A whiff of sour grapeshot
OXFORD BEVIS HILLIER
The Oxford and Cambridge final examination results are now appearing almost daily in The Times. I scan them with the bitterness a man might feel who read in the 'Forthcoming Marriages' column that his girl-friend had got engaged to someone else. Five years ago, I failed to obtain any class in the Honours School of Modern History at Oxford. In a word—the graceful one used in the Franks Re- port—I had become 'wastage.' What had happened? I still find it hard to disentangle the real reasons from the heroic-mythical ones I adopted at the time.
There was always the consoling epigram of Dr Johnson (who also, though for other reasons, came down without a degree): 'A nightingale never won a prize in a poultry show.' Perhaps Proust could also be invoked:
. . lists which I used to murmur to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified in my brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.' This was my catechism of failure. Examinations were not for such as me. The syllabus was ponderous, unimaginative, strictly for conscientious drudges. Why should I lumber my mind with that incubus? I looked forward to writing a success-story autobiography: As I Ploughed, So Have I Reaped.
I still hold by some of this defence worked out in the first flush of failure, while making allowance for its petulance and conceit. Dur- ing the year before I took Schools, there had been much agitation by undergraduates for syllabus reform in the School of Modern History. Cherwell suggested that the quickest way to achieve this would be for its advocates to hand in blank papers in every subject. But martyrdom was not fashionable that summer. The chief advocates of syllabus reform were found to have taken firsts of the conventional 'glittering' kind. Some of them have since be- come dons, and are busy teaching the syllabus against which, at wine and cheese parties in North Oxford, they once caballed. As his- torians, perhaps they believe that the best way to change the establishment, short of bloody revolution, is to join it first. But too often what really happens is that those who run the gauntlet with fewest bruises eagerly join the gauntleteers. One recalls Tom in The Water Babies (written by one of Cambridge's more improbable Regius Professors of Modern His- tory), who, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, said he wanted to be a master sweep like Mr Grimes and have lots of appren- tices to beat. And since most people do not like to admit that anything in their lives has had a bad effect on them, the gauntlet itself is romanticised.
Here, as a perfect example of the glamouris- ing process, is Oxford's Regius Professor of Modern History, Hugh Trevor-Roper, survey- ing the scene of his early triumphs with the kind of warm human sympathy the Emperor Nero reserved for gladiators:
'What I chiefly enjoy about the examination is the comedie humaine. As all those horses parade before us in the paddock of the -Examination Schools, we recognise, with nice ;, satisfaction, the stables from which they have come. Here is the pure product of Winchester and New College, pat and smug in his assured place; here Balliol has wrestled with the arte- fact of Ampleforth; here the solidity of a natural second-class man has been undermined by the corrosive ingenuities of Wadham, or a simple third-class man has been unbalanced by the heady wine of St John's.'
(Sunday Times, 2 Aueust 1964.) Horses unbalanced by heady wine are no doubt a diverting enough sight; but there is another side to this Oxford circus, the acrobat who falls off the trapeze. It is difficult to view with 'nice satisfaction' the suicide in the Cowley Road, or the unfortunates who end up in the Warneford Psychiatric Hospital. In 1963, no fewer than seventy candidates took Schools from the hospital, and 'Where were you edu- cated?' Eton and Warneford' was literally the sick joke of the season.
But there was one history professor at Oxford who did not choose to play the super- cilious voyeur, and in fact led the movement for syllabus reform. In his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Modern History (2 November 1961), Professor R. W. Southern said that 'Nearly everything that we now do in the History School goes trek to the 1870s.' The School had been devised as a 'professedly undogmatic' alternative to 'the charges and counter-charges, the deprivations, degradations, and condemnations which theological dispute brought in its train.' To ensure that it would not be, in Freeman's sneer, 'an easy School for rich men,' a formidable bulk of constitutional history was made its basis, to the exclusion of other aspects of history—art, architecture, liturgy and worship—'subjects which have never found a secure academic home with us.'
After pointing 'out the deficiencies in the syllabus, Professor Southern went on to con- demn 'the dull despotism' of examination papers. 'I speak with feeling on this subject, for one of the saddest experiences of a tutor's life is reading these papers, and to examine them is slavery.' He suggested a remedy. It was that the undergraduate should be allowed to omit some large part of the traditional syllabus and submit, instead of some of the examination papers, a piece of work or perhaps several pieces of work, written at leisure during the three years of undergraduate life. No effect was given to this suggestion; but the syllabus was reduced. It was reduced by the abolition of the General Paper—the paper which gave most scope for the expression of original views rather than a more or less ingenious paraphrase of historical works. The folly of this move was realised, and the General Paper was reinstated in the year after I took Schools.
These strictures are not offered as explana- tion of, or apology for, my own debacle. Whether that was in main the result of sloth, `emotional disturbance,' an Aut Caesar, aut nihil philosophy, or sheer ineptitude, is scarcely a matter of high public concern. (My former headmaster's theory, advanced in a signed article in The Times, was that the glory of wearing a scholar's long gown gives an un- balancing sense of superiority. He recom- mended the abolition of open awards.) But there are two points to make. First, that there is a long-standing dissatisfaction, among both dons and undergraduates, with the Oxford History School; and, secondly, that nothing whatever is being done about it.
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