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Yesterday was Wednesday of 9th Week of Trinity Term when the University of Oxford traditionally celebrates its 'Festival of dedication' and awards honorary degrees to the great and the good. All participants are first invited to Lord Crewe's Benefaction - peaches, strawberries and champagne. They certainly looked very merry as they made their way towards the Sheldonian for the ceremony. The man with the page boy is Chris Patten, (Lord Patten of Barnes) Chancellor of Oxford University and last Governor of Hong Kong (and one time head of the BBC), the woman with the highly decorated gown behind him is Louise Richardson, first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and expert on global terrorism. The very happy man in the red and cream gown is Yo Yo Ma, world famous Chinese-America celllist and one of this year's 'honorands'. The verger and the bedels lead the procession (final photo). For more information about Encaenia, go to the University's website at: http://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/The-University-Year/Encaenia     I attended a private view of the Jeff Koons Exhibition at the Ashmolean last Friday. After coffee and croissants, Xa Sturgis, the museum's director, told us the story of how the Exhibition came to be: An Oxford University student society named after Edgar Wind, first Professor of Art at Oxford (see https://edgarwindsociety.co.uk/) decided to inaugurate a prize and present it to Jeff Koons. Koons was evidently thrilled and flew straight over from the States to receive his prize. He was slightly surprised to be greeted by 35 students in the basement of the Ashmolean, but was sufficiently impressed by the museum to subsequently agree to work with them to stage this exhibition. If you like steel representations of balloon animals and blue meditation balls in unusual settings, then this is definitely the exhibition for you.     This is one of the last college barges still in existence. Many date from the 19th century. Members of colleges would use the barges as changing rooms and common rooms and watch the Torpids and Summer Eights rowing races on the Isis (the local name for the Thames) from these barges. One of them was sold in 2014 - asking price £150,000. This one is hidden near Donnington Bridge.
 This is a Harris Hawk, regularly employed by some of the Oxford University colleges (and Oxford Castle) to discourage nesting pigeons. He comes out once a week and his job is to fly around looking hawkish....
No, not Xmas or Hanukah, but……….. ‘Interview Time’. Just as they come to the end of an exhausting term, which began with the induction of the ‘freshers’ in October, the academic staff of the colleges of the University of Oxford are gearing up again to choose next year’s intake. No ‘eight week term’ for them, nor for all the college and university staff - the administrators, who organise this mammoth logistical undertaking, the porters, the catering teams and the scouts who have to clean the rooms.
Just to put it into perspective, last year the colleges of the University of Oxford received over 20,000 applications. All of these applicants needed top scores (or predicted scores) in their A’level or equivalent exams just to attempt the selection process. Next, in most cases, they needed to do a written test, taking the form of an aptitude test for those subjects which they had never studied before. Such is the University’s eagerness to leave no stone unturned and no prospective Einstein undiscovered, that 10,000 of these applicants were invited to come and stay at a college and be interviewed. Moreover, they weren’t just interviewed once, but twice (at different colleges) and, in some cases, three times. And all for just 3,200 undergraduate places! The legendary Oxford Interview is really designed to give the applicant a taste of the Oxford Tutorial, the traditional hour a week which most Oxford students spend in close conversation with their Tutor. Once at the University, they have to come to tutorials equipped with an essay or problem sheet that they have spent the previous week researching and writing. For the interview, no essay, but a daunting leap into the unknown when they can be asked anything related to the subject they want to study. To make the process a little less terrifying and to find out more about Interviews at Oxford, go to the University of Oxford’s website at https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-oxford/interviews?wssl=1 . This will give you a real taste of what to expect as an interviewee. It also gives some interesting insights into what the Tutors are looking for and contains some advice from former (successful) interviewees.  Anyone who has rowed in the University Bumps races on the Isis will know that each race starts at Iffley Lock, beside a bronze cast of a Bull’s head with a ring in its nose. This ‘Starting Ring’ was presented by Lord Desborough in 1924. William Henry Grenfell, the first and last Lord Desborough, was one of the University of Oxford’s finest sportsmen. Six feet five inches tall, he was a man of extraordinary, restless energy who relished a challenge. In fact everything about the man and his life seems to have been on a grand scale and the sheer number and variety of his physical achievements is quite amazing: a Balliol man who captained the Oxford University Boat Club and rowed twice in the Boat Race, he apparently stroked an eight across the English Channel in 4 hours 22 minutes, twice swam across the rapids at the base of the Niagara Falls and climbed four Swiss mountains including the Matterhorn in eight days. He was also a wrestler, tennis player, three-time Amateur Punting Champion of the Upper Thames and in 1906, at the age of 50, won an Athens Olympics silver medal for fencing. His working life in politics as a Liberal MP was similarly varied and at one point he was rumoured to be serving on 115 committees simultaneously! However, his crowning achievement was surely to bring the Olympic Games to London. For Lord Desborough was a visionary and when he became the first President of the British Olympic Association at its creation in 1905, he worked tirelessly to promote and encourage excellence in sport. Never one to miss an opportunity, and noting the likely effect of the recent eruption of Vesuvius on the ability of the Italians to host the 1908 Olympics, he came to the rescue and persuaded his friend Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, that England was ready and willing. The 1908 Games were thus organised in a mere eighteen months and Lord Desborough apparently gave a superlative total of 139 speeches at luncheons and functions to promote them. In fact he raised so much money that the public had to be asked not to send any more! Fittingly, he had the honour of firing the starting gun for the first ever marathon over 26 miles, with the finishing line at the feet of King Edward VII. Following the success of the London Olympics, Lord Desborough wrote in 1910, 'In the Games in London were assembled some two thousand young men…representative of the generation into whose hands the destinies of most of the nations of the world are passing at this moment…and we hope that their meeting…may have a beneficial effect hereafter on the cause of international peace.' Tragically for the nation and for Baron Desborough of Taplow himself, international peace was not to be, at least in the short term, and he lost two of his three sons to the First World War with his third and youngest son dying in a car accident in 1926. Despite the Times mistakenly publishing his obituary in 1920, occasioning a memorable Pathé newsreel title "Lord Desborough - erroneously reported dead a few days ago - unveils War Memorial", Lord Desborough lived until 1945 and died at the age of 90. His dedication to sport and to Oxford never waned and despite the desperate sadness of his family story, he continued to be active in sport, becoming president of the Amateur Athletic Association (also, incidentally, founded in Oxford - in the bar of the Randolph Hotel) from 1930 to 1936. His 1913 book Fifty Years of Sport at Oxford, Cambridge and the Great Public Schools is now a collector’s item, but his vision for the future of sport in this country is alive and well and the inspiration for the most recent London Olympic Games. Having discovered Lord Desborough, purely by reading the inscription on the starting ring at Iffley Lock and investigating further, I recently discovered his wife, who seems to have been entirely as extraordinary, gifted, energetic and life-enhancing as her husband. Richard Davenport-Hines has written a lovely biography of this great lady, 'whose whole existence seemed a cry for life but was dogged by death' and which also stands as a memorial to her sons, of which The Balliol War Memorial Book apparently says ‘Both were intensely alive: both were the joy of their friends’. The book is called Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough.  |
AuthorI am fascinated by the history of Oxford and am constantly learning new things. I'd like to share some of them with you. (For some of my published articles, go to about.) 
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