It rained all day. Three hours up to Oxford, three hours back in the dark. At the interment last November of Malcolm Oxley’s ashes in the Quad, I shared an umbrella with George Fenton. Except at school he was George Howe and was so cool. I didn’t mention this.
Malcolm taught history at St Edward’s from 1962 to 1999. Thirty-seven years. He was, by every account given that afternoon, a man of deep faith, inspiring teaching, selfless service. The tributes ran long. The praise was unqualified.
I ate three sandwich triangles and a very small square of cake.
Malcolm got me into Oxford. That’s not nothing. He and John Todd lit a fire for history that still burns. I acted in his Beggar’s Opera, joined his singing tours, absorbed a great deal about how to think. The debt is very real. But that afternoon I felt somehow outside the celebration of Malcolm’s life. A memorial service is not the place to raise alternative views. Everyone knows this. So I stood in the rain, and listened, and thought about Dick Bradley. Bradley became Warden of St Edward’s in the same term I arrived: Winter 1966. I was his last Senior Prefect. In March 1971, he was effectively forced to leave. At the end of the Spring Term. He couldn’t even finish the academic year.
Why? His marriage had failed, and he’d fallen in love with someone else. The Governors had, with great reluctance, ruled that a divorced headmaster could remain in post; they were clear that a remarried one could not. With Bradley determined to marry, he was left with no alternative but to go.
We raised £26 for his leaving present. I put in a fiver. A friend who’d recently left put in another. Even now I’m appalled.
Malcolm, from what I recall, did not regret Bradley’s departure.
I have thought about this often – and I recently reread the chapters Malcolm wrote in his history of the school about Bradley’s wardenship, published some forty years after the events. In them, and interrogating memories that are both imperfect and selective after more than fifty years, I think I understand a little better.
My feeling then was that Bradley had lost the respect of much of his Common Room. Malcolm was not alone in this. Was it disappointment in a Warden who seemed to have given up the struggle? Was it mischief – Malcolm undoubtedly enjoyed poking authority, even while being authority himself? Or was it simply that a man in trouble had become inconvenient, and his departure solved a problem? I don’t know. Perhaps all three. Memory is unreliable and motive is opaque, even to those who act. What I do know is that it was so much of its time. A divorced headmaster could stay; a remarried one could not. And so the institution, as all institutions always do, closed ranks.
Blair Worden was there in the rain that afternoon. He’d supervised my special subject – Commonwealth and Protectorate – at the end of my second year at Oxford. I confessed that I was the one who’d invented the story about Major-General Desborough falling off his horse. He roared with laughter. The young don he’d been fifty years ago hadn’t seen the funny side. Some transgressions soften with time. Others don’t.
Five visits to St Edward’s in fifty five years. Three of them memorial services. I was relieved, driving home in the rain, to shake the dust off my feet.
Malcolm gave me a great deal. I owe him. But gratitude and disquiet can sit side by side. They have to. And the disquiet, I’ve come to realise, is less about Malcolm than about Bradley: the abruptness of his leaving, the airbrushing out of his wardenship, the shame I know he and his family carried. That was the wound. Malcolm’s memorial simply surfaced it.
Warm lard has its uses. It soothes. It smooths.
What it cannot do is tell the whole truth.
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 