Imaginary Landscapes
Living the Unreal Life in Oxford
When I was a graduate student at Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we would occasionally get “Old Boys” (alumni) who were in town for a “gaudy” (reunion) drop by the Graduate Common Room at my college, Jesus. Often they were coming off a—shall we say?—generous lunch and would inform us urgently that these were “the best days of our lives”.
I remember thinking that was a depressing prospect when you were still in your twenties and with good luck had decades yet to live. Perhaps I was inoculated against that nostalgia later in life because after having spent four years at Oxford and exhausting my bank account in pursuit of a doctorate, I left with only a master’s degree.
But as I prepared to return for the first time in more than a quarter century—on this occasion because my brother-in-law, Gordon was being honoured by a symposium here—I couldn’t help but indulge myself a bit. I watched several seasons of the TV series Endeavour—a prequel to the better known Inspector Morse—set in Oxford. A preposterously large number of people are murdered in all of the Morse series in service of the plot. Of course, only half the enjoyment of the shows comes from the murders and the capture of the culprits: the other half is the endless shots of Oxford’s “glittering spires” and cobblestone streets.
The night before I left for the UK, poking around on the television for something to watch, I stumbled across HBO’s version of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which to my surprise is set in a dark future fantasy version of Oxford. You see the same familiar buildings with the occasional adjacent field adapted as a launch pad for weird aerial craft.
The experience of living and learning—or for that matter visiting—Oxford is to walk in the literal footsteps of real people of note. My college, Jesus, is dwarfed by grander colleges such as Christchurch, Magdalen, and St. John’s, but it boasts among its alumni Lawrence of Arabia, the British prime minister Harold Wilson and the author/historians Niall Ferguson and Yuval Harari, not to mention the occasional Nobel Prize winner you’ve never heard of.
But I think the slightly unreal feeling I had as a student at Oxford was not just that I was miscast among the great and the good (and not a small number of the truly evil) who had walked its halls. It was that Oxford is also a literary landscape and a movie set.
Thomas Hardy is believed to have written most of his novel Jude the Obscure in a pub called the Lamb and Flag on St. Giles. For centuries the pub was owned by St. John’s College, which apparently used the proceeds to fund doctoral students. It is part of the circle of life that some of the research grant I received when I was at Oxford was used to buy beer at the Lamb and Flag.
Across the street from the Lamb and Flag used to be another pub, the Eagle and Child, which sadly closed during the pandemic after nearly three-and-a-half centuries in operation. It was where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their little group “The Inklings” would meet to read out their works-in-progress such as the Narnia books and Lord of the Rings.
I am told that when you take the tour of Christchurch College nowadays, you are not just shown the staircase where Charles Dodgson had his rooms as a mathematics don; Dodgson wrote the Alice in Wonderland stories under the nom de plume Lewis Carroll. You are also informed that the dining hall is the one used for the Harry Potter films—digitally enhanced in post-production, of course.
A guide at the Duke Humphrey library told us how irate some “readers” (library users) were that filming for Harry Potter closed the reading room for three days. Apparently when the Morse series requires someone to be murdered there, they film at night when it is closed anyway.
One of the weirdest cinematic events when I was a student was the filming of Heaven’s Gate. The director, Michael Cimino, had just come off the wildly successful Vietnam war film, Deer Hunter, and was given an enormous budget for his subsequent film. The movie depicts fighting in Wyoming in the 1890s, and perhaps needless to say, Oxford plays no part in the plot. However, there is a prologue set at Harvard University, which apparently rejected Cimino’s extravagant demands to film there.
So Cimino set out to transform 20th century Oxford into 19th century Harvard. Dirt was spread on the streets to cover pavement and I remember cycling by a long line of exquisitely crafted replicas of American stage coaches alongside the Oxford University Parks, manned by actors dressed as Yankees, waiting for the call of “Action!”.
Many undergrads signed up as extras on the film and spent long idle days waiting for their moment, meanwhile gorging in the fabulous canteen which was by all accounts served much better food than what you’d get in the college hall. There was considerable discussion about a beautiful tree on the grounds of St. Peter’s College which was apparently not beautiful enough, and had supplementary branches bolted to its trunk.
Heaven’s Gate went four times over budget and was said at the time to have been the most expensive flop in history
My time in Oxford also coincided with the much more successful Alec Guinness TV rendition of John LeCarré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The signature shot at the beginning of each episode included part of the Radcliffe Camera—the reading room where I usually spent my time.
It seemed a little unfair to me that a program about betrayal in the British secret services would be illustrated with a shot of Oxford when the real-world traitors had, after all, been Cambridge men, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean.
But then something interesting happened. Near the end of my time at Oxford, a friend was appointed a junior research fellow at Lincoln College, whose alumni included none other than John Lecarré (real name: David Cornwell). Lincoln had a reputation as a recruiting centre for the British secret services and indeed its principal at the time had led either MI5 or MI6—I forget now which one.
My friend’s office overlooked the principal’s garden and one day he noticed that the principal was spending long hours sitting there with the principal secretary to Margaret Thatcher, who was then prime minister. They were reviewing papers and evidently engaged in deep discussion. We wondered why.
A few weeks later, Mrs. Thatcher rose in the House of Commons and announced that Anthony Blunt, curator of the Queen’s art collection, was a Soviet spy and the so-called “Fourth Man” in the ring with Philby, Burgess and MacLean. In the interests of transparency, it is important to say that Blunt was also a Cambridge man.
“It is important to say that Blunt was also a Cambridge man.”
The best line of journalism I have read in a long time.
Small world. Hard to imagine that Joll was parachuted into occupied Hungary to make contact with the local resistance. He described his spoken Hungarian as “limited.”