Dirty rotten scholars

Who was the dirtiest don in history? There must be many claimants for this title, especially in the 17th century, when all dons (except heads of houses) were bachelors. The diaries of Anthony à Wood bear witness. Actually my candidate for the title lived until 1940, and had a wife, too, though she was instrumental in his filth-accumulation. I know a bit about foul dons, having been up at Oxford over 60 years ago, when bathrooms were rare. I was tutored, happily briefly, by an ancient monster from outside my college, whose fingernails were an archaeological site and whose neck exhibited what Morland nannies used to call ‘tidemarks’. He once walked to the room in New Buildings where he taught me across the long grass of Magdalen deer park. It had been raining and he arrived with his flannel bags wet to the knees. Whereupon, ‘to avoid double-pneumonia and trench foot, to which I am prone’, he took them off and held them up, steaming, in front of the one-bar electric fire, thus giving me a glimpse of his ancient long johns.

Of course Cambridge could beat this kind of thing easily. As Hugh Trevor-Roper used to say, though the provision of hot water in Oxford might be exiguous, it was torrential compared with Peterhouse. It is all different now, to be sure, though grime was slower to relax its grip on Cambridge. And naturally the dirtiest don on record was a Cambridge man. What is more remarkable is that he was master, for 22 years, of the country’s most palatial college, Trinity, occupying lodgings which a duke might find honourable. Sir Joseph Thomson (1856-1940) came from Manchester, as I do, and his father, a publisher-bookseller, was by no means poor. Thomson was a prodigy and got into Owens College at the age of 14.