In a class of his own

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. As Fellow and then Warden of Wadham College from 1922 to 1970 and successively Professor of Poetry, Vice Chancellor of the University and President of the British Academy, this short, powerfully built, unbeautiful, but magnetic man for years gave the tone to the university. He was a brilliant wit and a challenging and imaginative college tutor. Late in his career, he fought an intelligent rearguard defence of the University’s independence. His biographer, Leslie Mitchell, well-known for his works on Whig history, has drawn on years of local Oxford knowledge and unpublished manuscript material for this penetrating portrait.

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In tune with the mood following the end of the Great War, Bowra, the son of a domineering employee of the Chinese government, encouraged his pupils to turn their backs on parental tyranny and Edwardian shibboleths, and seek out the beautiful and finer things of life; these he himself had discovered on the Somme, as a gunner officer, by reading poetry as an escape from a detestable situation. He rapidly acquired a circle who rejected conventional morality and filial piety in favour of intellectual freedom, friendship and aesthetic ideals — comparable with the spirit of Bloomsbury but actually incompatible — far too tough-minded and dissipated, and intellectually more light-hearted, with wit rated higher than truth in conversation.

Bowra’s protégés over the years included Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, John Sparrow, and Cecil Day Lewis. Isaiah Berlin thanked him for inspiring him with ‘what is a free, generous, life- and pleasure-loving, warm-hearted and intellectually anti-prig front.’ Bowra’s ideal was a Greek one — the happiness of the individual — the source of his own rebellious liberal views.