Tradition, conversation, rebellion: my first year as an Oxford Fellow

I joined an Oxford College as a Fellow in Engineering in the mid-Sixties, coming straight from Paris. It was a male fortress. No women. I did it just in time to experience the unique and bizarre nature of Oxford college life. It was a different world. I knew it would be a place of anachronisms, and with all the upheavals of the 1960s, I knew these would not last for ever. 

The tradition I first witnessed was the solemn march of the Fellows to the High Table, led by the Principal. We moved up in order of our election to the Fellowship, that meant that I, the last one elected, had to be the last one in the line. For me this had two distinct advantages: it was an easy position to remember and as I’ve always struggled with punctuality it proved quite convenient. Then came Grace in Latin recited by the Bible Clerk. Although the pronunciation of the Latin words differed greatly from the Hungarian, I could understand partly because I studied the language of the Romans in Budapest for eight long years, plus  the words I didn’t know were not that hard to guess. Context is everything.

 After dinner, at dessert my duty as the Junior Fellow was to serve snuff to the other Fellows and their guests. This was not too onerous: I could willingly accept that tradition. Does it still exist? Alas, no. Snuffed out like so many others. Like the following old rule. Item 3 on the agenda at the second or third Governing Body meeting was a request by one of the Fellows for permission to get married. My reaction was a combination of grievous shock and mild amusement. I was very much looking forward to the discussion. What will be the arguments for and against it? Would matrimony be universally condemned? Will some Fellows praise celibacy? To my disappointment there was no discussion. Permission was granted without a debate. I took it as another indication of the decline of Oxford traditions. 

But there was one tradition that was still alive and occasionally kicking vigorously: the conversation at High Table. Of course, I knew of the tacit and general English rule: never talk about religion or politics. I could comply with that. Religion had little interest for me and I actually welcomed the absence of politics after the savage debates I had endured at the École Normale in Paris. Yet here there was another simple (and to me, incomprehensible) restraint. Never discuss your own subject. So what was conversation about? Food, wine, travel. I remember one story. One of the more senior Fellows liked to travel a lot and could vividly describe some small cities in France or Italy. On one occasion he told us that, on principle, when in Italy, he never relied on the local water supply. “For my teeth,” he concluded to general hilarity, “I use a light Moselle.”

I was not adverse to listening to travel stories, but my real interest was in what each Fellow did, I mean the subject he worked on, what he liked, what he disliked. I wanted to talk about Cicero with the Cicero specialist and about the Republic with the Plato specialist. I was politely rebuffed. But it was not all gloom. I had a good conversation with the Fellow in English history. He had a French name but not a French accent. I asked him how he acquired his name. He said his ancestors had arrived at these shores with the Huguenots under Charles II, and gave me an introduction to the wars of religion in France. He liked Henri IV. It was comforting to find another refugee. 

Unfortunately, on the whole, my quest to make Fellows talk about themselves was unsuccessful. Even worse, I was warned by the Seneca specialist: “Had you brought up these topics when I was a Junior Fellow in this College, you would have been sconced.” I guessed that being sconced must have been something dreadful. I quickly consulted my Concise Oxford Dictionary. I found only a noun, sconce, which meant a flat candlestick or alternatively an earthwork defending a ford. Neither meaning helped me much. Today, when the tradition of sconcing is dead as a doornail , anybody can find its meaning in Wikipedia. 

“Sconcing is a tradition at Oxford University of demanding that a person drink a tankard of ale or some other alcoholic beverage as a penalty for some breach of etiquette”

So had we had Wikipedia at the time, I would have been able to find out what was in store for me.

As it happened I made one final attempt to discover what made the Fellows tick. I asked the Camden Professor of Ancient History about Tacitus, a man he had written a fat tome about. He did not reply. He just looked through me.

I gave up. I kept mostly quiet and confined my discussions to the younger Fellows, below thirty (I regularly played chess with one of them; another taught me to play squash), and with the Professor of Comparative Slavonic Philology, who was always available. I soldiered on until a heatwave intervened. Trying to ignore the weather, we had lunch in the airless Common Room, hot, bothered and sweating. Luckily, we did not need to wear a gown for lunch, (although gowns for dinner were mandatory), but a suit and tie was enough to bring you to the brink of passing out. 

This was the time when I managed to make an indelible mark on College life. I acted, and the College followed my lead. I was a tie-breaker, not in the sense used in tennis, but rather belonging to the class of iconoclasts who are all in favour of breaking images. According to my next-door-neighbour, well versed in the language of the ancient Greeks, a breaker of ties could be described as a desmonoclast, an epithet I am happy to accept. 

So how did it all happen? On that particular day, I still vividly remember, I was working in my office in the Department of Engineering Science. I wore a pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. When lunchtime came I realised that this choice of garments would not be welcome at the Common Room. So I changed to a pair of respectable trousers, a long-sleeved shirt and a jacket. It was hot. I stopped half-way through tying my tie. Back to shorts and missing lunch? No, I was hungry, and my defiance grew with my increasing hunger. My heart was beating with stubborn rebellion. Yes, I shall go to lunch (it was about a three-minute ride by bicycle to the College). No, I shall not wear a tie! Then with one mighty, single move I discarded both my jacket and my half-tied tie.Around the end of my first year in College I met the man who first wrote to me in Paris, encouraging me to apply to Oxford. I lamented that I had not fitted in well. He tried to console me.

“I think you did very well. Better than I expected. You must have realised that you would be subject to a triple jeopardy: you had never had any previous contact with Oxbridge, your subject is the least academic one among all of them. And you are a foreigner at the heart of the British Establishment. Just carry on as you have done so far.”

I did carry on. How did I fare? That’s another story.