‘Oxford in the Twenties: recollections of five friends’ by Christopher Hollis

Originally published fifty years ago in June 1976, this is part memoir and part history. Christopher Hollis (1902 – 1977) studied at Balliol College, Oxford in the early 1920s where he was a prominent and well-connected undergraduate. He became President of the Union debating society, but his subsequent career was much less distinguished than had been widely anticipated at that time. He was a backbench member of parliament for a time, but for most of his life lived quietly teaching and writing. This was his last book.

The subtitle ‘recollections of five friends’ really describes what this book is about. It is not intended in any systematic way to discuss the ways in which life at Oxford evolved in the 1920s, instead very much focusing on five friendships that lasted for decades with people who Christopher Hollis first met at Oxford. Two brief chapters bookend these portraits, one discussing the history of the university before the 1920s, the latter its development afterwards. These are of some interest, but it is the five central chapters which, for me, made this a really engaging and enjoyable read. This is because four of the five contemporaries whose lives he discusses – Maurice Bowra, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton – are all men who I have an interest in. All were highly original characters in whose company it is always a pleasure to spend some time. The fifth, R.C Robertson-Glasgow was a cricketer who I had not heard of before reading this book and who frankly remains rather less interesting in comparison to the others.

I read Leslie Mitchell’s wonderful biography of Maurice Bowra a few years ago and so was already very familiar with him and his influence on several generations of brilliant Oxford luminaries in the inter-war period. But it was a pure pleasure to be reacquainted here, particularly with his absolutely uncompromising defence of liberalism as a creed, as here in the context of the Spanish Civil war:

I argued that, though perhaps there was freer talk on the so-called Loyalist side, they talked a good deal of nonsense. ‘That does not matter – does not matter in the least’, he said emphasising the words ‘in the least’. ‘We all talk balls, but what matters is that we should be allowed to talk them.’ And that was indeed the ruth. His interest was in liberty – in people not being beaten up – and in those who thought they had appoint of view being allowed to express it.

He carried his liberal principles through to discussions about religion too:

Of the rival Christian claimants the Protestants were more to be condemned for their hostility to drink, the Catholics for their hostility to sex.

There is apparently a good, full biography available (if you look hard enough for it) of Leslie Hore-Belisha too, by Ian Grimwood, but this is not one I have yet read. Having enjoyed Christopher Hollis’s chapter on him, I am keener than ever to do so. Hore-Belisha was a liberal politician who, like Christopher Hollis, excelled in debate at the Oxford Union in the early 1920s during a period in which most undergraduates affected a distaste for politics.

Hore-Belisha sailed close to the wind in debating as an undergraduate, saying things that were controversial in their time but which made people laugh and garnered him the support he needed to get elected to senior positions in the Union. I guess this instance must have involved a staged heckle, but it was nonetheless effective:

Belisha had used in his speech the phrase Homo Sapiens. A facetious member on the bench opposite shouted ‘translate’. ‘Homo Sapiens’, said Belisha, ‘clever bugger’. But surely one had to be very strait-laced to take exception to such repartee.

The anti-politics mood was to change with the General Strike in 1926, the crash of 1929, the subsequent depression and the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, after which during the 1930s Oxford became a deeply politicised place. By that time Leslie Hore-Belisha was in Parliament and making his way up the ministerial ladder. He is now chiefly remembered in Britain now for the time he spent as transport minister working on road safety in the 1930s. The orange globes that adorn posts at the side of zebra crossings are still called Belisha beacons. He went on to become Minister of War during the run up to the Second World War when he perhaps allowed his experiences of fighting in the First World War to colour his view of the competence of the military top brass. He quarrelled with them and was dismissed. Later in life he spent a lot of time living in monasteries, dying in his early sixties in 1957.

Evelyn Waugh, according to Christopher Hollis with whom he enjoyed a lifelong friendship after graduating, was not in any way perceived by his undergraduate contemporaries as the one of their number who would be most successful, and indeed whose name would be used as shorthand to describe their generation. But they were all destined to be labelled members of the ‘Waugh Generation’, just as their successors in the 1930s became ‘the Auden Generation’. He was a late developer.

It is very difficult to portray Evelyn Waugh as anything other than a pretty unpleasant man who also wrote sublime and brilliant novels, and Christopher Hollis makes no attempt here to try. He writes about his use of ‘models’ for the characters in his books that often involved two real personalities being merged to create a single fictional one. There is also a lot here about his drinking when at Oxford and some homosexual experiences too.

Surely some of his curmudgeonly personality was put on to shock and entertain? I have still never been wholly clear about this, and the suggestion here is that he was genuinely a very difficult, irritable man with deeply conservative and Catholic views, who suffered fools very badly indeed and seems to have enjoyed offending people:

Evelyn frankly enjoyed violence and conflict. Later in the 1930s he had no sort of sympathy with Sir Oswald Mosely and his Fascists, and still less with Mosley’s Communist opponents, but when I once said that I hoped that conflicts between them would not come to civil war and bloodshed he took issue with me. ‘You must want bloodshed,’ he said, ‘life is intolerable without it’.

Fake or real? Hollis suggests real. His diaries were published posthumously and were absolutely never intended to be so. They were written for himself alone, and thus give an authentic portrait. He was unpleasant, but could also be a very loyal friend and superb company.

I will finish with my favourite Waugh quote as explained in the context of his personality by Christpher Hollis. It sums him up nicely I think:

In later life he refused to vote and in an often quoted mot said: ‘I would consider it an impertinence to advise my sovereign on whom she should select for the government of her country’. This was too frequently quoted as an expression of serious opinion. Of course, it was obviously only said in order to rile his critics. Yet it did express his serious expression of ‘God’s scorn for all men governing’, and also for all men governed.