TRINITY COLLEGE | Scavenger Hunt with Great-Nieces, April 2019

L to R: Grace, Helen and Alice, with a portion of the
Portrait Gallery of Trinity Alumnae behind them.

OXFORD, April 14, 2019—We are visiting Trinity College with Alice's great-nieces, Grace and Helen.

We organized the visit as a Scavenger Hunt with nine treasures to hunt for and one more for advanced credit. All nine of the main treasures were located and visited.

L to R: Helen and Grace, in front of
the double-headed griffin.

Trinity College is Stop 14 on the Oxford Bus Tour. It is a short walk to Stops 19 and 20 to the west, Stop 8 to the south and stop 13 to the east.

Trinity was founded in 1555 by Sir Thomas Pope, who handled the dissolution of the monasteries for Henry VIII and thereby became personally wealthy during that period. 

He also became an adviser to Henry VIII's daughter Mary Tudor, who became Queen Mary I. The tomato-juice drink "Bloody Mary" is named after her, perhaps unjustly since the number of Protestants she executed was a fraction of the Catholics and others who resisted Henry VIII. 

The Trinity College Chapel was the first at Oxford to be designed on pure classical principles. Its design was assisted by Sir Christopher Wren. The tomb of the founder is in the Chapel; Trinity is the only college at Oxford to have its founder buried within.

SCAVENGER HUNT, TRINITY COLLEGE 

[✔️] The Portrait Gallery of Trinity alumnae (see photo at the top of this post).

[✔️] The Two-Headed Griffin (see photo above right). The griffin, also spelled griffon or gryphon, was in ancient times considered to be the guardian of gold and empires. The griffin has the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion — the king of the air atop the king of the jungle.

L to R: Helen and Grace, in
front of the Pig & Whistle.

[✔️]The justly famed Grinling Gibbons carvings, recently restored. Photo to be included...

[✔️] The Stuart gate, which is kept locked until the House of Stuart returns to the throne.

[✔️] The Pig & Whistle, guest room (see photo at left). Note to potential guests: This is emergency accommodation more than a royal suite. You may prefer the Presidential Suite at the Randolph.

[✔️] The Portrait of Pitt the Elder (Lord Chatham), who championed the colonies in their battle with the French in what is called in the United States the "French and Indian War", and made possible the American Revolution. Pitt was a Trinity alumnus.

[✔️] The Portrait of Lord North, who was intransigent in his advocacy, in Parliament and in his recommendations for policy to George III, that the American colonies must pay for British troops in America. Lord North thereby made the American Revolution inevitable. He is one of Trinity's three Prime Ministers, and the least admired. (The third Prime Minister was Lord Wilmington, who gave his name to the capital of Delaware.)

L to R: Helen and Grace in front
of a tribute to Trinity's four bumps
in 2013.

[✔️] The Commemoration of four "bumps" in Eights Week, 2013, by the First VIII (see photo at right). The bumps that year included Trinity neighbor Wadham College and rival Balliol College. A bump means that a boat's prow passed the stern of the boat in front, and they exchange places in the "head of the river" races.

[✔️] The Portrait of George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore, who with his two sons Cecil (who became the 2nd Lord Baltimore) and Leonard (who became Governor of Maryland) founded the colony of Maryland. The colony was named either after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, or, more probably, the Virgin Mary. All three Calverts were Trinity alumni.

L to R: George Calvert (1st Lord Baltimore, 
founder of Maryland), Helen.

The photo at left shows Helen in front of the portrait of George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore (1579-1632), Secretary of State for England, Founder of the Maryland Colony (later the State), as a haven for Roman Catholics. 

The original portrait was by Daniel Mytens the Elder, circa 1624. The copy was donated to Trinity College by the Society of the Ark and the Dove, by permission of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore. The donation was arranged as the result of a relationship with the Calvert family under Trinity College Presidents Michael Beloff and Sir Ivor Roberts.

Although George Calvert never went to what is now Maryland, he made the voyage to Newfoundland, where the colony was originally going to be settled. His son Leonard became Maryland's first governor, while the other son, the 2nd Lord Baltimore, pleaded the case of the colony in Parliament.

[  ] For extra credit (requires a special advance appointment): The stained-glass window showing the Washington coat of arms inherited and used by George Washington, and incorporated in the flag of Washington, D.C. The window dates back to Durham College, which occupied the Trinity College site before the Reformation.

OXFORD IN FICTION: Top Six Fictional Colleges (Updated July 4, 2018)

Morse, Lewis, Endeavour...

Which Oxford colleges are most often models for fictional colleges?

Two ground rules: 

First, exclude colleges used as sets for stories about schools (e.g., Hogwart's) or estates (e.g., Downton Abbey).

Second, exclude real colleges referred to in fiction, as when Jay Gatsby claimed that he went to Trinity College after the Great War. (His character's attendance was fictional, his purported alma mater is not.)

Based on these rules, my nominees for the top six real colleges used as models for fictional Oxford colleges are...:

Christ Church - 7
Oriel - 4
Balliol - 3
Brasenose - 3
LMH - 3
New - 3

The tabulation is below. Let me know of sites that might qualify and have been left out and I will reconsider and if necessary re-compute with credit to you if you want it.

College (or Hall)	Fictional College
All Souls	All Saints College - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Balliol (3)	Baillie College – Yes Ministerand Yes, Prime Minister, attended by two consecutive cabinet secretaries.
	Scone College- Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh; Something Nasty in the Woodshedand The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery by Kyril Bonfiglioli. (John de Balliol was crowned King of Scotland at Scone in 1292 and ruled for four years.)
	Biblioll College Jude the Obscure
Brasenose(3)	Brazenface College – Verdant Green by Cuthbert Bede.
	Lonsdale College – Inspector Morse novels and subsequent Lewis TV series filmed there.
	Mayfield College –Lewis episode "Life Born of Fire” filmed there. Could also be Greyfriars, former Permanent Private Hall, nearest to “Mayfield” Press.
Christ Church (7)	Anonymous college in A Staircase in Surrey, a series of five novels by J. I. M. Stewart.
	Cardinal College – A Yank at Oxford.Cardinal College is the original name that Cardinal Wolsey gave to Christ Church in 1525.
	Cardinal's College - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
	Clapperton College - The Oxford Virusby Adam Kolczynski.
	St Thomas's College - An Oxford Tragedy and The Case of the Four Friends by John Cecil Masterman. St Thomas the Martyr's Church is located near Osney. Christ Church owns the church.
	Cardinal College Jude the Obscure
	Wolsey College - Inspector Morse novels and Endeavour. Cardinal Wolsey founded Christ Church.
Corpus Christi	Foxe College - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Corpus was founded by Richard Foxe.
Exeter (3)	Carlyle College - Lewis, episode "The Soul of Genius" filmed there.
	Jordan College - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
	Plymouth College - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Jesus	St Michael's College -  Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
Keble (2)	Baidley College -Endeavour TV series; "Home", the last episode of the first season filmed there.
	Tresingham College - The Oxford Virusby Adam Kolczynski.
Lincoln	Gresham College - Lewis,episode "Dark Matter". The "Invisible College", a group of Oxford scientists (including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren) that went on to establish the Royal Society. met at Gresham College in London.
LMH (3)	Lady Matilda's College -Lewis. Based on and filmed in Lady Margaret Hall.
	St Margaret's College - Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones. Probably based on Lady Margaret Hall.
	St Sophia's College - Based on Lady Margaret Hall. PP
Magdalen	St Mary's College – Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (who attended Magdalen).
Merton (2)	Chaucer College – Lewis. Named after Geoffrey Chaucer.
	Judas College – Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.
New College (3)	St Saviour's College –Inspector Morse, episode "Fat Chance" filmed there.
	Wykeham College – Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. New College was founded by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester.
	St Gerard's Hall – Lewis episode "Wild Justice"; fictional Permanent Private Hall. Filmed here, and also at SEH and Christ Church.
Oriel (4)	Bartlemas College – Kate Ivory detective novels by Veronica Stallwood. Oriel's property includes St Bartholomew's Chapel.
	Courtenay College – Inspector Morse TV series. Nuneham Courtenay is a village 5 miles south-east of Oxford. Nuneham House now belongs to the University.
	St Ambrose's College - Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes. Oriel was both film location and the probable location of the college based, for example, on the boat race in 1842.
	The King's College (known as "Dick's" after alleged founder Richard II) - Colonel Butler's Wolf and Our Man in Camelot by Anthony Price.
Queen’s	Queen Philippa's College - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Queen's College was founded in honor of Queen Philippa of Hainault.
Somerville(2)	St Jerome's College - Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton. The Reluctant Cannibals by Ian Flitcroft.
	Shrewsbury College - Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night.
St Benet’s Hall	St Scholastica's College - Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials. Scholastica was the sister of St Benedict (Benet).
St Catherine’s	St Katherine’s – Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters
St Peter’s	St Mary’s College - Tony Strong, The Poison Tree.
St. Hilda’s	Bede College - Operation Pax by Michael Innes, nom-de-plume of J. I. M. Stewart. (St Bede wrote about St Hilda.)
Trinity (2)	Savile College – Lewis.
	Oriel College – Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes. Under current computation rules, Gatsby doesn't count.
Wadham	Gabriel College – Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials.

SUMMER EIGHTS: May 20-28, 2016 (Updated August 26, 2018)

Head of the River Pub (next to the Folly Bridge) –
a good place to observe the rowing scene.
All photos by JT Marlin.

The 2016 Summer Eights begin with trials starting May 20 and are followed by the Head of the River races, May 25-28. 

They bring out some 170 boats and 1,500 participants. 

At one time, the Summer Eights races took six full days.

The boats compete to be in first place, i.e., Head of the River. 

Brigid Marlin, artist, at Folly Bridge. She is the
 sister of two Oxonians (Randal and me), mother
 of a third (Chris), aunt of two others (Christine
and Kate). Photo by JT Marlin.

They compete in single file because the Thames–a.k.a. the Isis in the Oxford segment above Iffley Lock, can't accommodate very many boats abreast.

A boat advances one place in the long line by "bumping" the boat ahead. Colleges have "bump" suppers after the event to celebrate their advancement(s).

The event, sponsored by Neptune Investment Management, has its own website.

History of Summer VIIIs

Is your Oxford college blade
On this clever clock arrayed?
Is one of them your very own,
Of 36 blades that here are shown?

Recreational rowing at Oxford was under way in 1769. Students then used single wherries, which were designed for choppy seas and have keels and higher sides than than today's flat-bottomed single sculls.


For Isis use, the gunnels were lowered and then the keel was eliminated. A history of competitive-rowing boat design is here.

The first boat-racing clubs at Oxford were organized in 1815, when Brasenose and Jesus Colleges competed for Head of the River in eights, giving the event its name. 

Exeter claims to have been the fourth entrant and that seems to fit with available historical record.

Guide to markings of Oxford college oars.

The "eights" of course have eight oars but nine on board. 

The cox is the extra person in the back who steers and shouts the rowing rhythm. 

Since the cox is baggage, he (or she)  is preferably smaller than the others in the boat.

The cox needs good timing, a big voice, sharp eyes and cough drops.

Christ Church added itself as a competitor in 1817. Seven years on, when Exeter went Head of the River, the crews agreed not to bring in rowers from other colleges. This generated five new college boats – the fifth boat being Worcester in 1824 or 1825, Balliol and Univ (6th and 7th) in 1827, and Oriel and Trinity (8th and 9th) in 1828.

Location of the Boathouses

A visiting Cantabridgian has written a frank tour guide of the Oxford boathouses and he is mostly impressed.

A map of the locations of the boathouses is provided below. The links to the boat clubs don't work because this is a screen shot, but I have included after the screen shot some links that work. The Folly Bridge notations show Salter's and the Head of the River Public House, but are missing the new Folly Bridge restaurant and the attached boathouse that provides boats to visitors.

University and College Boat Club Websites 

Oxford University Boat Club . Oxford University Women's Boat Club
Oxford University Lightweight Rowing Club
Oxford University Women's Lightweight Rowing Club

Balliol
Brasenose
Christ Church
Corpus Christi
Exeter
Green Templeton
Hertford
Jesus
Keble

Lady Margaret Hall
Linacre
Lincoln
Magdalen
Mansfield
Merton
New
Oriel
Osler House (Med students)
Pembroke
Queen's
Regent's Park
Somerville
St Anne's
St Antony's
St Benet's
St Catherine's
St Edmund Hall

St Hilda's
St Hugh's
St John's
St Peter's
Trinity
University
Wadham
Wolfson
Worcester

Other Rowing Posts: Rowing Blazers . 2012 NYC Boat Race Dinner . Punting . Head of Charles . 2017 Summer Eights

OBIT: Christopher Hitchens (Balliol) 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens (Balliol), 1949-2011.

This is one of a collection of Oxford obits.

Was Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) as clever as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter et al. said at Hitchens' Memorial at Cooper Union, NYC April 20, 2012?

If there is any question, I offer in evidence his 2006 appearance at a bookstore in Annapolis, the home of the U.S. Naval Academy (talking about his book on Jefferson). His appearance was part of the Annapolis Book Festival.

I was ready to go to sleep when I started watching this one-hour C-Span2 BookTV YouTube tape, and was wide awake when it ended. Click on it at your own risk.

For those who would like to take Hitchens down a peg, the Annapolis appearance can be compared with his La Jolla appearance. The two talks were certainly similarly structured. But a comparison will show how different they were.

Hitchens is classified as an eloquent left-wing radical whose anti-theist views led him to support military action against Islamic rogue states. He left the Nation after 9/11. He supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, for which some have never forgiven him, although the Nation was out in force for his memorial.

No one's perfect. When Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, he did not hesitate to concede that the cancer may have been in part a consequence of his heavy consumption of cigarettes and alcohol.

Ample details on Hitchens' life are here. He was named by the Guardian as one of Britain's top 300 intellectuals. He became a U.S. resident and then in 2007 a U.S. citizen, but retained his British citizenship.

Now that he has passed to his eternal reward, I am sure that the Almighty God I believe in forgives him for not wanting to believe in Him; there are surely worse sins.

(Thanks to Tim Sullivan for sending me the Annapolis and Memorial YouTube tapes.)

BIRTHDAY: Smithsonian Institution, Founded by Oxonian James Smithson

James Smithson (Pembroke, Oxford),
founder of the Smithsonian.

On this day was signed the law that created the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The money and initial collection of artifacts was donated by an Oxford man who had never been to the United States.

The founder was James Smithson, MA (Oxon.), FRS (c. 1765-June 27, 1829), English chemist and mineralogist who attended Pembroke College, Oxford.

I first learned that Smithson was an Oxonian at the New York City Boat Race Dinner on April 23, 2009, when Lord Selkirk of Douglas told us about the founding of the Smithsonian in a speech that was the best Boat Race Dinner speech I have ever heard.

Smithson was the natural child of the 1st Duke of Northumberland, born in Paris, it is said in Pentemont Abbey. He had the given name of Jacques-Louis Macie, later anglicized to James Louis Macie.

Lord Selkirk of Douglas (Balliol, Oxford), gggg-nephew of
James Smithson MA (Pembroke, Oxford), donor of the
Smithsonian Institution.

He became an English citizen and went to Oxford, studying chemistry and mineralogy. At  22, he changed his surname from Macie to Smithson, his father's pre-marriage surname, living from  inheritances from his mother and other relatives.

Smithson traveled extensively throughout Europe publishing papers about his findings. In 1802, he  proved that zinc carbonates were true carbonate minerals, and one such zinc carbonate was later named smithsonite in his honor.

Smithson never married and was childless. He left his estate to his nephew Henry James Hungerford, or his estate. If his nephew was to die without heirs, however, Smithson's will stipulated that his estate be donated to the founding of "an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” in Washington, D.C. In 1835, his nephew died and so could not claim to be the recipient of his estate.

After a decade of debate about how best to spend the money, President James K. Polk signed the Smithsonian Institution Act.

President Andrew Jackson sent diplomat Richard Rush to England to negotiate for transfer of the funds, and two years later Rush set sail for home with 11 boxes containing a total of 104,960 gold sovereigns, 8 shillings, and 7 pence, as well as Smithson’s mineral collection,scientific notes, and personal effects.

After the gold was melted down, it added up a fortune, well over $500,000. On August 10, 1846, the act establishing the Smithsonian Institution was signed into law by President Polk. Today, the Smithsonian is composed of 19 museums and galleries including the recently announced National Museum of African American History and Culture, nine research facilities throughout the United States and the world, and the national zoo.

Besides the original Smithsonian Institution Building, popularly known as the “Castle,” visitors to Washington, D.C., tour the National Museum of Natural History, which houses the natural science collections, the National Zoological Park, and the National Portrait Gallery.

The National Museum of American History houses the original Star-Spangled Banner and other artifacts of U.S. history. The National Air and Space Museum has the distinction of being the most visited museum in the world, exhibiting such marvels of aviation and space history as the Wright brothers’ plane and Freedom 7, the space capsule that took the first American into space. John Smithson, the Smithsonian Institution’s great benefactor, is interred in a tomb in the Smithsonian Building.

BILL COSBY: Mark Whitaker's Biography (Postscripts)

Mark Whitaker (L) and John Tepper
Marlin. Photo by Alice Tepper Marlin.

Sept. 24, 2014–Last night, at the North American office of Oxford University, Oxonian Mark Whitaker talked about Bill Cosby's achievements as a popular comedian and comic actor.

He also spoke about Cosby's private lobbying for African American causes. Cosby avoided talking about race in his comic routines, but had a definite point of view that put him in conflict with some other African Americans.

The Cosby Show, 30 Years Ago

Cosby's is best known for his contribution to the creation of Dr. Huxtable and his portrayal of the character in The Cosby Show. It was just over 30 years to the day since the debut of the first airing of this show.

The Show is credited with helping to make possible the election of President Barack Obama, because it showed a middle-class African American family, with the emphasis on the American rather than the African. The Cosby Show helped moderate the fears that middle-class white Americans showed in their abandonment of central cities for suburban areas.

Alice and I had some personal interest in following the show because she had grown up with co-producer Tom Werner on the Jersey Shore. Werner's wife Jill also worked at the organization Alice founded, the Council on Economic Priorities, before the Werners married.

Chapters 20 and 21 of Whitaker's book show the nervous runup to the creation of the show, as Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner staked a mortgage on their homes to bet on a family show starring Bill Cosby, who was then already known as the first black male star in a television drama, I Spy, which  ran from 1965 to 1968 and won Cosby three consecutive Emmys for Best Actor.

The road to the opening of the show was rocky. Cosby wanted the show to feature a limousine driver with a Latin American handy-woman wife. More than one writer was burned out in the script development, partly because Cosby himself liked to embellish on his lines. NBC executives tried to check on the rough cuts–they were told everyone was in a meeting, and then the tape would get lost...

Jay Sandrich was responsible for getting the final cut of the tapes for The Cosby Show. He had three  "rabbits' feet" on which he depended to get the tapes ready on schedule–

• Two versions of the show were taped, in the afternoon and evening, so he could choose the best version of each scene.
• Phylicia Ayers-Allen, playing Mrs. Huxtable the lawyer, could be relied upon to stay in character because of her ample live theater training, so even if neither of the versions was usable, she could often save the day by providing a usable reaction shot.
• Cosby tended to leave after each shooting for some stand-up performance and therefore did not hover over the editing process. P.S. Cosby is is still, at 77 and despite his vision difficulties, performing live.

There was a lot of sandbagging before The Cosby Show's first episode, which was called "Pilot". Television commentators believed it would have trouble beating Magnum, P.I.  in their time slot, but they begged NBC not to "dump" the show if its ratings were weak.

But that week, 30 years ago, The Cosby Show beat not only everyone else in its time slot but every other show on television. It had 21.6 million viewers. When Carsey told Cosby the news, he was incredulous. 

"You mean we beat 60 Minutes?"
"Yes," she said.
"Call [my wife] Camille!" he said.

I remember watching the first episode myself, back then, and it was a revelation. The importance of the show was self-evident.

The Author, Mark Whitaker

Whitaker in his childhood identified greatly with Cosby for many reasons, mostly related to the fact that they both had fathers who left home. Whitaker's mixed-race parents divorced when he was six and his black father left home. They lived in Norton, Mass. (home of Wheaton College).

Unlike Cosby, Whitaker did well in school and went to Harvard and then won a Marshall Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He worked for Newsweek as a reporter and then as editor and became the first African American to be editor-in-chief of a national newsweekly. He served as Washington bureau chief for NBC News and then managing editor of CNN.

His first book was a memoir, My Long Trip Home.

Cosby's Childhood

Bill Cosby is two years younger than Whitaker's father. He grew up in a housing project in North Philadelphia. After Pearl Harbor, his father Bill Sr. left his wife and two boys to join the Navy. He was home enough to add two more boys to the family, but for the next 15 years he served three tours of sea duty as a mess steward. His wife worked as a maid.

Young Cosby meanwhile did not do well at school, flunking 10th grade twice. He joined the Navy, like his father, and after four years' service he came out ready to go back to school. He had impressed a track coach from Temple University and was admitted to the University despite very low SAT scores.

At Temple Stadium, Cosby's coach had him run a 320-yard track, to try to increase the speed of a 440-yard runners and the endurance of a 220-yard runners. On his first run, Cosby had difficulty. The coach asked him what was the problem:

"Rigor mortis set in!" Cosby said. ... "Riggie... He's a little man who jumped out of the pit with a plastic hammer and hit me in the knee."

Riggie was a threat to Cosby all his life.

Cosby in Public and Private

Jonathan Winters, mentor.

In public, Cosby is transparent. He is seeking to get at truth. In private, he did not want at first to cooperate with the biography and when he did try to be helpful he tended just to tell stories.

On stage, Cosby avoids discussion of race. Off-stage, he takes on a variety of racial issues. He takes African American leaders to task for relying too much on trying to change the system and not enough on fixing problems by taking responsibility for them.

He gives great credit to white mentors that he has had during his life. He calls them "abolitionists", giving credit to the long history of conscience-stricken whites who have espoused abolition of slavery and enfranchisement of all citizens.

On stage, he is funny. Off-stage he can be funny but also deadly serious.

Bill Cosby and "Hello Friend" tee shirt in
honor of his son. 

Hollywood's comedians tend to know one another. He and the late Robin Williams were not especially close but they shared one idol - Jonathan Winters, who died in 2013.

Winters once warned Cosby that comedians tend to tire of their material sooner than their audiences do. That fact is one reason Cosby is constantly amending his scripts.

Cosby has two daughters. A tragedy of his life is that his son Ennis (1969-1997), who had been diagnosed as dyslexic but had overcome some of his disabilities, was killed while changing a tire on an access road in Los Angeles. Cosby does not talk about Ennis in public but in his performances he wears or has a tee shirt on display that has the message that Ennis used often - "Hello Friend". Whitaker does a good job of describing Cosby's deep feelings about his son.

Postscript (Sept. 24, 2014)

After I wrote the above, I read the review of Whitaker's book by Dwight Garner in the NY Times issue  of Sept. 23, 2014 (pp. C1 and C6).  Based on this review, I would add:

1. The improvisational nature of Cosby's performances fits with his love of jazz, which Whitaker refers to when he describes Cosby's experience in the Navy.
2. Garner lists specific ways in which Cosby helped fellow black actors and black students, such as the $20 million–widely noted at the time–that Cosby gave to Spelman College, a mostly black college.
3. On the negative side, Garner notes allegations of Cosby's womanizing before he was 40, and accusations of sexual abuse. The book's greatest weakness, he says, is in Whitaker's not mentioning any of these claims.

Postscript 2 (Nov. 18, 2014)

Recent reports underscore Garner's point #3. More women are coming forward and they have little financial incentive to do so because with such a time lapse it would allegedly be hard to make a case, and the statute of limitations would have run out.

BIRTH: Oct 2–Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Today is the birthday (in 1904) of novelist Graham Greene, in Berkhamsted, England. Berkhamsted Castle is where the Saxon nobles were summoned to pledge their allegiance to the Norman king, William the Conqueror, after the Battle of Hastings.

A conference is held in Berkhamsted every year to discuss the huge volume of Greene's novels and other writings and the many films based on them. Greene was born in a building of the Berkhamsted School, one of six children in a large, prosperous and intermarried family.

He boarded at the Berkhamsted School, where his father was made headmaster. He was bullied and unhappy, and frequently depressed. He was sent to London for psychoanalysis in 1920, which was unusual at the time. He tried to kill himself several times. Doubtless unconnected with his depression, he attended Balliol College, Oxford. Also, surely unconnected with his Balliol affiliation, he (briefly) joined the Communist Party.

He began his career as a reviewer and essayist. An avowed atheist, he had been questioning his faith since his days at boarding school. He wrote:

So faith came to one—shapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. I began to believe in heaven because I believed in hell, but for a long while it was only hell I could picture with a certain intimacy.

Garrison Keillor describes Greene's marriage as follows:

When he was 21 years old, [Greene] wrote an essay referring to Catholics as people who "worship" the Virgin Mary. He received an indignant reply from a young woman named Vivien Dayrell-Browning, explaining that Catholics did not worship the Virgin Mary, they venerated her. He wrote her back, they met, and Greene was smitten. Unfortunately, Dayrell-Browning was a very devout Catholic, and she had several more eligible men courting her. But Greene was stubborn. He wrote her no less than 2,000 letters and postcards, sometimes three a day. And he converted to Catholicism. How much of his conversion was influenced by his future wife, and how much by other spiritual motives, no one knows for sure. But he became a Catholic, married Vivien, and went on to write novels about characters struggling to reconcile their faith with the rest of their lives. 

Greene's first novel, The Man Within (1929) was sufficiently successful that he was able to earn a living writing novels, all of which deal with questions of morality. About ten years into his marriage, Greene had an affair, the first of many. He and his wife separated, but never divorced.

The Power and the Glory (1940) is a novel about an old Mexican priest. He calls himself a "whisky priest" and looks back on a life of drinking and other misdeeds including fathering a child with one of his parishioners. At the end of his life, he is living on the run, practicing his faith despite the new revolutionary government's outlawing Catholic sacraments.

Keillor writes:

The Power and the Glory was so popular that it attracted the attention of the Vatican, which appointed two different people to review it and decide whether the Church should take an official position. The two readers had similar reactions to the novel. One wrote: "Odd and paradoxical, a true product of the disturbed, confused, and audacious character of today's civilization. For me, the book is sad." They thought it should never have been written, but they also knew it would look bad for the Church to officially condemn it, since Greene was the most famous Catholic writer in England. Instead, they recommended that Greene's bishop privately scold him for it and direct Greene "to write other books in a different tone, attempting to correct the defects of this one." Greene did nothing of the sort, and continued to write about characters struggling with their own moral failings and their Catholicism in novels like The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), which he dedicated to his mistress. 

Greene's other novels include Brighton Rock (1938), The Third Man (1949), The Quiet American (1955), The Comedians (1966), and The Honorary Consul (1973).

REUNION: Europe in Madrid – Lord Patten

L to R: Lord Patten of Barnes, Oxford's Chancellor.  Steven Jones, Branch
Representative for Guernsey. Alice Tepper Marlin. Photo by JT Marlin. 

The University Dinner for the European Oxford Reunion was held on the top two floors of the Posada de la Villa Restaurant.

This three-storey building in mid-Madrid is a coach house dating back to 1642, a mere 150 years after Christopher Columbus checked in with Queen Isabella before setting off westward to find the Far East.

The restaurant, selected by the Madrid Branch representative, Andrew Moore, gets 4 to 4.5 stars on Yelp and TripAdvisor for its traditional Madrid food.

We were served mostly tapas-bar style, with plates of fried octopus and onion rings, peppers, salad, scrambled eggs and mushrooms, potato croquettes, and lamb, followed by various Spanish pastries. The small "black pudding" cakes were a topic of conversation because the uninitiated are startled to be told what they ate. Everyone likes the decor and most people love the food, though a few dissidents don't like so much being fried. Nobody doesn't like the lamb.

Christine Fairchild, Director of Alumni Relations for Oxford (and previously Executive Director of External Relations for the Harvard B School), spots Alice and me as we come in to the restaurant looking for someone we know. She takes us to the third floor, where we are seated behind place cards at the "Chancellor's Table". Apparently we had been notified but the email never reached us.

Sure enough, on my left and Alice's right is Chris Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford since 2003 and Chairman of the BBC Trust since 2011. He was made a life peer in 2005, with the title Baron Patten of Barnes. We are both delighted at this unexpected honor and treat. 

Lord Patten was born Christopher Francis Patten in Cleaveleys, Lancashire in May 1944. He is proud of the fact that he is the son of a jazz drummer and was the first person in his family to attend university. He attended St. Benedict's School at Ealing Abbey in western London, from which he won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. I can vouch for the high academic standards of the Benedictine schools of that era, having been dunked into three rigorous years of Latin and Greek at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire in the 1950s - followed by three more years at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. Lord Patten read Modern History at Oxford. Patten was a near contemporary, matriculating a year after I did. (Unusually for an American at Oxford, I served as editor of Oxford Tory for a term and was General Agent of OUCA when Balliol's James Douglas-Hamilton, now Lord Selkirk of Douglas, was President.)

After taking his degree, Patten traveled around the United States on a Coolidge Traveling Fellowship - kind of a U.S. equivalent for Brits of what the European Tour was for American college students. His visit to the United States followed in the peripatetic footsteps in 1964 of Oxford Union standouts Michael Beloff (predecessor of Sir Ivor Roberts as President of Trinity) and Jonathan Aitken. 

At one point in mid-1965 Patten was touring the southern states, in a car with Pennsylvania plates. As he made his way into  Alabama, he was puzzled by the open hostility that his car provoked. It dawned on him that his northern license plates tagged him as a likely civil rights troublemaker. Pennsylvania was  the source the previous summer of a Penn Law School contingent, three of whom (one of them a New Yorker) were killed by white supremacists in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Viola Liuzzo, 1925-1965

VIOLA FAUVER LIUZZO was born in Pennsylvania on April 11, 1925. After a failed first marriage, Viola married Anthony J. Liuzzo, a Teamster union official from Detroit. She raised five children, and at 36 resumed her education at Wayne State University, graduating with top honors and becoming a medical lab technician.  She joined Martin Luther King's 25,000-person strong Selma-to-Montgomery March on March 25, 1965. King brought a petition to Alabama Governor George Wallace demanding voting rights for African Americans. After the demonstration, Viola was a volunteer driver, ferrying marchers back to Montgomery Airport. Her co-driver was Leroy Moton, a young African American. Coming back from one of these trips, the two volunteers were passed by a car carrying three KKK members from Birmingham and an undercover FBI informant. Seeing a white woman and black man together in the car, the three KKK members decided to kill them. Collie Wilkins put his arm out of the window and fired his gun, hitting Viola in the head twice and killing her instantly. Leroy survived. Besides Wilkins (aged 21), the KKK members were William Eaton (41) and Eugene Thomas (42). All three were swiftly apprehended.  Gary Rowe (34), the FBI agent, testified against the others. Between arrest and the trial, rumors circulated in the media that Viola was a Communist who abandoned her five children to seek sexual relationships with African Americans. The stories were later found to have been planted by the FBI. Despite Rowe's testimony, the three KKK members were acquitted of murder by an all-white Alabama jury. President Johnson's Justice Department charged the men using an 1870 federal law with conspiring to deprive Viola Liuzzo of her civil rights. Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas were found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On August 6, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson, ending "Jim Crow" literacy tests, poll tax, and other subjective voter tests that were widely used in some southern states to deprive African-Americans of the vote. The law required Federal oversight of voter registration in states and voting districts where such tests were used.

Patten then went to New York to work in the campaign of John Lindsay, doing what today would be called "oppo research", tracking the television and other appearances of Lindsay's rival Bill Buckley.  Buckley never expected to win, and did not, but he developed a series of campaign strategies that could be considered a template for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign.

In those days, it would have been hard for someone in New York City to visualize a conservative comeback. The Republicans were not much less progressive change than the Democrats on many issues. Nixon created the country's Environmental Protection Agency. 

Both the Conservative Republican victories and the election of Barack Obama might have been surprising in 1965. As Patten said during the dinner:

Who would have thought that during our lifetimes the United States would have a black president? But are we seeing now a backlash? When I was in New York City in 1965, the Senators were Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller. Could either of them be nominated by the Republican Party today?

Bill Ruckelshaus, Nixon's appointee as the first head of the EPA, has said more than once that he doesn't recognize the Republican party he once served. Mayor Bloomberg is an exception, cut from the same cloth as the liberal Republicans of that day. But the fact that Bloomberg can have liberal views on key issues, only proves that New York City is different, and Bloomberg's personal campaign war chest makes him also different. 

When Patten returned to the UK, Patten he became a desk officer and then, within ten years of going down from Oxford, director of research for the Conservative Party. He stood for Parliament in 1979 and won (MP for Bath), eventually rising to a cabinet minister post and party chairman, serving in turn as UK Secretary of State for the Environment, UK Minister for Overseas Development and  Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He led the Conservative Party's unexpected fourth consecutive electoral victory (under John Major) in 1992, the year that President Clinton was elected to his first term. 

However, that year Patten lost his own seat in the House of Commons. He was therefore freed up for the post of Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hong Kong, and was a figure of dignity in July 1997 as the television cameras famously recorded the Union Jack being hauled down, as Britain handed back Hong Kong - in accordance with the terms of its lease - to the People's Republic of China. Patten's term was marked by both a steady rise in the Hong Kong economy and an expansion of Hong Kong's social welfare system that would have made Nelson Rockefeller proud.

The dinner table conversation of course turned to China and Lord Patten wondered how the clash between rising wages and expectations on the part of the population and a government that does not have the same institutional capacity for flexible adaptation that are built into democracies like the United States and the UK. Will China become more democratic? An open question.

From 1999 to 2004 he served as one of the United Kingdom's two members of the European Commission. In his first speech after his appointment to the EC, addressing the Confederation of British Industry, Patten said:

There are strong moral arguments for the EU as a factor of peace and stability in Europe. And the single market has had a huge multiplier effect in terms of economic integration, shared wealth and mutual understanding.

This long-standing past support of the European Union made it a talk of the Oxford European Reunion when he expressed doubts about the EU's future. Who knows? Maybe reports of his comments contributed to a weekend walk-back by the EU of its austerity dictates to Spain and other debt-burdened EU members.

Lord Patten asked me whether President Obama can get much more done given the stalemate in the Congress. I said it was certainly a bad sign that the Senate failed to pass even modest background checks for gun-buyers, when 90 percent of the public is reportedly in favor of such checks. But all is not lost: 

• Democratic supporters are learning how to make better use of the independent groups that up to now have been noted primarily for supporting far-out anti-tax and socially conservative agendas and candidates. Gun control is a major test case, with Mayor Bloomberg investing heavily in pursuing the topic, with his mayoral group out front on the issue. Gun-control supporters are gearing up to punish gun-pushers  of both parties in 2014 (some Democratic Senators joined with the Republicans to defeat the bill).
• There is much that the President can do without need for Congressional support. George W. Bush missed a huge opportunity after 9-11 to impose a carbon tax or higher fuel standards, and he went out of his way to permit more mountain-top coal mining and continued use of coal-fired power plants. But in his second term he made major contributions to the environment by executive order. He did finally raise fuel standards for cars, he implemented a phaseout of HCFCs, and perhaps most important, he added 125 million acres of land and sea areas to the marine and land preserves.     

Patten admires many American politicians, and he is especially in touch with those that have Oxford ties. Senator Dick Lugar (defeated in the Republican primary in Indiana; the GOP nominee lost to Democrat) was first off his lips, along with Senators Sarbanes and Bradley. He stays in touch with Justice Breyer, and NY Times columnists Nick Kristof and Tom Friedman.

 Photo by JT Marlin.

It is rare to have such a pleasant and interesting evening and it more than made up for the miserably cold and cloudy weather in Madrid. 

On the way out of the restaurant, each of us was given a key that includes the phone number for future reservations. What a clever idea!