Oxford remembered
A. L. Rowse What a library of books has grown up about °xford—not only academic work but novels, autobiographies, poems. At the University a Claremont in California there is a whole recimful of them, a special collection. Now we have a delightful addition, an authentic ,aral touching portrait of the Oxford so ‘41PlY wounded by the Great War of 1914n18. Described as a 'period piece', it has not `bue sophistication of Gwen Raverat's Cam ridge classic of that title—she was a Darwal; but this is perhaps more human and certainly more poignant.*
Sir Basil Blackwell says of it, 'few indeed
w.
II the book down without a sense of
chastening by pity and fear": His admirahhle foreword reminds us that, if Sir Basil i ad not been otherwise engaged—in build„rig uP the finest bookshop in Britain, in Vblishing so many excellent books, and in Iseovering and producing so many young aUthors—he would have made a good rirer himself. He should give the public his R„a,tobiography, or at least a history of h°14ckvvell's, endearing place, of which he as, Feen for so long the genius loci. b maY Cannan, rather a good poet, was also N°4 I,_11 into the book-world of Oxford. Her i',1er was Secretary to the Delegates of the r'-'1irliversity Press, responsible for much of pre expansion—and the distinction—of the toess in his time. (They do not always go ___gether.) May was of good old Scots paren* a'rey Ghosts and Voices, by May Wedder°urn Cannan (The Roundwood Press, Kirieton, 0.50)
tage on both sides, Jacobite indeed, and there are wonderful descriptions of Highland holidays, rock-climbing, mountaineering, rather beyond my ken. (I have never been there.) But the main theme of the book is Oxford, where the Cannans lived in a tall Georgian house in the High opposite Magdalen, with its garden looking towards Christ Church Meadow, where 'we sat out and watched the moon coming up through the branches of the old apple tree. The garden smelt of wallflowers and lilacs, roses and stocks, and Magdalen spoke the hours with his soft old voice.'
It was the Oxford of Sir Walter Raleigh and D. G. Hogarth, young T. E. Lawrence, the Omans—Carola's play performed in the Library at All Souls—Sir William Anson appearing on the steps of the Warden's Lodgings with grave face on the approach of the war. For their world was doomed.
The country was really unprepared—to that it largely owed the holocaust of its best young men. This young woman, with more prescience than the country at large, had organised her own little hospital of sixty beds in a wing of Magdalen College School. The public spirit, the nobility of these upperclass amateur efforts, against the muddle and unpreparedness of the authorities, is unbelievable. But, then, people in general never believed the Germans would make their war. May Cannan is bitter, and rightly so, about the good, kind, liberal-minded folk who would not see the signs that were plain enough for anyone of sense to see. (Just like the 1930s all over again. No excuse.) May had received a warning even in the nursery. The Cannans had had a visit from a German professor; on leaving, the wife said to the children, 'When there is a war and you are all starving, my brother, because to me you have been kind, will bring you bread.' So like them ! In 1914, the Cannans were putting up Belgian refugees from the looting and partial devastation of Louvain.
The book is very revealing of the war years and the various kinds of war work May and her friends put in: deputising at the Press, spells of nursing in France and elsewhere. Oxford ,was full of wounded soldiers in their blue, the Examination Schools a big hospital. It is the Oxford that Santayana describes so poignantly.
May Cannan had her own personal tragedy. Her father was a lifelong Trinity friend of 'Q'—famous then, and ripe for revival as a writer. Q's son, Bevil QuillerCouch, was a splendid fellow; a sailing man, who had rescued folk in distress at sea off Fowey, he was a rowing personality at Oxford. He fought all through the war on the Western Front, in command of his battery, three times wounded.
I have always wanted to know more about him. But Q, the most sensitive of men, could never bear to speak of him after his death, any more than Kipling could after the death of Iris only son. Here is the story. Bevil was waiting through all the years of the war to marry May. 'The thought has helped me no end in carrying through these four years. But I made a vow that if my family had to suffer because I was out here, it was right that no more should.'
After the Armistice he and May had their paradisal five days in Paris. When he had gone, she went into Notre Dame, hitherto sandbagged up against the attentions of Big Bertha (May narrowly escaped one of her shells). 'The great cathedral was in darkness save for the high altar, on which lay the flags of France and England; but everywhere there were candles, and before every candle knelt a figure in black. I bought myself a candle and knelt with them.'
She would have need of consolation. Within a matter Qf months, after coming safely through all the fighting, with a magnificent record as a gunner-officer. Bevil was dead of pneumonia in Germany, all their happy plans as dust.
I never knew that Bevil Quiller-Couch, a natural leader of men, hoped to go into Parliament, a Liberal of the left—one of the lost leaders so sorely missed in the 1930s. There are many glimpses of Q himself here, at the height of his popularity, at Cambridge and elsewhere, in those post-war years, with the wide influence for good his books had then. Every glimpse of him shows him as he was, generous in every way, encouraging to .
the young, considerate and kind, publicspirited to a fault, a noble soul. And, of course, a far finer writer than those, so much inferior, who would depreciate him. He is now due, overdue, for a revival; but will he egt it, in these days with things as they are?
Previous page
