Age and Youth. By Sir Ernest Barker. (Oxford University Press.
21s.) SIR ERNEST BARKER confesses somewhere that he would gladly have joined a society "for the promotion of recklessness in conversation." Yet his book, which is presented as "conversation," not auto- biography, gives little indication that he would have been a very active member. With one or two glowing exceptions, when he cannot prevent his robust north-country humour from breaking through, his con- versation is on the level of talk at high table rather than gossip in the common room. He is careful not to tread on any corns (though he comes dangerously near in his suggestion, diffidently withdrawn, for a separate women's university), and his criticisms are cloaked by an urbane impar- tiality which is almost exasperating. Indeed, he evinces at times the austere caution which he attributes to Cambridge University, illustrated in his story of the only contri- bution once made to a discbssion by Pro- fessor Sidgwick: "I am pur . . . pursuing a train of thought which ev . .. eventually may lead to a possible objection." It is fair to add that Sir Ernest would apply his objection as much to his own opinions as those of any one else.
Yet few people are better qualified to comment on all aspects of university life and education—the theme of the first part of his book. He can recall the free-and-easy atmosphere of Oxford at the turn of the century (when even dons had no hesitation in skipping their tutorials if the ice were good for skating), the moral problems of a mixed London college (King's) in the Twenties, and the more cloistral Cambridge system in the Thirties.
He has foregathered with dons of an American college ("all boys together" is his irrepressible parenthesis) to cook and consume welsh rarebits, and after the war, though already a septuagenarian, he under- took the arduous task of serving as pro- fessor in war-devastated Cologne. And throughout, he draws his contrasts, especially revealing in the case of Oxford and Cam- bridge, with a broad-mindedness untinged by the parochialism of most University members.
It is typical of Sir Ernest's perennial vitality, despite his avowed pleasure in retirement, that he disposes of age before turning to the "father of the man." Here he sheds the mellowness later acquired and lays bare the rugged reality of economic struggle. His main remembrance of his early days as son of a north-country miner is of a constant, and generally losing, battle against poverty. At one vital stage his whole future career depended on whether or not his parents could borrow the money for his season ticket to attend Manchester Grammar School, to which he had gained a scholar- ship. Henceforward all was plain sailing; for the boy found in the studious environ- ment of the Grammar School a content- ment which a public boarding school, one suspects, would not have accorded him.
Sir Ernest describes his mind as half scholarly and half hard-headed with the hard-headedness of the north country. One fancies that, even today, some of our universities could do with a larger dose of the mixture.
EVE CROSLAND
Previous page
