oxford – The Homebound Symphony

July 15, 2025

the original of Wimsey

Roy ridley 9fb1d2cb 5fce 4f9f 9af4 b930c69b7e6 resize 750. In 1935, when Dorothy L. Sayers was working wit her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne on the play Busman’s Honeymoon, she wrote from Oxford:

I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL. What is the use of anything? … Such waste — why couldn’t he have been an actor?

Though Sayers did not remember it, she had seen this man — whose name was Maurice Roy Ridley — many years before, and had swooned then also. In July 1913, at the end of her first year at Oxford, she reported to her friend Catherine Godfrey about what she saw at the Encaenia:

But the Newdigate [i.e., the winner of the Newdigate Prize] was a darling. His poem was on ‘Oxford’, and he recited it so nicely. He had a very clear, pleasant voice, and spoke as if he meant it. He read from the rostrum close to us, so we saw and heard splendidly. His poem was not frightfully full of genius, and was very academic in tone and form (though it was in blank verse) but there was an appealing sort of youthfulness and pathos and Oxford feeling about it that made it quite charming.… He was very nervous, and he quivered all over all the time he was reciting. Charis and I fell head over heels in love with him on the spot. His name is Maurice Roy Ridley – isn’t it a killing name, like the hero of a six-penny novelette? He has just gone down from Balliol, so I shall see him no more – my loves are always unsatisfactory, as you know….

Surprisingly, this passionate love was altogether forgotten 22 years later.

The news that he was “the perfect Peter Wimsey” reached Ridley, who subsequently acquired all of the Wimsey novels and placed them prominently on a shelf in his Balliol rooms. (Whether he read them is not known.) Vanity was certainly one of Ridley’s most prominent traits — one of his pupils reported that he had a bust of Dante on the mantel over his fireplace and would stand next to it, posing in such a way that the resemblance between him and the great Florentine poet was clear to all observers — and the Wimsey connection gave that vanity more fuel. For instance, he already had a monocle, and began wearing it more regularly.

But Ridley was not content with mere appearance. In 1936 a Balliol student named Pat Moss died in a fire, in peculiar circumstances, and when the police arrived they found Ridley hopping around the scene of death with a magnifying glass. They ordered him to depart. Whether he continued to investigate crimes, or potential crimes, I do not know.

But because Pat Moss was Canadian and naturally friendly with other Canadians at Oxford, one of them who had seen him earlier on the evening before his death — as it happens, a pupil of Ridley’s — was thoroughly questioned. His name? Robertson Davies. (I get this information from Judith Skelton Grant’s biography of Davies, from which I’ve also taken the photos below.) No arrests were ever made, and Moss’s death could have been accidental, but in later years Davies said he thought Moss had gotten involved with gamblers and had been killed by them.

Another of Ridley’s pupils of the era said that he was not a good tutor, but was a great influence, and certainly he would have encouraged Davies — already quite inclined to flamboyance — to make a name for himself at Oxford. This Davies did largely through his participation in OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he served as sometime dramaturg, sometime stage manager, and sometime actor.

Something else Davies learned from Ridley was the usefulness of a monocle:

And a brief P.S.: Many of you will know that Sayers had a son out of wedlock, had him raised by her cousin, and only later told him that she was his mother. When John Anthony, after serving in the military during the Second World War, decided to attend university in 1946, what university did he choose? Oxford. And what was his college? Balliol. And who was his tutor? Why, Roy Ridley, of course.

August 21, 2024

Mildred Pope

OU SMV 16-001.

That’s a portrait of Mildred Katherine Pope (1872-1956).

There are periods of history in which, for certain people, all the doors they would most want to pass through are closed, locked, and barred, and nothing can be done about that. Then there are periods when all those doors are wide open. But there are also the periods in between, when the doors are locked but can, just maybe, be unlocked; closed but capable of being opened by those who are bold and resourceful, patient and determined. Indeed, those specially gifted people are the ones who ensure that the doors will be open for those who come after them.

I’ve been reading about Mildred Pope — who was one such person, and to an exceptional degree — because she was Dorothy Sayers’s tutor at Oxford, and the model for the character of Miss Lydgate in Gaudy Night.

Miss Lydgate’s manner was exactly what it had always been. To the innocent and candid eyes of that great scholar, no moral problem seemed ever to present itself. Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity. As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life. It was as though a misdemeanor committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact. So many young people had passed through her hands, and she had found so much good in all of them; it was impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago. Unhappy, yes; misguided, yes; exposed to difficult and complicated temptations which Miss Lydgate herself had been mercifully spared, yes. If she heard of a theft, a divorce, even worse things, she would knit puzzled brows and think how utterly wretched the offenders must have been before they could do so dreadful a thing. Only once had Harriet ever heard her speak with unqualified disapproval of anyone she knew, and that was of a former pupil of her own who had written a popular book about Carlyle. “No research at all,” had been Miss Lydgate’s verdict, “and no effort at critical judgment. She has reproduced all the old gossip without troubling to verify anything. Slipshod, showy, and catchpenny. I am really ashamed of her.” And even then she had added: “But I believe, poor thing, she is very hard up.”

This is a wonderful tribute, but the back story, as it were, of Mildred Pope is a truly remarkable one. Her DNB entry is brief but eye-opening, and much of what I know comes from it.

She came up to Oxford to study at Somerville in 1891 and stayed for most of her life, first as a librarian, then as a tutor. But though her undergraduate experience had many high points — especially in her performances in field hockey and disputation: she was “renowned for her pace on the wing … and her level-headedness in debate” — her academic career was somewhat rockier, because there was not one scholar at Oxford who could instruct her in the subject she loved: Old French philology. Essentially, her education in the field which she would make her own was achieved through an extended exchange of letters with Paget Toynbee of Cambridge — whose intellectual roots were in Old French but who had become, by the time he knew Mildred Pope, England’s finest scholar of Dante.

Miss Pope (as her students later called her) seems to have been deterred by nothing, taking her First and then going on to study philology at Heidelberg before returning to Somerville. Later she was awarded some sabbatical time to pursue her doctorate at the University of Paris under the guidance of the legendary medievalist and philologist Gaston Paris. She received her doctorate in 1903, though Oxford did not see fit to award her a B.A. until 1920, when other female graduates were so acknowledged — she would receive hers alongside Sayers.

No matter. When she died the Times of London reported that the establishment and development of the teaching of medieval French at Oxford was almost wholly her doing. Further, “It would be fair to say that Pope effectively invented the discipline of Anglo-Norman studies.” Her recruitment of other dons to the cause of women’s suffrage in the 1910s was severely frowned upon by the university authorities; she was impervious to intimidation. Throughout the Great War she devoted her summers to intense and demanding relief work among refugees and displaced persons in France and Belgium. In 1928 she became the first woman to be appointed Reader at Oxford.

She was, a historian reported, “the most beloved of all Somerville’s tutors,” and when she left the College in 1934 — to accept a professorship at the University of Manchester — a Gaudy in her honor was held. Sayers was asked to offer a tribute, and she did, calling particular attention to Pope’s “integrity of judgement” and “humility in the face of facts.” Above all, Sayers said, Mildred Pope exemplified “the generosity of a great mind … that will not be contented with the second-hand or second-best.”

Here’s to the great Mildred Pope.

June 6, 2021

le mot juste

Bowra

Maurice Bowra was an Oxford don legendary for his social activities, his malicious wit, and his bullhorn voice. Once, in the 1930s, he met an elegant German who was visiting England to participate in a kind of charm offensive on behalf of the Nazi regime. (This was common in those days: Hitler had people working hard to gain the approval of Oxford and Cambridge dons.) At one point in the conversation, Bowra stood up and told the man, “I know what you are. You are a Nazi.” And then he added, “I look forward one day to using your skull as an inkpot.”

I am in awe of the ingenuity Bowra manifested that day, and will keep his lapidary phrase hidden away in my bosom in case I should require it. Someone writes a slashing review of one of my books? Dear X, I look forward one day to using your skull as an inkpot. Someone cuts me off on the interstate? I lean out the window: I look forward one day to using your skull as an inkpot. It’s absolutely perfect.