The don who embodies Oxford

Sir John Betjeman gripped the sword and, with great gusto, sliced through the marzipan towers of Battersea power station. The party, nearly 30 years ago, was for the launch of ‘Temples of Power’, Glyn Boyd Harte’s delicious compendium of unusual industrial paintings.

Such memorable occasions are not so unusual in the life of Jeremy Catto. He is the quintessential Oxford don — his portrait by Boyd Harte shows him in black tie and plimsolls, with his left foot shooting out of the frame. I can’t detect Jeremy anywhere in his friend Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, but if one were to devour C.P. Snow, Goodbye Mr Chips and Porterhouse Blue, there is a smattering of Catto in each.

This month the cruel dictates of age will force him to retire from Oriel College. Oxford undergraduates, past and present, want to storm the Bodleian to prevent it.

With university lecturers having so recently threatened to strike (‘Not so much red brick as breeze block’, some might say) and with even Oxbridge becoming more uniform and systematised, the example of Jeremy Catto is a powerful antidote to the modern transformation of our universities.