Paul Johnson

Dirty rotten scholars

Brilliance, bitterness and filth in the loftiest of ivory towers

issue 26 February 2011

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.

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