When Oxford life resembled a great satirical novel

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend Harold Acton, immortalised as Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, once bumped into the wife of John Beazley, a lecturer in ancient Greek pottery, while she was exercising their pet goose in Christ Church’s Tom Quad. Hopping over the bird, Acton intuitively doffed his hat. Here, Marie Beazley declared, was ‘a true gentleman’. Mrs Beazley was famous in academic circles for her unpredictable remarks. Over dinner with undergraduates she once announced: ‘My husband can make sparks fly from my loins.’ Her daughter married the poet Louis MacNeice, who made his own pithy observation of the dons of Oxford as ‘scraggy-necked baldheads in gown and hood looking like marabou storks, giant turtles reaching for a glass of port with infinitely weary flippers’.

If Oxford University has long had a reputation for treating the wives of its dons badly it is hardly surprising, when one considers that it was illegal for dons to marry until 1877. After that, the dons and their families moved to the sprawling houses of north Oxford and Boars Hill. Wives had a new power (the department store Ellistons on Magdalen Street had a private entrance solely for the wives of dons and heads of houses) and they exerted it at the dinner table. None more eccentrically than Lady Mary Howard (of Castle Howard fame), who in 1899 married the Australian scholar Gilbert Murray, the future Regius Professor of Greek.

Daisy Dunn’s Not Far From Brideshead is described as a classicist’s portrait of Oxford University between the wars. It focuses on three scholars: Murray, Maurice Bowra and E.R. Dodds. Such was Murray’s cleanliness of body and mind that Virginia Woolf supposed ‘a great nurse must rub him smooth with pumice stone every morning’. He and Lady Mary, ‘one of Oxford’s fabulous monsters’, were vegetarians, abstained from alcohol and gathered an eclectic group around their luncheon table at their house on Boars Hill, including undergraduates, politicians, a token foreigner and their loyal gardener Edginton.