OX-CAM BLOG: Passed 90K Pageviews, Oct. 2015

In October the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race Dinner Blog passed 90,000 page views since it was created in 2011. 

Thank you for reading.

If you want to communicate to or through this site, please send email(s).   

The following are the most-read posts in October:

Why Didn't Hitler Bomb Oxford? (Updated Oct. 24, 2... Jun 8, 2013

"What's Your Blazon?" in latest "Oxford Today", Mi... Oct 15, 2015

Coats of Arms vs. Crests Oct 23, 2015

Rowing Blazers - Ralph Lauren's Launch of Carlson'... Sep 24, 2014

Douglas, Moray and de Vere (Oxford) Coats of Arms ... Nov 23, 2014

Oct. 21 - Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge Oct 21, 2015

Windsor Herald Speaks in New York City Oct 20, 2015

October 18 - Oxonian Families Buy Mason-Dixon Line... Oct 18, 2015

Oxford College Clues to the Stars and Stripes Nov 21, 2014

October 15 - Happy 2085th Birthday, Virgil Oct 15, 2015

Oct. 28 - Birthday of Evelyn Waugh

Oct. 28, 2015

BIRTHDAY: Oct. 28–Evelyn Waugh (Updated Feb. 18, 2017)

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

This day in 1903 was born Evelyn Waugh in London, England. A latter-day Oscar Wilde, he was a witty novel-writer who shone between the two world wars.

His was the son of Arthur Waugh, director of a publisher with the rights to Charles Dickens' novels, for which Waugh did not care. Both Evelyn and his elder brother Alec became well-known novelists.

Evelyn wrote his first fiction at 7, called 'The Curse of the Horse Race," of which he was proud. He  told a Paris Review interviewer: "It was vivid and full of action." His poem "The World to Come" was written in the meter of Hiawatha.

Waugh was close to his mother Catherine but envied the bond between his father and older brother. Due to a homosexual scandal involving his brother at the Sherborne School, Waugh was required to attend a less-prestigious religious institution called Lancing. Nonetheless Waugh earned a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, which he loved. He rode a bicycle and smoked a pipe and "drank for Hertford" while constantly thinking of clever things to say or write. He neglected his academics trying to be an artist and writer.

Of his contemporary Graham Greene, who suffered from depression while at Oxford and kept to himself, Waugh reported that Greene

looked down on us (and perhaps all undergraduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry.

A Balliol man, Greene graduated in 1925 with average honors in history. Waugh left Oxford without a degree.

After going down, Waugh took a series of low-paying teaching jobs while trying to be an artist. A friend, Anthony Powell, an editor at Duckworth, got Waugh a commission to write a biography of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. However, Waugh was displeased with his book. Still in debt, Waugh attempted suicide by drowning himself, but was stung by a jellyfish so he ran back out.

Pulling himself together, Waugh then wrote his famed first novel Decline and Fall (1928), about a schoolteacher named Paul Pennyfeather whose name betrays a lightweight character. Pennyfeather is sent down from Oxford for running across campus pantless. Then the only job he can find is at a school where other teachers are pedophiles or noisy drunks or both. About to marry the mother of one of his students, he finds that her income comes from South American brothels.

Waugh had a series of military appointments, travels and an unhappy marriage, all of which he used as material for his writing. Besides novels, he wrote travelogs and short stories. In 1930, Waugh covered Haile Selassie I's coronation as Ethiopia's emperor, calling it "an elaborate propaganda effort" to cover up the emperor's brutality.

Waugh based some later novels on his World War II service. His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was semi-autobiographical. It became a famed 12-hour PBS television series (1982) and then a well-regarded two-hour movie. Here is a greatly abbreviated description from Amazon:

Brideshead Revisited: Directed by Julian Jarrold, adapted by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock. Evelyn Waugh's 1945 text follows artist-turned-soldier Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) as he enters Oxford and meets Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), black sheep of the Catholic Marchmains. Ryder falls for Flyte's sister, Julia (Hayley Attwell), though indomitable Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) disapproves of his atheism. Sebastian wants Charles and his drinking accelerates when Ryder shows preference for Julia. Goode is as deft as Jeremy Irons in the TV series, but in both cases the shows lose steam when focus shifts from Sebastian to Julia.

Waugh died in Somerset, England, in 1966.

HERALDRY: Coat of Arms vs. Crest

All of the above add up to an "Achievement"
 of the owner's coat of arms.

Ian Senior (Trinity 1958) sends out an independent Trinity College alumni newsletter from time to time. It supplements the good work of the College's alumni relations and development team.

In Senior's previous issue he kindly mentioned my article on the Coats of Arms of the Oxford Colleges. In his article, seeking to sustain his readers' interest by varying his language, he uses the word crest as a synonym for a coat of arms.

This rouses Robert Parker (Trinity 1967) to write to Senior making clear that a crest is not a coat of arms. He says:

I too read John Tepper Marlin’s (Trinity 1962) article in Oxford Today with great interest, but the article is about “Coats of Arms”, not “Crests”! A Crest is a quite separate device, used for identifying one’s property, or as a badge (e.g., the Trinity double-headed Gryphon device on the Trinity College Boat Club tie), while the “Achievement of Arms” of the modern colleges, with which the article is concerned, are all full “Coats of Arms” - i.e., a shield, emblazoned.

Arms granted by the College of
Arms to the widow of a lawyer who
represented "ladies of the night".

Senior responds: "Glad to be put right on coats of arms, or could I also call them escutcheons? - Ed."

The answer to Senior's question is in the figure above. A coat of arms may include an escutcheon or shield (which seem to be synonyms). But it often includes other elements of the Achievement. When you, as an individual, go to the College of Arms and pay the $8,000 fee (upon approval of your application), you should expect to get The Works - a full Achievement with crest, motto and whatever else fits, plus the seal of one or more of the Kings of Arms, certifying that you have been granted the arms.

Windsor Herald demonstrated this at a talk earlier this week in New York City. He designed a coat of arms for a deceased attorney whose widow wanted to obtain for him a posthumous coat of arms. The bread and butter of the distinguished attorney's business was the defense of what Windsor Herald described delicately as "ladies of the night".

So we see on the shield at right a cut-off view, in two rows, of Six Ladies Dancing. The black (sable) vertical bars evoke the view from a prison cell.

The widow was pleased with this memory of her late spouse, which I have no doubt was easy for some Poursuivant to establish as unique.

From what I understand, while many people who apply are refused arms, Oxford alumni who have managed to stay out of jail – and maybe some who have done time in a good cause – can make a pretty good case for their being entitled to bear arms, in the heraldic sense, with the endorsement of the College of Arms.

Since I have a sentimental interest in the continuation of the institution, I encourage anyone who reads this and has a spare $8K that is getting laughably little interest from a bank to apply for a coat of arms. Cheaper than a Monet.

Comments: Coat of Arms vs. Crest Harris Manchester  Linacre

POETS: Oct. 21–Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This day in 1772 was born the Romantic poet-critic-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England. Like many others, he learned to be a dissenter at Cambridge.

His father was a C of E parish vicar and master of a grammar school who struggled to take care of 14 children from two marriages. Samuel Coleridge was child #14. He liked reading - his favorite book was The Arabian Nights - and was a good student in his father's school. But papa was done in by his multiple responsibilities and died when Samuel was only ten.

Samuel was packed off to board at Christ’s Hospital in London, the "blue-coat school," where the boys wore a blue gown and cap with yellow stockings. Coleridge hated it, but thrived under an English teacher who introduced him to great poetry. He also met Charles Lamb, who became a lifelong friend, and Tom Evans, who had an older sister (Mary) with whom Samuel fell in love.

Since Samuel's late father had wanted his son to be a clergyman, in 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge to study for holy orders in the C of E. However, during his first year he came under the influence of William Frend, a Fellow at Jesus with Unitarian beliefs and Coleridge's life goals came into question. Perhaps not coincidentally, Coleridge accumulated debt for his brothers to pay off - by no means the last time that Coleridge relied on others to pay off his debts (nobody's perfect).

In June 1794, traveling to Wales, Coleridge met another student, Robert Southey. He  broke his trip to spend time with his new friend talking about implementing Plato’s aristocracy-free Republic. They envisioned joining with ten other families to form a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania in the newly independent colonies, sharing work and beliefs in a free-thinking environment, supported by a great library. (With hindsight, an ideal location would have been Berwick, Pa. - safely above the river and right between rich veins of coal and iron.)

Coleridge dropped out of Cambridge to join the army. He called himself Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. But he wasn't much of a soldier.

Instead of going to war, or to Pennsylvania, Coleridge married Sara Fricker and in 1797 moved to a small house in the country with a vegetable garden. That year he made friends with William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The three went walking in nearby hills called the Quantocks. As the sun went down and the moon rose over the sea. Coleridge came up with the idea for a poem about a sailor who kills an albatross and brings a curse upon his ship. It became The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in a 1798 collection of ballads he published with Wordsworth that was to be the starting gun in the Romantic era of poetry.

Coleridge was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated with laudanum, which fostered a recurring opium addiction, anxiety and periods of depression.  In today's language he may have had bipolar disorder. He quarreled with his wife and fell in love with Wordsworth's sister-in-law. He wrote a poem, Dejection: An Ode, and sailed to Malta to improve his health. Coleridge said:

I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book - let him relate the events of his own Life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.

Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Frost at Midnight and a prose tome Biographia Literaria. His critical work on Shakespeare and German idealist philosophy was influential. He coined the idea of "suspension of disbelief" in drama. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

HERALDRY: Windsor Herald Speaks in NYC

Windsor Herald speaks at the New York Genea-
logical and Biographical Society at 36 W 44 St.

A few hours ago I went to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society to hear Windsor Herald, William Hunt.

We met earlier this year in London when I was doing research for my article on the coats of arms of the Oxford Colleges, which has just been published in Oxford Today.

He started with some background about the College of Arms, of which he is an officer. The heralds carry the rank either of King of Arms or Herald. The Heralds work on the design and blazon of the arms to ensure that they are unique, assisted by Poursuivants, and the Kings of Arms grant the arms under the authority of the Crown.

Coats of arms in England date back to circa 1128 when the arms of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou were said to be established. He started the Plantagenet (his nickname) royal line. A picture of his shield on his tomb shows what appears to be a forerunner of today's royal coat of arms. But the descriptions of his arms are not contemporary, and no one is certain which arms in England are the oldest.

The College of Arms in London is next to St. Paul's Cathedral. The 1666 Great Fire of London - which left one-sixth of the population homeless - destroyed the original building. The College of Arms building that we see today is the one built after the Great Fire, minus one of the four sides.
The fourth side was removed, says Windsor Herald, to make room for Queen Victoria Street, which the College now faces.

Windsor Herald showed several of the pedigrees that are stored at the College of Arms. Some of them show dubious links stretching from Adam and Eve without interruption to and some early English kings. The pedigrees are often propaganda instruments - for example, by placing key individuals on one or other side of the Wars of the Roses.

During the time of Henry VIII the wish for coats of arms spread and the Crown decided it would be a good source of revenue to tax people who have them.

Windsor Herald provided a series of examples of
coats of arms that he has designed. This one is
especially funny, paid for by the widow of a lawyer
who defended "ladies of the night".

Windsor Herald said that virtually anyone who has lived in England for several generations, if they are resourceful enough can trace their ancestry back to one or other king.

He showed how quartering of arms works. When a man entitled to a coat of arms marries a woman who also bears arms (e.g., by having no children, or by being widowed), the arms are "quartered". He showed examples of quartering ad absurdum.

Someone who wants a coat of arms applies to the Earl Marshal. The Court of the Earl Marshal is the only room at the College of Arms that is open to the public.

The arms are "granted" by one or more of the three Kings of Arms, for a fee (about $8,000 for an individual coat of arms, more for institutional arms), which pays mostly for the overhead of the College of Arms along with the design or certification work by Heralds and their Poursuivants.

Windsor Herald then went through a series of examples of interesting coats of arms. The right to bear arms has to be established either by genealogy, showing descent from an ancestor who bore arms, or de novo by community recognition, including professional qualification or a university degree. The acceptable qualifications are fairly broad, but Windsor Herald says that the College of Arms frequently turns down applicants for coats of arms.

Comment

The College of Arms is a bit like a bank. Banks don't like to lend money to people who really need it. (The banks are worried about being paid back.) If a person really needs a coat of arms, one has to ask why? The question is easier to answer for institutions, which have always needed a corporate identity.

OXFORD-USA: Oct. 18–Oxons Create Mason-Dixon Line (Updated Oct. 29, 2016)

This day in 1767 the border was settled that a century later became the boundary of the American Civil War–the Mason-Dixon line.

The line was named after two surveyors, Mason and Dixon. They were hired by two prominent families on either side of the border. Both were originally headed by Oxonians:

• Catholic Leonard Calvert, founder of slave-colony Maryland. Leonard's brother Cecil, the second Lord Baltimore, handled the British end of the formation of the colony. Leonard  and Cecil, as well as their father George–the first Lord Baltimore–were alumni of Trinity College, Oxford. 
• Quaker William Penn, founder of free-colony Pennsylvania. William Penn was an alumnus of Christ Church, Oxford.

The Calvert and Penn families, to settle a dispute over the border between them, hired English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.

The essential element of their survey, which had been interrupted by skirmishes with Indians, was completed on this day.

It established the boundary not only between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland but for territories in the west that after the Revolution became the state of West Virginia and those in the east that became Delaware.

Why did this become the dividing line in the War Between the States?

It is no puzzle why the South favored slavery–the earliest immigrants to the southern colonies like Virginia were loyalists to the British Crown and the C of E and they were given generous grants of land that required huge numbers of workers. The cash crops such as tobacco and cotton that became the mainstay of the southern farms required workers to do strenuous repetitive tasks, and slavery provided a solution.

It is also no puzzle why New England did not favor slavery. They did not get large grants of land from the Crown because the earliest immigrants to New England were dissenting rebels from the Church of England. Most therefore became small farmers, traders or manufacturers.

Maryland and Pennsylvania were in-between colonies and states. Unlike most other southern states (Georgia's Wilberforce was another exception), Maryland was not founded by someone with allegiance to the Church of England. Even though Pennsylvania was not founded by a dissenting Quaker, its founder Penn had enough good will from the Crown to get given some land:

• In Maryland, the Crown carved a large piece of land out of northern Virginia to give to the Catholic Calverts. The Catholicism of the day was not aggressively opposed to slavery.
• In Pennsylvania (as it was to be called), lands were granted to Quaker William Penn because he  had won favor with the Crown, even though leaders of his religion included many abolitionists who fought actively against slavery. It was easier in Pennsylvania than it was in Maryland to be opposed to slavery because of the coal and iron reserves that provided higher-paying jobs, and therefore without having to rely on slaves.

To settle their border dispute, the land-rich Calvert and Penn families hired Mason and Dixon to establish the borderline. The families were responding to a 1760 demand from the British Crown that colonial settlers cease their skirmishes and adhere to a 1732 border cease-fire. Both families claimed the land between the 39th and 40th parallels. On this day in 1867, Mason and Dixon established the border at 39º43'. If they believed that the rights on the two sides were equally balanced, they would have settled on 39º30', which suggests that Pennsylvania was the victor, getting 72 percent (43/60) of the disputed land area.

During the year 1767, the colonies were engaged in a dispute with the Parliament over the Townshend Acts, which sought–through taxes on tea and other imports–to pay for the British costs of troops sent by Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder (like the Calverts, an alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford) of establishing the continuing military presence that had driven the French and the Indians allied with them from the colonies.

However, the border dispute seemingly settled in 1767 was not over. The Mason-Dixon line held as a dividing line, but after the American Revolution, the states south of the Mason-Dixon line began lobbying the new U.S. Congress for the legal rights of slaveowners. The northern states argued that ownership of human beings was not acceptable in the "New Constellation" of states.

Although the arguments were temporarily ended by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which accepted the states south of the Mason-Dixon line as slave-holding and those north of the line as free, the attempted compromise–and its successors–failed and Pennsylvania became the site of many famous Civil War battles. Gettysburg, Pa., in 1863 was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. The Quaker commitment to abolitionism trumped their commitment to peace.

In April 1865, the south capitulated. The ensuing 13th Amendment (1865) was immediately passed abolishing slavery and nullifying the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857). The bitterly fought 14th Amendment gave citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. It was ratified 101 years after the Mason-Dixon line was established. However, civil rights did not mean voting rights. It took many more debates and political battles, some more amendments, and another 100 years, for the United States to pass laws to ensure that all adult citizens be allowed to vote...

HERALDRY: "What's Your Blazon?" in "Oxford Today" (Updated Mar 8, 2017)

Cover of The Michaelmas 2015 Oxford Today.

Sent to a quarter-million Oxonians: The Michaelmas 2015 issue of Oxford Today.

On p. 66, note the fine obit of Dan Topolski, about whose life and death I have posted.

My article, "What's Your Blazon?" is on pages 45-50. I am grateful to Ian Senior, who emails out a  newsletter about Oxford, for alerting his readers to what he calls a "very interesting" article.

Special thanks to Windsor Herald, William George Hunt, TD, BA (Southampton, UK), FCA, for giving me a tour of the College of Arms in London when I visited in February. I add more acknowledgments at the end of this post.

The College of Arms is, especially for an American, an amazing institution. The traditions go back to Edward III and 1364, 651 years ago. It is the ancient predecessor of something most Americans think they invented – brands and trademarks.

To show my gratitude to the College of Arms for keeping alive the heraldic traditions, I made a contribution to their U.S. foundation and I urge other Americans to do the same. The College has managed to survive for six-and-a-half centuries, mostly from fees and contributions from private sources. But in inflation-adjusted money its revenues have not been keeping pace. Americans can make gifts deductible from taxable income to support the College of Arms through the College of Arms Foundation, administered by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society.

The rich topic of the Oxford and Cambridge college coats of arms is ripe for greater enjoyment. Heraldry is too much fun to be restricted to specialists, although I am determined to keep learning as much as I can. We don't want to go to the other extreme either, of the mass-produced "family" coats of arms.

Anyone with greater expertise or imagination, please share comments with me here and I promise to email back my appreciation for any feedback, any further required contrition and of course I will correct anything I have posted online that needs to be corrected.

Last month I spent a day at the Society of Genealogists (SOG) in London (they have an excellent heraldry section in their library) and I have become a member.

On Monday in New York City I will be going to the next heraldry committee meeting of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYGBS), which I have joined and where Windsor Herald will be speaking.

Exonerating anyone else from any shortcomings as a heraldry expert, I would like to acknowledge the help of a number of sources, for which there is little space in Oxford Today articles. The heraldry holdings of the British Library and New York Public Library were helpful (although I wish more of the NYPL holdings were open-stack, as they are at the British Library), as well as genealogical societies in New York (NYGBS) and London (SOG). The library at the College of Arms was under reconstruction when I visited, so I wasn't able to use it much. The new Weston Library of the Bodleian in Oxford has a small but helpful open-stack collection.

Several people read drafts of my article. My wife Alice Tepper Marlin, of course, read it at an important juncture. Marlene Rehkamp, with whom I worked in the New York City Comptroller's Office, kindly gave it a thorough read and as usual came up with excellent suggestions.  The Editor of Oxford Today, Richard Lofthouse, saw the potential for the article at an early stage and deserves huge credit for turning Oxford Today into a forum for general discussion among alumni around the world, both in print and online. I think we are increasingly finding out that print and cyberspace have a lot to offer each other.

Other Posts on the Arms of Oxford Colleges and PPHs: Original Article in Oxford Today . Heraldry as Branding . Heraldry as Fun .  Coat of Arms vs. Crest . Sinister Questions . Visit to the College of Arms . Windsor Herald Talks to New Yorkers . Shaming of Harvard Law Crest :: Rapid Expansion of Oxford's Colleges and Halls . Oxford Stars . Links to Heraldry, Oxford, GW . Harris Manchester College . Linacre College . St Catherine's . St Cross College . St Edmund Hall . Trinity College :: Regent's Park College . St Benet's Hall . 

BIRTH: Oct. 15–Virgil is 2085

Virgil (70-19 B.C.)

This day in 70 B.C. was born Publius Vergilius Maro, known as Virgil (sometimes Vergil), in Andes, near Mantua, Italy.

Virgil was the son of a farmer, not a nobleman. He was lucky to receive an education in Latin, Greek, philosophy and rhetoric.

His knowledge of Greek was essential for his writing of his greatest work, the Aeneid (Oxford World Classics) because the character of Aeneas is taken from Homer's Iliad.

Many of Virgil's scenes in the Aeneid (such as his reminiscences about Aeneas' military exploits as told to Dido and his visit to Hades) are informed by the Odyssey.

Virgil moved from Mantua to Rome and his poetry won him powerful friends and admirers. While he was in Rome, a series of civil wars raged (50-31 B.C.). Julius Caesar's civil war with Pompey and the succession wars after his assassination were still recent events. Aeneas is portrayed as a ruler destined to bring civilization, unity and peace to a divided world - which is what Rome was looking for at the time, and what Augustus aspired to be.

Virgil at first wrote poems about farm life. When Rome's civil wars ended, the Roman government asked Virgil to write a poem to get Romans back to their farms - he wrote for them the Georgics, a poetic Farmer's Almanack about how to get honey from bees and how best to grow trees, grain, and animals.

Emperor Augustus liked the job Virgil did, and gave him an annual salary to write about the history of Rome.Virgil's response was to create the Aeneid, about the soldier Aeneas who came home from the Trojan war to found what would become Rome. The opening lines, which many Latin students including myself have been required to memorize, are:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem,
inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum,
Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.

My favorite phrase is inferretque deos Latio (he brought his household gods with him to Latium) because I grew up in a traveling family. Our Dad started working for the U.N. when I was three and by the time I was 12 we had spent at least a week or two each in eight countries - the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Holland, France, Spain and Italy.

Since our Mom was a convert to Catholicism, we visited churches everywhere we went. In the 1950s that was a good way to be introduced to different cities because after the Depression and World War II religion had a wide following.

Virgil worked on the Aeneid for more than a decade when he took a trip to Greece for some final research. He caught a fever, and died before he could finish his epic poem. He asked for the incomplete poem to be burned, but Augustus refused to deep-six all the work he had financed with hard-earned tax collections. It eventually became the central book in Roman schools. It has to be one of a very few books that have been in print more than two millennia.

Soon after his death, Virgil's style and subject matter was imitated by the younger poet Ovid and others in Rome's Silver Age. Dante, in his own Italian epic poem, the Divine Comedy. makes Virgil his guide through Hell as he proceeds to the gates of Heaven.

Virgil died in Brundisium (now Brindisi), Italy, on September 21, 19 B.C.

OXFORD: On Inviting Hitler to Speak in 1933

Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany,
appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor. 

Oct. 12, 2015 – The Practical Ethics blogsite at Oxford Univ. poses a question in the context of a recent  invite to Marine LePen of France.

How would you feel–i.e., what are the ethical issues–if it was 1933 and you were an officer of the Oxford Union considering an invitation to Chancellor Hitler?

A number of factors could be considered:

• The Oxford Union is a society independent of Oxford University (but I note that the Practical Ethics blogsite is copyright by Oxford University).
• Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January, so his official status was beyond question. 
• Oxford appears to have had a special status in the eyes of Germany and in the eyes of Hitler.
• Hitler had expressed extreme racial views in Mein Kampf, but his views were not widely known because few took him seriously. The book did not sell well when it first came out in 1925. The English translation My Battle did not come out until 1933.

What do you think?

WW2: Col. Francis Pickens Miller (1895-1978), Oxonian, U.S. Intelligence Leader

Col. Francis Pickens Miller (1895-1978) was born in Kentucky on the Virginia border and studied at Washington & Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia.

After serving in the field artillery in World war I, he went on to study at Trinity College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Helen Hill Miller, Col. Miller's wife, was the U.S. correspondent for The Economist; I met her and Col. Miller at my Dad's house in Washington in the 1960s.

My Dad, E. R. Marlin, was in the O.S.S. in Dublin and London in World War II and reported to Col. Miller.

Miller's intelligence papers are at the George C. Marshall Library and Museum, which is between Washington and Lee University, which Miller attended, and the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va.

Thanks to Tim Sullivan for sending me the link to the following documentary, which describes the evolution of the O.S. during World War II and reviews its achievements.

This 46-minute documentary movie discusses the raison-d'être of the O.S.S., and Wild Bill Donovan's contribution to the war effort.