known as Fellows of Oriel College) took their meals with the provost (principal or president of the college) on a raised dais or platform at the head of the hall. They had much better fare than was served to the students, together with wines from a well-stocked cellar.
In his will, Cecil Rhodes—who was once upset while dining at Oriel to find there were holes in his table napkin—had left a princely sum to uphold the dignity and honour of the college’s head table. Dinner each evening began with the provost or one of the dons standing up and bowing to a student whose scholarship or bursary entailed his saying the lengthy Latin Oriel grace or blessing of the food. He would commence with an answering bow and then launch into it. I found that after a couple of weeks I had unconsciously memorized this sonorous-sounding invocation, and even today it resonates in its entirety the moment I recall the scene to mind. The grace was reportedly first recorded by St. John Chrysostom, an early patriarch of Constantinople who played a not insignificant role in this writer’s life, as we shall see. It can now be found in full, with a translation, under the Wikipedia entry for Oriel College on the Internet.
While it has changed and grown over the centuries, Oriel College is one of the oldest in the university, having been founded by Edward II in 1326. It will thus celebrate its seven hundredth anniversary in 2026, a short time from now. Because it was a royal foundation, Her Majesty The Queen is the official college Visitor and must pay a formal visit whenever her duties bring her to Oxford. There is a large portrait of the founder at the north end of the hall, over the head table, and one of Queen Elizabeth II at the south end. The hall itself is a stunning, light-filled, oak-panelled edifice with a soaring hammerbeam roof. When the tables are laid with the historic college silver, some of it dating back to the medieval period, and the place is packed with students—today both male and female, since women were finally admitted in 1985—it simply glows with warmth and vibrant energy. It wasn’t long before I felt very much at home.
At the same time, I must admit up front that being a student at Oxford and a member of Oriel was a truly humbling experience. People much wiser and cleverer than I have expressed the same feelings about this. You see yourself from a different perspective when you walk amidst the ghosts of all the great names from the past. Just to take Oriel alone: The key founders of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England—John Henry Cardinal Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble—were at one time Fellows of Oriel. Sir Walter Raleigh was a student (c.1585), as was Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1710–1713), the patron and friend of George Washington. Winston Churchill’s grandfather John Spencer-Churchill, seventh Duke of Marlborough, attended Oriel, as did Cecil Rhodes (1876–78), the poet Matthew Arnold (1845), two Nobel Prize laureates and numerous bishops, including two Archbishops of Canterbury. In short, the full list of notables who walked those cloistered halls is beyond impressive. But, thankfully, as well as being sometimes intimidating, the illustrious history of Oriel, and of Oxford itself, was a source of inspiration. It made you want to do your very best.
Readers who have enjoyed the British television crime series Inspector Morse will be interested to learn that the buildings and quadrangles of Oriel College were used as the location for “Ghost in the Machine,” under the name of Courtenay College, as well as the following episodes: “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn,” “The Infernal Serpent,” “Deadly Slumber,” “Twilight of the Gods” and “Death is Now My Neighbour.” The college was also used as the location for the actor Hugh Grant’s first major film in 1982, Privileged, as well as for Oxford Blues (1984), True Blue (1991) and The Dinosaur Hunter (2000). Other television series, a documentary (on Gilbert White) and the book Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes were also shot or set either in part or wholly at Oriel. When I first walked around Oxford in my early days there, I felt very much as though it were all one big movie set because of the rich and at times nostalgic aura surrounding everything, especially when the mist rose up from the Cherwell and Isis rivers in the evenings. Since then, the city has in fact become the movie set I thought it was in 1951.
At Oxford they talk not of studying a particular subject but of “reading” political science or economics or physics. I read Classics, or “Greats” as it was called, and so was not actually exposed to an English seminary. However, every college had its Anglican chapel and a learned chaplain. Oriel, one of the smallest and oldest of the colleges, was no exception. The circumstances of my meeting our chaplain, Dr. Roy Porter, for the first time were somewhat unusual. I had just arrived to take up residence the day before. My room was on the second floor, off staircase number one, in the main quadrangle. Immediately below me was the large, though similarly bare, suite of the Captain of Boats—head of the Oriel College Rowing Club. On this particular evening there was a club party in his rooms to celebrate the beginning of a new term. The din of the revellers was worsened when, as they drained each glass of beer, they tossed the glass through an open window to crash on the concrete pavement around the quadrangle of grass below. Coming from a conservative background, and being Canadian, I was surprised at both the obvious drunkenness and the wanton waste.
Then I heard a crash of tangled metal. I looked downstairs and saw a student with his dinner jacket askew, bow tie hanging by a thread, climbing the stairs carrying a bicycle over his shoulders. I watched open-mouthed as he staggered past me up to the third floor, paused for a moment before an open window, and then threw the bicycle out and down to the quad below. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, and he said with an inebriated grin: “My tutor told me that after the party he wanted to see the whole quad filled with bicycles!”
I decided to lodge a formal complaint and went in search of the Captain of Boats. Looking into the crowded room, my eyes focused on a small black-suited figure with a clerical collar: the college chaplain, a man renowned for his knowledge of the ancient Biblical languages and one of the most noted of the translators of the New English Bible. Porter was being held firmly in the grip of two very large oarsmen while a third wound bathroom tissue around him in wreaths from head to foot. A fourth student then mounted a chair holding a pitcher of beer and, reciting some kind of Latin mumbo-jumbo, poured the beer over the chaplain’s head in a mockery of baptism. The helpless cleric spotted me and cried out for rescue. Call it discretion or cowardice, but there were twenty “enthusiastic” young men in the room who were looking for trouble. I decided that anyone clever enough to decipher Hebrew ought to have known better than to be there in the first place, so I retreated and left him to their mercies. The next day I saw him enjoying himself at the head table with the other dons, so it seemed his little encounter had caused him no permanent damage.
With these antics and many more, I suffered a certain loss of innocence during those first few days in the city of mist and “dreaming spires.”
My footsteps reverberated through the deserted quad and the clock tower began to tremble as its inner workings prepared to sound the hour. Peter Brunt, my tutor in Greek and Roman history, had sent a terse note earlier in the day saying he was down with a cold, wouldn’t be able to meet with me for the usual full hour, but would I come along at eight p.m. for a brief chat about my studies? I adjusted my ridiculously short commoner’s gown as I reached the door of his apartment. As yet we hadn’t been introduced, although his rooms were on the front quad not far from my own. As I knocked, the eight strokes of the bell had begun their doleful litany.
The chiming ended before I could make out the distant, exceptionally nasal voice saying: “Come in, come in—the bloody door is open!” I entered timidly into what proved to be his study-cum-sitting-room. The air was rank with stale cigarette smoke. Books, papers and files were stacked on all sides. Apart from two tired, deep easy chairs in front of the standard electric fireplace, the only piece of furniture visible was a large oak table. There was so much clutter around and upon it, however, that it was very well disguised. The best thing about the room, as I subsequently discovered, was its splendid view of the college’s main quadrangle, with the entrance or clock tower on the west and the ancient hall or refectory on the east.
The door in one corner of the study was open and Professor Brunt, my don or tutor, could be seen propped up in bed, surrounded by more
