‘Most of you, I suppose, entered Oxford from
the railway station in the western suburbs, and a guidebook ought, therefore,
to begin with a description of the things you will see coming up Park End
Street, New Road, Queen Street and High Street.’ Thus begins A
Handy Guide to Oxford, published by O.U.P one hundred years ago this
summer – a centenary that should not, I think, go unremarked. From the start, the
author has a specific readership in mind:
But I gather
that you were usually so much occupied in abusing the uneven surface of these
streets, while you were being jolted to your Hospital, that you had little chance
of admiring the County Jail, the Assize Court or the Canal Wharf [….] But you
must not be too hard on the City of Oxford for your jolting; we cannot afford
to repair our roads in war-time, and most of the men who normally repair them
are gone to fight.
Here is a vade mecum
with a difference: ‘This little book,’ claimed its author, C.R.L.Fletcher, ‘was
specially written as a guide for the wounded, in June 1915, when I was attached
to the Third Southern General Hospital, as Tobacconist-in-Chief and Matron’s
head Fag. The profits of sale were given to the Fund for supplying Tobacco to
the wounded in that Hospital.’ He is not joking.
Fletcher was a don at Magdalen, and even today
his old college is ambivalent about their former Fellow: ‘His views were far
from progressive and are best described as imperialist, conservative and
strongly opposed to co-educational teaching – he refused to admit any women to
his lectures’. According to Magdalen’s website, Fletcher’s volume of Reminiscences ‘regarded West Indians as
lazy, sentiments mirrored in his A School
History of England (1911), written with Rudyard Kipling, which claimed that
all Spaniards were vindictive and all Irish ungrateful.’
Fletcher clearly wears his prejudices without apology, but he quickly warms to the task of describing and explaining the
University to men who would never normally have found themselves there. He is keen
to point out that Oxford, too, is playing its part in the war. Explaining the
function of the Examination Schools in the High Street – which had by then been
become the city’s main military hospital – he describes how, only a year
earlier,
In those rooms
in which the nurses give you such tender care, young men were writing for their
lives, six hours a day [….] Most of those young men are now either in the
trenches in Flanders, France or Turkey, or drilling recruits of the New Armies
preparatory to going; and many of them have already fallen asleep upon the Bed
of Honour.
‘Writing for their lives’ ... fighting for their lives; No Man’s Land … ‘the
Bed of Honour’ – such phrases perhaps suggest Fletcher’s difficulty, in 1915,
of finding language appropriate to the realities of war. Describing the colleges, however, he’s on
safer ground, happily mixing history and Common Room gossip, with occasional
architectural comments thrown in. Modern architecture provokes his wrath (for
Fletcher, modern means anything after Sir Christopher Wren): the Victorian architect
William
Butterfield is condemned as ‘the worst architect in English history’. Butterfield’s
Keble College (1871), he claims, is
‘the crowning triumph of his style – a style hardly equalled for ugliness even
in America.’
Not content with that sally, Fletcher has
another thrust at Butterfield a few pages later. Here, after extolling the
beauty of Merton, one of Oxford’s oldest colleges, he announces that
The prospect of
the whole college from the south is spoiled by only one thing, the very ugly
pile of new buildings erected on the site of the ‘Grove’ in 1864 by that same
Butterfield who filled up the cup of his iniquity seven years later by
perpetrating Keble College.
Poor Butterfield! But Fletcher’s
architectural eye could sometimes spot a good building even in unpromising
places:
In the depth of
the slums which surround the remnants of the Castle one occasionally meets fine
old houses mouldering to decay; one of the finest in Oxford is situated in
Paradise Square, in the heart of the populous and squalid parish of St Ebbe’s
….
The most unexpected, and (as it seems to
me) revealing page of the Handy Guide to
Oxford, is its preface, a pastiche of Pilgrim’s
Progress. Likening the wounded soldier arriving in Oxford to Bunyan’s Mr
Great-heart, and the Kaiser’s army to the evil Apollyon, Fletcher begins thus:
And I saw in my dream how Mr Greatheart came to Oxford
city, to be healed of the wounds he had gotten in the fight against Apollyon.
When he had lain a month there, tended by Christiana and Mercy and Faith and
the other sisters whose names are writ in the Book of Life, when, I say, his hurts
began to be on an healing, [sic] he made shift to go abroad betwixt his
crutches to view that city.
Now Bunyan’s Great-heart was ‘a strong man,
so he was not afraid of a lion’, but this latter-day namesake, venturing out of
the Examination Schools (renamed the 3rd Southern General Hospital)
and looking up and down the High, is at a loss to know one college from another,
until
… there met him presently a man with white hair who
spake very civilly to him thus, “Mr Greatheart, you have saved me and this my
city from Apollyon, and I shall reckon it an honour if you would take this one
small book that I have made for your sake.”
The white-haired man is of course Fletcher
himself, and the book he proffers – one of the quirkiest, yet also one of the
most telling, publications of 1915 – is his Handy
Guide to Oxford
… which
the other thankfully took and thrust in his bosom; for what with the manage of
his crutch he lacked an hand to hold it as he hobbled away. And the
white-haired man went upon his way and Mr Greatheart saw him no more.
Adrian Barlow
C.R.L. Fletcher, A Handy Guide to Oxford (Oxford: O.U.P. 1915; reprinted 1925). All
quotations above are from the 1925 edition. I am grateful to my friend Brian
Cairns for introducing me to this remarkable little book.
[Illustrations:
(i) The Examination Schools in the High Street, Oxford; requisitioned as the 3rd
Southern Counties Hospital during the First World War; (ii) Keble College,
Oxford, by William Butterfield, 1871.
