her untidy hair. (She had very beautiful violet eyes.) She had herself been a lecturer at Reading University before the war until her child Padmint was on the way, when she was rather unceremoniously and brusquely sacked. Her husband Alan Ross will loom larger in the next chapter; he had spent the war in secret intelligence work at Bletchley Park, decoding the Ultra-coded German signals. We learned from her about her son. His name also belonged, it seemed, to the world of Ultra.

‘Why ‘Padmint’?’ I asked her.

‘Ah, well now, you see, there’s a prize of five guineas for anybody who can work that out.’

I never won the prize. But as I became more and more frustrated reading my unshaped literary essays to Rice-Oxley each week without getting any feedback, so I became more and more immersed in Old and Middle English philology and enjoyed more and more my tutorials with Stefanyja.

Except for A4.  Here eventually Gordon Ricketts and I went on strike. We discovered that there was a degree course at Oxford called ‘Shortened Honours’ for which we had only to offer five papers instead of nine. It was designed for people like me, rather addle-pated returned warriors and, although it had been intended to be completed in two years instead of three, this was nowhere stipulated. And so eventually, to everyone’s scandalised surprise, Gordon and I decided to take Shortened Honours but to take three years over it. We jettisoned A4, to Stefanyja’s mixed amusement and chagrin. It seemed to us pointless to memorize what, if anything, was odd about dozens of textual gobbets from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton et al for comment in old examination papers in the hope that something similar would come up in our own exam. The decision to junk it meant that I could spend a great deal of my second year acting in and producing plays, a very good way to learn the texts to quote to the examiners in support of any specious critical point I might eventually try to make. I felt I needed to get Second Class Honours; I never thought I could hope to get a First. At that time I was convinced that there was a class of exceptionally brilliant people like